SkippyBing

Ahh, BAE Systems, can build a rail gun, can't fit the same tech in a carrier to launch aircraft for less than £2 Billion....

Well a) it's funny either way and b) watching the video there are definitely open windows on the first few carriages through and possibly an open door on one of the later ones. You'd be surprised how much of the world doesn't have air-conditioning.

Harry's still on the OCU as I understand it (I know someone on the same course). The 4 Apaches were already on Ocean for Op Cougar*, be interesting to see if they swap some of the other stuff on there for more Apaches. *Op Cougar was/is an Amphib deployment by the RN that was planned months ago and had nothing to do with Libya.

That's pretty much what I thought, although the early Mosquito Night Fighter also had the 4 .303s the radar wasn't really up to much consisting mostly of some aerials stuck on the nose! Thanks for clarifying the armament situation, I was/am kind of stumped as to why they thought the P-61 had the better armament and thought I might have missed something, as they temporarily locked the thread and deleted one of my posts I figured I should stop asking over there! Interesting to hear about the German experience with the 30mm, do you know if the sight could compensate for that or was it basically done by eye?

Having probably come close to being banned at Sim-Outhouse over this I was wondering if anyone here could clear things up for me. One of the Mods over there is working on a P-61 for FSX, which is coming along nicely, at some point they said the Mosquito wasn't a good night-fighter which I queried, because it seemed to do alright. One of the points they raised was that the Mosquito couldn't match the armament of the P-61 and said 'With the P-61s four canon alone its considered to be the most devastating aircraft of world war two. it could shred anything' and 'The Mossie didnt have that kind of firepower.'. However as far as I can tell both aircraft had 4 x Hispano 20mm cannon, while some P-61s had four .50 cal in a turret I'm not sure they'd be making much of a difference once you'd been hit by all that 20mm anyway. So are they wrong to say the Mosquito didn't have that kind of firepower or did the P-61 have better 20mms? Don't get me started on the radar side of things where apparently the P-61 had better equipment, despite the later Mosquitoes being fitted with the same model...

Ahh memories, I remember throwing 4.5" explosive bricks at that for an entire day back in 2001. Made it tricky trying to sleep during my six hours off mind... PS ditto on the FA2

The thing most Brits don't notice is that Americans pronounce it the way they spell it, they're missing the second i. There's actually a good reason for this, it's the original spelling as coined by the great Cornish scientist Humphry Davy (inventor of the Miners Lamp and various other things as well as being notable for spelling his name with two less Es than I would have), who was the first to refine it. It was only some miserable English language imperialist who decided that the second i should be added to it to sound more classical (as in Latin) and tie in with all the other exciting new elements that were being discovered. Personally I like saying aluminum to wind up people who seem to thing that that's the most important thing to be worrying about, and then claim my Cornish heritage as the reason.

God bless Matelots. Incidentally I had the honour of receiving my wings from Henry Allingham one of the last two veterans living in the UK back in 2007, a very humbling experience.

The amusing thing about most of those renders/impressions is that they have the tail rotor down right (because that's the only thing anyone's actually seen) and the rest is a normal Blackhawk with aerials and all sort sticking out all over the place. If it's actually stealthy it's likely to be more like the side on profile drawing with as much as possible shielded/conformal. Reference coming in under the radar, I think a stealthy helicopter would make it easier on the crew, <100 ft on goggles is hard work (although less hard than 200' bizarrely), if you can safely take it up to 500'+ then it's easier which means you're fresher for the actual insertion. A stealth/low observable helicopter should be able to travel further at a 'sensible' height, i.e. it'll blend in with the ground clutter at a higher altitude than a non stealth one.

You weren't in Sherborne were you, same thing happened to me there!

Have you tried right clicking the installer and selecting 'Run as Administrator'? The Program Files folders are protected from unauthorised users altering files in them, basically as a way of trying to stop malicious code being run. If you select 'Run as Admin' you're saying that it's alright for that program to make changes to those folders. That's why TK made the Strike Fighters 2 series place the files you'd want to change somewhere else. Although it's ironic that an MS product doesn't play well with another MS product they were produced by two separate divisions of MS. Also FSX was written around the same time as Vista so they didn't have access to all the detail as to how security was going to be implimented in the new OS. You can lower the level of protection from the User Access Control or UAC panel, personally I have it one from the bottom setting which means I have to run things as Admin to let them change stuff but it cuts the warnings down to the minimum which is handy when you're doing dev stuff!

As I understand it's essentially an A330 with the wing from an A340, which handily means the plumbing is already there for the refuelling pods. I'm guessing its max take-off weight is lower than a C-17s?