Pimp my Forward Observation Vehicle

A while back my attempts to scratchbuild some kind of armoured vehicle resulted in a rather shoddy looking forward observation vehicle – a skewed and somewhat clumsy affair which I’ve never been happy with.

I’ve been harbouring vague plans to improve (i.e. disguise the deficiencies of) the vehicle with some sort of camouflage netting, and as luck would have it I chanced across something that would do the job whilst walking my parents’ dog in their field recently – a piece of green plastic netting, not unlike the stuff that supermarket oranges come in.

Some glue and a liberal sprinkling of flock mixture later, and my forward observation vehicle is now looking a little less crappy (although in retrospect I wish I’d left a few holes in the netting to show the camo paint scheme underneath a bit more).

The vehicle’s main armament is a powerful telescope, but who is responsible for creating such a precision instrument? Maybe it was someone like Mr. C H Leake, a Herefordshire farmer who in 1935 appeared in the Pathe News bulletin “Peeps Through the Window of the World” with his home-made astronomical telescope.

Mr. Leake not only ground and silvered the reflector himself, but also invented a water clock mechanism to follow the path of stars across the sky!

Now there was a Leake family farming not far from where I grew up… Hmm… I wonder…