Specially-Marked Il-2's

[John Thompson]

Some good photos of specially-inscribed Shturmoviks:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvif2ne.ru%2Fnvi%2Fforum%2F0%2Fco%2F148346.htm&act=url

John

[learstang]

As always, thank you for the link, John!  Interesting Shturmoviks - they have the short radio masts, which are supposed to be representative of early two-seaters, yet they were apparently produced in September of 1943, and appear to be painted in the three-colour scheme, which would make them very late straight-winged two-seaters (the arrow began to be produced in the fall of 1943).  In addition, they have the later, more "cutout" gunner's canopy.  I can't tell if the wings are wooden or not; if they're from Zavod 18, they should be metal (there were two zavodi in Kuibyshev, today's Samara - Zavod 18 and Zavod 1).  Wherever they're from, these are nice closeup shots of the Shturmovik and are now a part of my rather large collection of IL-2 pictures (at over 3,600 pictures and 4.5 GB and growing).

Regards,

Jason

[John Thompson]

Wow - that's an impressive collection! Do you have any advice regarding backups in the event of a hard disc crash? My own collection has outgrown the capacity of a simple CD backup so I've been considering a big USB stick, but so far I haven't done anything about it. I'd rather not go to the expense of a portable hard disc, but maybe that's the sensible answer. Comments?

John

[learstang]

John, what I'm using is a portable Seagate hard disk of about 450GB that connects to a USB port on my desktop.  In addition, I also have some of the pictures on various CD's - you can't have too many backups!

Regards,

Jason