SkippyBing

Shocked myself a few times with my laptop power supply, must have some massive capacitors in the rectifier. Also shocked myself a few times off the UK's 240VAC supply, not as bad as you'd think.

Yeah, if they get the contract Airbus are going to set up a North American construction facility, can't remember where off the top of my head. So it'd actually be creating more jobs in the US economy than the Boeing proposal.

The phrase bunfight springs to mind. The current plan is for two RN JSF squadrons and two RAF, all of which would ultimately be able to operate off the carriers, with the RN one's being the specialists and explaining to the Crabs what the pointy end is called. At the moment the RAF seem to be trying to stop the RN generating the required number of fast jet pilots, they required different manning figures than Fleet to stand up a Harrier squadron, as 800/801 are under Strike these days this was a bit of a f**ker hence the Naval Strike Wing which is kind of a mixy blob of all the RN types. The problem is the RAF traditionally don't like going to sea which is fair enough it's not what they signed up for, it does however mean we keep sending carriers to sea without any fixed wing aviation, or borrowing it from someone else which is going to be a bit embarrassing when we get two shiny new carriers at £X billion and no air groups. Before anyone mentions it I am aware a lot of the lack of fixed wing naval aviation these days is because the jets keep going to Afghanistan, if only because Admirals various keep mentioning that frequently 50% of UK forces there are Navy despite the lack of coastline. I'm just worried that if it gets accepted for too long a period we'll have some really big yachts.

We'll take India if everyone could forget about Benny Hill. Right I'm off to find some of this p0rn everyone's talking about...

Where's Gordon Freeman when you need him? I for one welcome our new Combine overlords...

Aluminium, I thought it was Granite!

True last moths security update did fix six critical vulnerabilities in IE, there can't be that many left!

Bear in mind Google make money purely from advertising things, so they scan your googlemail messages so they can put contextualised ads in the margin, they scan your web browsing to stick ads down the side and at the top of your web searches. By building the web browser they can get even more information about your surfing habits so they can find new 'better' ways to advertise stuff to you. So in at least one way Google are out to spy on you. I've also never heard anyone call a Microsoft product secure before, but I probably spend too much time reading the register.

Actually we invented the World Wide Web, well I say we, Tim Berners-Lee did while working at CERN. Not the same as the Internet, more a useful way of using it. We also invented the jet engine, hovercraft and the USA and according to at least one book I have the Royal Navy created the Modern World so ultimately it's all our fault. Apart from Big Brother that was the Dutch apparently.

Same for the UK, I drove from Petershead (NE Scotland) to The Lizard (SW England) and it took 12 hours, still two better than google maps reckoned.

Oh indeed!! You could even include Culdrose, although why you'd bother is beyond me

If you can only visit one aviation museum, you probably have a more fully evolved social life than I do, however I'd recommend Duxford too. I am of course duty bound to big up the Fleet Air Arm Museum here at drizzly Yeovilton, but realisticly it's probably a bit too much of a trek from Farnborough.

By 'Incognito' function I take it you mean P0rn mode?

Looking good, should be some room to fit a carrier battle group up to the North as well, covering the GIUK gap.

Yes but Yeovilton is in the South West, which is the important base...

In the Lynx we use a specific weight of 0.81, i.e. one litre of fuel weighs 0.81 litres of water = 0.81 kilos/litre. We burn F-34 generally but can accept a range of fuels without changing the specific weight (it goes into the tactical system so it can calculate performance figures) so I'm guessing it's a fairly safe bet for jet fuel. That means your 330 litres will weigh 267.3 KG. WhiteKnight, 330 litres of water will weigh 330 kg (assuming it's fresh not salt) the SI system defines one kg as the mass of one litre of fresh water, one litre of salt water weighs 1.024 kg. Fuel is less dense than water, hence oil slicks floating, you'd never guess I have a degree in ship design would you!?!?

I caught the program last week as well when I was in LA. I'm a bit dubious about the whole 10 Greatest X of All Time series though as the one on submarines failed to mention HMS Conqueror which is the only nuclear sub to have actually done what it was designed for, i.e. sink something! Also slightly strange seeing the US version as in the UK the voice overs are done by a Brit who seems far less excitable about everything.

Yup! The high wing loading which was great for the GR at low level means it turns like a dog. Obviously versus a Bear it wouldn't have been a problem but against a MiG-29/F-16 it was apparently like taking a bus up against a Porsche! My one time F.3 pilot mate has also confirmed it was f*** all use above 30 odd thousand feet, again because it was originally designed as a low level bomber, bit embarrassing when the tankers have to descend to your level!

Ahh, looking hard enough. Obviously people who've spent hours researching the outside of a model didn't think to apply the techniques to the inside, seriously if anyone can find any internal shots of a Blackburn Baffin I could update the cockpit on that so it isn't just what I think it would have looked like. Cockpits generally are harder to model well, the fact is you're sat in it and everything is much closer so to get a decent experience you end up wanting to get more detail into it, detail which is annoyingly hard to find. I'm finishing up on the cockpit for my Wyvern model (no I don't know why I choose aircraft that have all been broken up either), the pilot's notes are great, but the pictures are too low res to get all the detail out and the only other pictures tend to be of the TF.1 example in the FAA Museum, which is so unlike the production S.4 that you might as well look at another aircraft entirely. I'm not saying cockpits are irrelevant, I model them which may be one reason my output is so low, but I can see why some people after the struggle of getting the external model done say 'the horror, the horror' when they contemplate going inside. It doesn't make them bad people, possibly just ones with a better sense of what's important in life, i.e. real 3-D people, fresh air, alcohol etc. What I find interesting is that the sim you support for being far more accurate, in that placeholder or stand in models are anathema to it, is the one played by less people I think a lot of people just don't have the time to invest in learning all the controls to operate something with 100% historical accuracy, after all the original pilots had fairly intensive training courses to go through as their actual jobs, I already have a job so I just don't have the time. Ultimately Stiglr isn't wrong in a lot of what he says, it would be nice to have accurate cockpits for all the aircraft available, but reality gets in the way and you have to be pragmatic about these things if you aren't going to work yourself into an early grave.

Sparky DON'T PANIC Let us know where you end up! Skippy

Observing this from the UK I find the original title of the post unintentionally hilarious. Here we know our press is biased, certain papers support the Conservatives (Republican-ish party) others Labour (Democrat-ish party) and the Sport essentially provides pictures of topless ladies and the results of yesterdays horse racing. The broadcast media is almost totally left wing, with Channel Four at least occasionally trying to even the balance by broadcasting such programmes as 'Climate Change is a complete fallacy made up by the Green Party so they can tell you what to think' Ok that wasn't the title of the program but you get the idea. Amusingly when the 'Lesbian single mothers who bother whales at weekends' tried to get the program censured the broadcasting complaints commission response was 'err... actually they've got a point, it may actually all be b*******ks', again paraphrasing, it's Friday and I'm drinking so I can't guarantee 100% accuracy. And yes I should be out being knocked back by young ladies but I've got 5 hours of airborne assessment Monday and Tuesday so I'm trying to cut back. Anyway back to the point, all media is biased if only because people who are drawn to that kind of thing tend to do media studies, which lets be honest is at least slightly left wing. Plus a right wing journalist won't survive long at a predominately left wing establishment and vice versa, so they tend to gravitate towards what they know. As long as you accept the bias it's not a problem, you know what you're getting, I've even taking the step of reading papers I 'disagree' with to balance my view, or at least have something to get angry with, after all if you only get your news from people who have the same world view as you you'll rapidly end up somewhere right of Kenghis Khan or left of Trotsky.

We had a similar thing called Ikara (think it was Australian in origin), actually saw one in the FAA Museum reserve collection took myself and a mate about a minute to figure out what it was, the torpedo shaped bottom half was the eventual giveaway! I'm guessing we ditched it as the system took up a lot of room on the ship and if you've got a helicopter anyway you might as well use that, works for me I don't want to be on the ship if there's a sub that close anyway!

I don't think armour plating of the keel would make much of a difference, actually some plans I have of a WW2 carrier indicate it had plating down to the keel so it was certainly an option then, the problem is it's not in the correct plane to resist the buckling of the keel. There are videos (probably on the net somewhere) demonstrating the effect of underwater explosions and the way they move around. The USSR did develop nuclear torpedoes to create a big enough explosion to break the back of a Nimitz class carrier, however for anything smaller than that you'd probably only need two conventional heavyweight. At Dartmouth they taught us something along the lines of 'Missiles will hurt you, torpedoes will kill you'.

It'll be a load of conventional explosive, probably Torpex. As I remember it's caused by creating a big bubble beneath the ship, then for reasons I don't really understand it contracts onto the hull and then re-expands, the absence of water beneath the centre of the hull causes it to buckle and snap in two. Sub launched torpedoes are normally 21" in diameter so you can get a lot of explosive in there, as opposed to air dropped ones which are generally a lot smaller and use shaped charges to make holes in stuff.

Yeah, I think originally it was thought the performance would be better due to the higher thrust compared to the J-79, however the increased cross section more than made up for that!