Typical, wait for ages and then two come along!

[archermav]

Well, it surprised me, I was just having a quick sortie when, after downing a 111 I made my return to Croydon.

I was making a rather splendid approach ie, I had not crashed nor deployed flaps too early, when I spotted to red squares up ahead moving across the terrain.

I figured it was just a quirky graphics thing but as I got closer it was two London buses without a roadway in sight (maybe Cliff was doing the driving)

Of course, this story would perhaps be mildly interesting if there were a scrrenshot, but as I "climbed" above the buses I was bounced by some damn rude german who obviously was not bus spotting.

Right, once more into the fray.

[Tako_Kichi]

Don't worry about it, it was just Cpt. Mainwaring and the rest of the Warmington-on-Sea Home Guard unit out on maneuvers!

Cpl. Jones' van had broken down (again) so they had to requisition the buses but Pvt. Pike was navigating hence the reason they were so far from the sea!

If you had waited a second they would have stopped so that Pvt. Godfrey could make use of the bushes!

[ick53993]

[edited]

[PV]

So, I was looking at those buses and thinking "they could use a bit of work", so I looked around, and found this website, which has everything you need to make models of about 200 distinct varieties of London buses: http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.smith/b ... x.htm#stop

What a fine individual, who has put up excellent plan views of all these buses, and says right on his front page: " They may be of use to modellers "

So, after a fair amount of flailing about, I determined that the BoB bus is really a post war variety, the first 8ft wide type, so to reskin with a proper period bus, I had to stretch the skin width. Lots of other tweaks of all sorts required, in getting the beast skinned while still using 128 pixel, 256 indexed colour, to keep the FPS hit to a minimum. Anyway, here is the result, a proper London STL bus as found on the road in 1940. I hope the skin is from the period as well: it was not specified - I'm a bit suspicious of the big blue circle - but I couldn't find any full views other than these. If anybody knows, please advise. Oh, yeah: the big billboard can be changed - if you go through the site he's drawn about 20 of them which can be lifted from the sides of the various buses he's drafted - I just kept the original for the bus I chose, but there are lots of different ones, several beer ads...



The file can be found here http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/LBUS.pcx , and goes in IMAGEMAP. And boy is it tiny...

[Tako_Kichi]

The following URL has links to images showing period buses. Your skin looks close to the buses of the period except that it looks like the real buses had a black roof rather than a red one. Yours is also missing the white rectangles on the front mudguards which were painted on all civilian vehicles of the period so that they could be more easily seen in the black-out. The position of the destination boards is more like a Routemaster than a STL too.

http://tinyurl.com/ffxbk

HTH

[PV]

As you see if you look through the site I linked, there were a vast number of different buses, each with different colour schemes. I started out thinking Rowan knew what they were doing, and tried to find an exact match, but there was none for prior to ~1949; in fact I couldn't find a good match to the front grill on the Rowan bus anywhere, and the front upper window was also simply not to be found. The closest I could come were some of the RMs without the chrome outline, such as in a few photographs on this page, but there wasn't a plan view anyway: http://www.countrybus.org/RM/RM7e.html#nation
I tried to find something all red with the white banding as on the Rowan bus, but no luck there either, so I settled for the only example of a 30s-40s ST with an all red scheme, and banding, though the banding was yellow and at a different height. As I say, though the buses on the site are well dated, the colour schemes aren't, so it is possible that they are later, and Rowan had a better resource for the striping.

[ick53993]

[edited]

[PV]

You're welcome - glad to hear it's being used.