Landships II

Hello,

I am currently working on compiling a database that will include all specifically identified Rolls Royce armoured cars. These identifications are based on photos, war diaries, internet sources, & etc. (For several years I have been gathering scans of photos of Rolls Royce armoured cars from around the internet and from a number of books. This collection now includes approximately 1000 images of varying quality.)

Essentially, if I can find a source identifying a specific car by name, hull number, chassis number, or vehicular registration number (liscense plate) I enter it into the database. If the information source is a photo, then I enter a copy of the photo into the database as well. So far, I have a little over 300 entries, although some of these are multiple references to the same car that were found in different sources or from different dates.

Recently, I have been involved in a discussion over on the Great War forum that has provided a number of additional entries for this database. (You can visit that thread here.) My research into this subject began here at the Landships forum, however, and I want to bring this effort to the attention of the folks here to see if there is any interest in lending a hand in developing it further. I intend to share the spreadsheet with anyone interested, and am happy to do so free of any charge or restriction, save for citation as a source if it eventually helps someone out there to develop an authoritative publication on these important and fascinating vehicles.

The file itself is a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet that is presently over 24 Megs in size. It is set up so that "mousing over" an entry causes a copy of the historic photo of that car to pop up. This feature takes a lot of memory but geatly aids in quickly making comparisons between cars and in allowing one to see how a particular car changed over time. As a spreadsheet it is sortable to also aid in making comparisons and is searchable to quickly find a particular entry. You can take a look at scans of a portion of the database here and here.

The spreadsheet includes fields for units in which the cars served, dates and locations where identified, and misc. notes. In addition, "sheet two" of the spreadsheet is a timeline showing units that operated these cars and the numbers of these cars on each unit's strength on a month by month basis.

The file has grown to a size that I do not know if most email services can handle it. To make it easier to access, I think this file should be posted online somewhere. Could it be posted on the Landships website?

This database is very much a work in progress, but I think the time has come to post it so that I can get some feedback, new information, and perhaps some leads. I hope that some folks out there might find it interesting as well.

Sincerely,

MarkV