Well, here I am again looking for more articles for the AMPS journal, Boresight. The recently expanded size of Boresight has generally been a great thing for us, but the one thing that needs to happen for us to sustain this size of a journal is an increase in the number of articles submitted. As I write this I am down to about 2 issues worth of material and the flow of new material has been a bit slow lately, so I'm hoping all you good AFV modellers out there will be submitting material shortly.

If you are thinking that writing for Boresight requires you to be some sort of Steve Zaloga or Ernest Hemmingway, this couldn't be further from the truth. Boresight has a mandate to publish anything that members submit and, to date, we haven't turned anyone away. If it needs a bit of work to polish the edges, don't worry, I'll help out and we'll work together to get it into print. Seeing something you wrote in actual hard copy is pretty cool and even if it's a bit nerdy, the sense of accomplishment is real and even your kids will give you some grudging acknowledgment for your efforts.

You don't even have to be a member. If you submit something interesting, we'll print your article and make sure you get a copy of that issue for you to keep, member or not.

What do you write about? Well anything that grabs your interest is a good start. Take some photos during your current build, add some captions that describe what is happening in the photo and bingo, you have a build article. Take some photos while walking around your local gate guardian, add captions describing the interesting details in the photos and there's a "Walkaround" article. If you've noticed something interesting doing research for a kit, well, summarise it, add a couple photos to illustrate your point and there's a research article. Is there a really good modeller in your club or do you know a vet? Sit down with them and a tape recorder (digital voice recorder for those that don't remember cassettes) and ask them questions or let them talk about stuff. Transcribe the conversation and there's an interview article.

A lot of publications have arcane rules about submitting material for publication. Boresight really doesn't. I'll take almost anything, but the more work I have to put into it, the longer it will take to get into print, so take that into consideration.

To ease the workload of the poor unfortunate Editor (yours truly) there are a few conditions that I prefer articles meet, but even these are optional if there's really no way for you to meet them:

Photos

- Resolution of at least 1024 x 768 or better if you have it. Bigger is better as I can reduce files to fit, but I can't blow up photos that are too small.
- Virtually any format is OK, but JPEG is preferred with TIFF being preferred if you want to use a non-compressed format.
- Most photos should be landscape but some in portrait orientation are good as well. Photos that might be considered for the cover end up being portrait due to the shape of the magazine. I can crop a landscape photo to portrait, but it requires a high rez photo to get good quality, ~1.5 mb or better.
- Any number of photos can be submitted, but I can generally only fit 15-20 photos per article in the magazine. The rest will eventually be displayed on the web site, so feel free to submit them, but limit the captions and article references to the 15 or so best photos.

Article

- Any digital format is preferred over any hard copy, although I'll use hard copy if I have to.
- Prefer Word, Wordperfect, RTF or ASCII Text formats in that order, but I can work with others if need be.
- Do not add any "interesting" formatting or fonts to the article; I'll only have to re-do it to fit the magazine pages. Arial or Times New Roman are fine.
- Captions for photos are desired, but not necessary. It is far more interesting for readers to hear from the author what he finds interesting or noteworthy as opposed to trying to figure out everything themselves.
- If doing a photo "walk-around" it is desirable to include at least a small "canned" history of the vehicle, whether that is a history of the general vehicle type or of the specific vehicle in the photos.
- Either correct or Americanised spellings are acceptable. If you write it in "Canajian, Eh?" English, I won't be changing the spelling to take the U out of armour. The only place I do that is in the names of actual organisations to bring it to the spelling chosen by that organisation.

Remember -

More info is always better. If you write it, I'll find a way to print it. If an article is long and interesting I'll make it a two-parter. Boresight is all about getting more basic information into the modeller's hands.


Paul Roberts
Editor, Boresight
www.amps-armor.org

Paul,

I work at an Army Maintenance school. I would be interested in maybe doing a few articles on Army wheeled vehicles and engineer equipment if you are interested.

The text of the articles may not be real lengthy but I could do some detailed walk around photos with caption material.

If you are interested, email me and we can talk in more detail.

I'm real interested! Email on the way...

Thanks,

Paul