As an offline player of both SH3/SH4/SH5 and Il21946, I can promise you there is an enormous amount of research among serious skinners and campaign/mission makers. The Offline Community is at the heart of the Il2 mods, not the Onliners so much, but it depends on your attitude: Silent Hunter, for example, is part strategy 'game' and 'historic simulation' - Il2 is also primarily a 'simulator' rather than a 'game'.
This is such a fascinating subject with so many ways to view it, may I give you a piece from my recent book on Grand Prix Racing history?
This is directly related to a section on German engineering dominance in the 1930s and the revision of history, particularly through image retouching, that goes on today.
"Author’s note:
The German racing cars of this period usually carried a couple of ‘swastika’ markings. Actually, the infamous logo of the Nazi party was a reversed swastika, originally a Phoenician sun symbol. This is a matter of historical record and in Germany today the swastika is an illegal symbol, although display for academic, educational, artistic or journalistic reasons is allowed.
However, all over the modern world photographic reference material is now widely 're-touched' to airbrush out the swastika (look really closely at contemporary photographs and you can often see where it has been altered). It seems that despite the acceptance for reasonable depiction, within a historic context, many companies and individuals are self-censoring!
Is it right to remove certain uncomfortable aspects of history while retaining those we wish to project? Should we be able to confront the historical truth and deal with it, or is it necessary instead to consume a revised edition, and to ignore the warnings of Wells, Huxley and Orwell? Namely; where does such shameful censorship end and who decides what is safe for you to see?
During the 1930s and 1940s Nazi interest and financing of German industry and sport permeated the entire society and we should not indulge in collective amnesia. Amidst the controversy over the issue of self-censorship, born of the desire to anticipate and avoid imagined offence, it has also been pointed out by modern academics, restorers, model makers, writers, artists and many others interested in truth; that those who suppress or alter the historic record usually become the thing they fear.
Despite the good intentions of ‘Political Correctness', distortion of the historic record is itself grossly offensive and dangerous, dishonouring history and insulting the memory of its victims."
Spook27 - AKA - SAS~Monty27
|