Flyby PC

What I didn't know was his service record with 78 combat missions flown in Korea. Mr Armstrong must have seen some incredible sights....

Massive childhood hero of mine. Not just a great embassador for the USA, but a testament to NASA and their capacity to find people of such great calibre.

You know in the Return of the King from the Lord of the Rings, when the Riders of Rohan line up for a charge on the Orcs? As Theodin rides along clattering the lances with his sword? I bet you any money, those riders would have charged at anything, - the Russian guns like the Light Brigade or the Scots Greys at Waterloo. There is just something hypnotic about a change on horseback, once you start, nothing will stop you.... or so you think. I remember one particular rideout, there was a knot of horses getting through a gate and a bit of a bottleneck formed, but as the hoses all fed through, it felt like your horse grew a foot in height and they all just took off across the field and the thud and rumble of the hooves was just incredible. The only thing that's felt kind of similar is your state of mind after a parachute drop. There's so much adrenalin pumping, you'd storm any barricade and never feel the bullets.

That looks cool. I'd love a go at that. After a local common riding, there's nothing quite like the sound of a large group of horses thundering across a field to get the blood pumping. Didn't they reckon that Henry VIII was hurt in a joist? He got a splinter in his eye, or a head wound perhaps, and that's about the time his weight began to increase and he had quite a marked change in temperament and started bumping off his wives and people who didn't agree with him, and decided to go to war with France. Some people reckon he got a brain injury when joisting and it altered his personality.

I read a book about the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when there were apparently instances of Russian tanks being knocked out by bottles filled with water because they'd run out of petrol for their molotov cocktails. Obviously, from inside the tank, you didn't know whether it was petrol, alcohol or water, but the fear of being burned alive in their tank was enough for some crews to panic and pop their lids open, and of course, that was the end of them.

Apologies if this has been said before, but I recently watched a program featuring the construction of the glider built in Colditz in WW2 by the British POWS. The program went ahead and built a full size replica of the glider, stuffed a dummy in the cockpit and some remote controls and 'pinged it' off the roof of the actual Castle using the weighted bath as a catapult launch just as the original escapers had planned. Spoiler alert - Don't read more if you don't want to know.... Bit of dip at first, which might have had a very high 'pucker' factor for the pilots at take off, but as the speed got up, the lift improved and it comfortably sailed around 2 miles and landed safely out side the castle. They had less room to make a landing because of modern buildings encroaching, but they answered the question. So would the glider built from matresses in the attic actually have flown? Yes. Definitely.

Think I'd rather have an Apache gunship overhead than a bullet magnet parked out front, - but best of all, I'd like the all round protection of a pub several miles away.

Bit of a journey, but the War Museum in Beijing has armour I haven't seen anywhere else. - I don't recall any WW1 armour, but some amazing stuff, WW2, Korean etc. A Buffalo, Sherman, and Pershing tanks off the top of my head, the mighty Centurian of course, Katushas, but give me some time to remember... I remember being impressed.... If I could think of a tank, it was there. It was interesting to see Korean and Vietnam things from a different perspective. I think it's funny how tanks always look bigger in pictures than they do in the flesh. I remember seeing the T-34 and the Jagdpanther in London's Imperial War Museum, and thinking they couldn't be full sized exhibits, but of course they were. They also have a WW1 tank, and it didn't look half as beefy as Olhams picture. The overiding impression I had seeing inside was wanting a good pair of ear muffs because it looked rather 'loud'. When you watch war films, directors make sure you get a good view of the tank, but with cover and shooting at you, these would be very dangerous things to encounter. I reckon they'd be as likely to see you before you saw them. I'm going back a few years, but I remember being a little disappointed by the size of a 'real' tank, but at the same time, a lot more aware how dangerous they were.

Well said Mike, I had the same thoughts about the bath issue, and it's a burning question we'll never know whether the real POWs were alert to the problem. I suspect if you have the expertise to build a glider, you're going to know it's required take off speed, but without testing, it does seem to be something you might not recognise until too late. On the upside however, you'd have a real pilot at the controls who'd react faster than a remote controlled servo controlled from a distance. I'm very happy in one big respect however, and that there is proof it could have been done. That alone gives credit to the men who built it, that they weren't complete lunatics, but level headed and truly inspired servicemen quite dedicated to their successful escape. It wouldn't surprise me if they even had a plan for getting the glider back for the next pair. Another question occurs, and that if I imagine I was a German guard who discovered the escape, would I intervene to stop them, or let them crack on out of sheer curiosity. If any escape plot deserves to be successful, you'd have to take your hat off to this one. I also have a chuckle about the possibility of a bath filled with water clattering to the ground as a test. I can just hear the guards - "Look, we know you're up to something!" They'd never guess what.

Possibly, but I also wonder whether the blue might have misinformed the French.

If it meant British, you might think there would be some blue there too. Thing is, I've also seen similar red and white stripes of British Matilda tanks during WW2 serving in the desert. I actually wondered whether it meant Canadian, or British right enough. The other option might be regimental colours.

Anybody know if the big red and white stripes at the front actually mean anything?

Recently came across this, and I'm gobsmacked how much the tech has advanced. What it photogrammetry does is 'scan' real life buildings and digitise them. It's been around a while, but I haven't kept up to date. As far as I'm aware, this hasn't been picked up by the games industry, but when you see the accurate rendered images these guys can capture, it's only a matter of time before the scenery in games is mind blowing in it's realism ..... Week 2 Photogrammetry has a bit of chat to begin with, but stick with it to see their results starting about half way through .... You'll see the potential right away. http://okeeffeimagingproject.wordpress.com/daily-documenting/video/

Not just great Olham, but real. It's basically 3d photographs of real things. Yes it's a big hefty amount of data, but once it's digitised and compressed, the resolution will be limited to the machine spec. The possibilities are incredible. If you can photograph something, you can scan it. It's not just scenery, but faces. I'll take a guess it takes some hefty computing power to process this data, but so does normal video before it's compressed and formatted. The potential for this is incredible. You're that much closer to a photo realistic digitised world inside your computer, because it is photographic images which are digitised. It's just a pity the hard work work is setting up the camera to record the image and the settings, so I don't think there is a retrospective option to digitise existing pics. Just imagine if you could digitise the trenches and pock marked landscape of Flanders!! I don't know enough about it, but if Google Earth ever get's multiple satellites to co-ordinate their pictures, then the mind boggles.. Keep up the good work PhotogrammetryR!!!

Just an OT thread to flag up the imminent landing of the Curiosity Robot on Mars, sheduled to touch down in around 11 hours time... http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ Fingers crossed NASA! Safe and happy landing Curiosity!

I'm less worried about sharing Mars with microbes than some aspects of space exploration. There are quite a few books and references which say if we knew what life there was out there in space, we might not be so eager to announce our presence to the Universe. Perhaps the vast distance between ourselves and other galaxies is something we should be eternally grateful for. Considering our society struggles to reach back 3000 years, but the Universe has been around for billions, I don't think you'll get very good odds on our civilisation being the first or the most advanced. Maybe life on Mars is as good as it gets.

Open your minds fellas, I'm not talking about my lifetime or your lifetime, but the pace of progress which can be possible. By your arguments, the Wright brothers shouldn't have bothered with flight until the they knew how to build a jumbo jet. Why are we wasting resources building jumbo jets now instead of waiting for somebody to invent something better? - Because we do what we can when we can. If all we currently have is the technology to explore Mars, then we should do it, and do it with all the enthusiasm we can muster. Because the more we know, the less time and money we waste on abortive research and conjecture. Conjecture like terraforming and nannobots, because until theory becomes proven practice, that's all it is. Once upon a time, whole new worlds opened up just by crossing an ocean that hadn't been crossed in a wooden ship. Mars really is a new world, and is just as important because it's a frontier we need to conquer to move on to the next frontier. And even just supposing all we ever manage is a sub terranean colony burrowed into Mars, then if ever something catastrophic happened to Earth, meteor stike, disease or any lethal calamity, we have a chance for our species to survive it. If you have one colony, you can have two. If you can have two colonies you can have four. If you have resources on Mars, your colonies can renew themselves with resources found on Mars and will be sustainable indefinitely. But you have to start somewhere, and I'm very pleased that NASA thinks like I do. We are just at the very beginning of a long journey. Curiosity is just us dipping our toe in the water.

Couldn't disagree more. To solve a problem, you need to know what the problem is. You need reconnaisance and intel, and that requires probes. Once we have a better idea what is there, and what problems there are which need a resolution, we can have a much better attempt at solving those problems. Mars is 35 million miles away, and we've sent a big machine all the way there with superb accuracy, it's landed precisely as intended, and so far everything is working perfectly, and that is something pretty special. The surface of Venus is as hot as a furnace. If we want to terraform anywhere in our Solar System, Mars is likely it. Mars has some atmoshere, which has similarities to Earths outer atmoshere up around 100,000 feet. While there are low temperatures, sometime extremely low, we can experience similar temperatures in the Antarctic. We've had people survive these extremes on earth, with appropriate equipment but some considerable way short of a space suit, and live to tell the tale. There is serious potential for certain organic things to live on mars. The whole point about the Curiosity mission is to look for evidence of time on Mars when it might have had a denser atmoshere, and supported organic life. If it did, it means all the building blocks of life will still be there and all the minerals, compounds and molecules are all there already. Here on Earth, we know all about putting chemicals into the atmoshere which create a greenhouse effect, so transfer that to Mars, and global warming could potentially modify the atmoshere to become more like Earths. The potential is fantastic, and we are just beginning to look. I repeat, we've only been able to manage powered flight in our own atmoshere for a little over 100 years, and we've gone from the Wright's Flyer to putting a robot on target and in one piece on another planet 35 million miles away. Big round of applause for us I think. Maybe you're right, and perhaps true interstellar travel is centuries away, but progress IS about incremental improvements, and while we often malign the last century, we made some massive spellbinding leaps in technology, so who knows what might happen in the next 100 years. - But not very much if we all stopped trying.

BH, for thousands of years, people said men couldn't fly, but some people refused to listen and kept on trying until the way was found.

It's funny BH, but that kiddies book I learned to read with said the moon would be where we'd be building spacecraft so they weren't limited by gravity. With hindsight, it was optimism, but at the time it was entirely rational expectation. You're correct about the size of vehicle, but look at the progress made already. Sojourner, the little one in the pic, was the Mars Pathfinder robot which landed on Mars in 1997. It weighed 10.6kg. Their wheels.... I agree about one thing however, all that money squander on crap could go towards feeding our planet and living within our means here before be go plundering new worlds, but all of us do need to re-examine our fundamental priorities. Back in the 1970's, the path seemed clearer. We needed to get to the moon, because it was stage one of having a base there, which made getting to Mars that much easier, because that was a necessary part of having a base there.... All I'm saying, is £1.5 billion is absolute peanuts. Not even peanusts, it's the dust which settles on peanuts.

£1.5 billion to put put it there. To put that in perspective, the BBC has an annual budget between £3.5 and £4 billion, and we get 20+ years of mind numbing garbage like Eastenders, River City, the Graham Norton show... I'm with NASA all the way. Mars has about 1/3 the gravity that Earth does, and an atmoshere that's mostly CO2. The gravity is too weak to hold on to an Oxygen based atmoshpere even if we could grow plants to create one, but you could sustain a biosphere and live there, and maybe one day invent an atmosphere we could breathe. That is if you don't mind -60 degree frost and 200mph winds, but those might change with an atmoshere too. I hope I see it in my lifetime, I really do. I was just 3 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and I used to go to sleep staring a poster on the wall with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin on it. I had books with drawings of moon buggies, space stations and moon bases, and those books fully expected we'd have whole colonies of people living on the moon by now, and making all sorts of progress with space travel. I had a slide viewer full of photographs of the Apollo missions. I know what I'd rather see my tax being spent on, and it isn't bailing out rotten thieving bankers or making sh____e TV programs and paying vacuous celebrities six or even seven figure salaries. Mars isn't like the moon. Mars has some serious potential to be well worth going to and staying there. Some day, there will be a human being who isn't born on Earth. We just need to start getting our priorities right and we can make it happen. Go for it NASA!

Wheels down on Mars! First images.... Right on time too. Good going NASA!!

See it all makes sense now. "Sir, sir, sir, can I paint my Se5 any colour I like?" "Any colour you like laddie, so long as it's RFC green".

Guys this is OFF, and with the level of detail, we all know 2nd Lieutenant Tolkein is down there, somewhere, and he's watching the skies and taking notes. Tell him how the book ends before he's written it and a blue Police box turn up, and next we'll be sucked down some worm hole ripped in the space time continuum which is bigger on the inside than it is the outside. Mind you, if Tolkein is down there, so is Hitler. What a spooky thought!

Olham if you watch this from about 4.15, there's colour footage of the Bismarck with a dazzle paint scheme.... I hear the principle was partly to obscure the speed, but also to confuse identification - seeing it on the horizon you had to double check whether it was one ship or two shorter ones etc.