Excellent stuff guys, the amount of wee details I'm picking up from these answers is brilliant.
I found these shots through the periscope, TTNav. It is indeed quite a small field of view, strange, it would seem relatively easy to have made it wider and more usable. I never considered that the periscope would need "motored" round or that it would take so long to do so. I'm sure there was a good reason for this .......
Was the rear compartment normally blacked out with the curtains and portholes screened or only when the radar was in active use? If so did you get much ambient light in there or was most of the illumination from the equipment lighting? This will make a big difference to the model if I have to recreate many different small illumination sources. Its all very well having as many of the dials and switches in the right place but if the lighting is wrong then that work is wasted.
RFCC, do I understand correctly, from mid 80s, it was a 4-man crew ? We can do sliding seats, I'll borrow code from the A380 which has them.
OK I'll bite... Annie's hatch?
The JPT stuff is interesting too and that's a few more lines of code that will be needed to model that aspect correctly.
The existing model that I am extending is a K2, so the sixth seat will be shown by default but will be able to be clicked out. We already have a working model of an RAF sextant (its on our Short Empire model - a Sunderland is planned!) so I'll try to get the guy who wrote that to do something to fit next to the astro-stool. You mentioned this was only used infrequently. I understand Green Satin was very accurate so was the astro stool only used from time to time to maintain astro-navigation skills in case of system failure?
At the moment our available armament options and paint schemes, purport to represent XH648, XH592 and XM717 with a choice of WE177A, WE177B, RedBeard, BlueSteel, BlackBuck1 and Shrike weapon loadouts.
I don't know how accurate any of this is. The paint schemes are white anti-flash, green-grey camo and a desert camo scheme that I am not sure is authentic. We don't have a Blue Steel sub-model yet but that is a future project as is the HDU and a centreline drogue. The Shrikes fire, disappear into the distance and err... that's about it for now. Am I correct in thinking they were never used in anger? As far as I know, the Argentinians never put anything up against the Victor/Vulcan operations.
My own interest is primarily in the tanking operations and given the resources available for XL231, I'd like to add that to the 3 serial numbers above and make sure that it is as accurate as I can make it.
Thanks again for all your help.