[Rainbow Six]

James, as always with your work, kudos on coming up with something that complies with the canon established in the Survivor’s Guide to the UK (particularly in this instance, where in my opinion canon raises a number of questions...).

I think main challenge is numbers though...if you go by canon the RAS is 2,000 strong but is supposed to control the whole of Scotland? The population of Scotland was in the region of the 5 million mark in 1996 (per the 1991 census) – granted a large number of those people lived in Glasgow and Edinburgh, both of which were nuclear targets but that still leaves a lot of people living in the Central Belt, so personally I’d look at upping the strength of those Militia Battalions to keep order, certainly those units based in Central Scotland. What sort of weapons and equipment do you see the Militia using?

With regard to non Scottish units, main players here are likely to be the RN base at Rosyth (if you still have it open – IRL it closed in 1996 as a result of Options). I grew up about five miles from there and it was a pretty big base in the 80’s...you also had a fair number of ex sailors living in the area, many of whom had married local girls. Just down the road from Rosyth was RAF Pitreavie Castle, which was HQ for NATO Naval forces North Atlantic and 18 Group, RAF (if you want to take Pitreavie Castle out of the equation probably easy enough to say it was plastered by conventional bombing at some point). The RAF also had Leuchars (F3 Tornado base) and the two bases on the Moray coast, Lossiemouth and Kinloss (Maritime strike and recon respectively) as well as a couple of non flying bases dotted about here and there. Army HQ in Scotland at the time was located at Craigiehall, near Kirkliston, just north of Edinburgh (it moved from Edinburgh Castle in the 50’s, although Edinburgh castle remains an active military base and in the T2k timeline would have had a working 25 pounder (it was replaced by a 105mm light gun a few years ago) that is used to fire the One o’clock gun at – oddly enough – one o’clock every day). There were three other Army bases in and around Edinburgh – Dreghorn, Glencorse, and Redford. Dreghorn and Redford may well have been destroyed when Edinburgh was nuked, but Glencorse was located about ten miles or so outside Edinburgh (to the south east) and was a recruit training base, so could well supply a ready made Battalion if it came over to the SNP in 98. I’d imagine it would also have a plentiful supply of weapons and ammo, and would give a good base to control the Borders region from.

Oh, and 45 Commando, Royal Marines were based at RM Condor at Arbroath, just up from the road from Dundee, so there might have been a handful of Marines around. So there’s a fair scope for a few scattered HMG enclaves in Scotland – I’m not sure how likely it would be that all of these bases would come over en masse.

As I’ve said in a previous post, I’m still not 100% convinced that Companies would take titles from British Army battle honours. I totally buy into the idea of attempting to tap into the great Scottish military tradition, but still think there would be an attempt by the SNP leadership to have more “Scottishness” in the titles, but that’s maybe just me...

Good job as always - hope the above is of some use.

Dave