Is This 1948 ½ Penny - George VI Struck Over 1944 Planchet?

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I guess it's not obvious to me what you think might be going on here. A 1944 half-penny planchet should not be different in any visible way from a 1948 planchet. Now, if what you mean is an overstrike, 1948 half-penny struck on a finished 1944 half-penny, it seems almost inconceivable to me that the orientation should be the same. We would expect the overstrike to be rotated with respect to the host coin.

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In the context of mint practices in the early part of the twentieth century there were four distinct methods whereby a coin may have been struck bearing the impression of an earlier date:

* Re-dating of an existing derivative master die or punch.
* Use of different working punches in the preparation of a die,
* Directly punching a numeral onto a previously prepared (working) die.

Re-dating of an existing derivative master die or punch:

There were two common methods for producing dies for a given date. From 1910 until the early twenties the usual practice was to use partially-dated working punches to press working dies onto which the remaining date numerals were added by hand. As the need for coins grew and annual mintages increased, this became tiresome and it was more expedient to produce a fully-dated derivative master die and make fully-dated working punches from that. We can see the effects of this change from the disappearance of variations in the position of date numerals after about 1922.

Suppose, for example, that in late 1921 the Melbourne Mint staff decided to produce a reverse die for a 1922 threepence. At that time the master tools were all held at The Royal Mint at Tower Hill in London but the Melbourne branch had a hobbing press which was used to produce working dies for the minting of sovereigns and half-sovereigns so it certainly had the means to accomplish the task. The steps would have been something like this:

* Make a punch from a (fresh) 1921 working die.
* Grind off the last digit, yielding a 192_ punch.
* Make a 192_ die from the partial-date punch.
* Engrave a 2 in the final position of the date.