Heinkel He51A-1

Erwin BOVYN Author
Sorry to mix amongst this dicussion but if it concerns land codes I also found it difficult to add Tsjechoslovakia that once was a complete country and not Tsjechia and Slovakia as it is now. In case of this discussion you should add more possibilities of choise to the users. I really do understand that this site wants to be as precise as possible but does it really matter if a "german" aircraft or vehicle belonged to the Reich orLuftwaffe or what ever for that period? After all it is/was all German.

Jörg Luther
@Erwin: Same game - czech (1989) is not the same as czech (1993). The problem arises from Scalemates using ISO 3166 Alpha-2 codes, some of which were "reused" in ISO 3166: Czechoslovakia is an excellent example. It was CS, split up 1993 into CZ and SK, and CS went to "Serbia and Montenegro", which 2006 split up into RS and ME, with CS not longer used (at least until now). Official country code for former Czechoslovakia now is CSHH (ISO 3166/3).

A possible partial solution would be to change to ISO 3166 Alpha-3 codes, which don't get changed. Czechoslowakia=CSK, Czech Republic=CZE, Slowakia=SVK. Anyway, ISO 3166 codes are only available for states that existed 1974 or later. There are no ISO 3166 codes for earlier countries. I abolutely agree with you in so far as Scalemates says "Country code is 2 digit ISO code." and there never has been an ISO 3166 code for the Deutsches Reich. There only is one for Germany.

In my opinion, as Scalemates flags out decal options with these codes, as a matter of fact DE would be totally sufficent for this purpose, wether let's say a plane belongs to Kaiserliche Fliegertruppe in 1917, Luftwaffe in 1936 or Bundesluftwaffe in 1961. The reason: The next field is "Organisation", and one following is "Year", so it's dead clear that DE-Luftwaffe-1936 is something different than DE-Luftwaffe-1961 or DE-Kaiserl.Fliegertruppe-1917.

But that's a detail that doesn't solve the problem with countries splitting up like Czechoslovakia or the USSR, or - even worse - with follow-up countries again splitting up as in former Yugoslavia. The only way to get a line in there is in my opinion to change from ISO 3166 Alpha-2 to Alpha-3.