About LRDG Germany

This Website was initially intended to document the progress of my upcoming diorama project and serve as a resource for modellers seeking detailed information on the LRDG. However, as I started to do my research on the subject, I quickly realized that information on many LRDG related subjects is scattered and can only be obtained by painstakingly comparing pictures, validating contradicting sources and getting on people's nerves by emailing them until they release a bit of their knowledge.
As I had similar difficulties locating distributors for some of the stuff I needed for my diorama (apparently, there is noone in Germany carrying the Raventhorpe product line; I bugged the guys at Scheuer&Struever for days until they finally agreed to import Rustall:),I figured that I cannot be the only LRDG modelling enthusiast out there and that there is no reason everybody else should do the same work I did over and over again. So I started to compile all the information I had and published it on these very pages.
If you find that you can add anything to the information on this site, or feel I am in error somewhere, feel free to drop me a note.

What's with the any browser stuff?

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." -Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, July 1996

A number of people have asked me about the "any browser" logo on the main page. Well, just imagine the following situation: someone is writing an article for some magazine, but because he (substitute "she" for all subsequent "he"s if you are inclined towards political correctness) is too lazy to check his typewriter's settings, he ends up encoding his article in such a way that only people with a very specially formed desk are able to read the article - all others will only see a heavily distorted version of the intended page layout, some readers will even be unable to read anything. Quite absurd, you will say - and yet, this is exactly what is happening on the web in recent years. The mess of browser-specific tags seems to become worse every day, and way too many people just slap together a website in Frontpage without even bothering to check how their pages render in a non-MS browser. Even worse are those guys who base their whole navigation concept on Java or (yuck!) Flash - such "interactive" "multimedia" "<insert favorite buzzword here>" creations seldomly do anything for easier navigation, and those without the required plugins are left out in the cold, having no chance whatsoever to even navigate the website.
And yet, the solution could be so simple - HTML standards are widely published, and even when using some sort of HTML editor, it takes very little effort to validate the editor-created code for HTML compliance; while adding Flash or Java features by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, it should be possible under every circumstance imaginable to create an alternate version of said features that can also be accessed with browsers without these abilities.
In an effort to make this site accesible to as many people as possible, I constantly strive to keep my code as HTML-compliant as possible and test all my pages with a wide array of browsers (tested browsers include IE5, Opera, Mozilla and Lynx - at the moment, I have no ability to test with iCab or Konqueror, but these browsers should also work flawlessly. If you find anything that does not work in your browser, please let me know - be sure to include your operation system and browser). Yes, the page layouts rely heavily on tables, and some versions of IE might render the tables slightly distorted, but it should be possible to view every page with every browser (even with a non-tables-capable browser like Lynx). Yes, the site uses some Javascript, but that is merely eyecandy, you will still be able to navigate the whole site even when disabling Javascript or using a text-only browser. And no, I am not endorsing support for Netscape versions below 6. All 4.x versions of Netscape are officially recognized as being Buggy As Hell^TM, and no webmaster should be forced to optimize his code to take into account N4.x's various rendering peculiarities.
Alright, finished my rant. Nothing to see here, move along.

This site was designed manually with some basic HTML and Javascript knowledge with a little help from Netscape Communicator's editor for the font and table layouts. All the site's graphics were done using JASC's Paint Shop Pro.