SkippyBing

Epic fail - 'Some radiation may kill you as we saw at Nagaskai and Horishima' so not the massive f*** off fireballs then? Unfortunately for the media the effects of radiation can't be summarised in one headline or 30 seconds of airtime, obviously this exceeds their intellectual capacity if not that of the rest of us. For those of you with an attention span that can be measured in seconds something useful

Best of luck. I was there for six months last year and it's possibly the safest I've been in the decade or so I've been serving. Mind you I wasn't flying for once so that may have helped!

You know Steam releases games by small and independent developers don't you? Oh yeah, never had any problems with Steam either, certainly made my life easier at times.

Oooo, did that a few weeks ago. Although admittedly it was on a Type 22 so the pirates weren't so keen on playing. Somalia looks lovely though, through binoculars...

I'm fairly sure it's photo shopped because they haven't had that many airframes serviceable in years!!

No, we're pretty much f***ked. The one possible bright spot is that there is no cost saving in cutting the QE Class Carriers, the contract was written so that once signed the government is committed to spending the money so cutting them really saves nothing. Unlike the Army*, and possibly the RAF, the RN actually plan in advance so running cost for the carriers are already accounted for, in fact the refits and docking periods are already on a spreadsheet in Fleet the only bits to fill in are where they deploy to. On the down side the skill and knowledge base that the RN sacrificed so much to retain is now lost, stand fast some folders in the FAA Museum** and anyone who hasn't moved on by the end of the decade. **Those of you from the UK may recall numerous newspaper expose on the appalling accommodation the Army return to after Op Tours. This is because rather than budget to spend money on a phased re-generation program the Army spent it on tanks and horses. Since the merging of all three service's estate management most funding has now gone to the Army as upgrading their accommodation to habitable is the number one priority at the cost of all the careful phased plans of the other two services. To the extent Yeovilton's main runway may not get refurbished limiting its usable area. **No seriously, a good friend was up from the IPT to check the museum for information and found that the last Cdr Air from the old Ark Royal had handily noted down their operating procedure for possible future reference. I think it's called 'The State of the Ark'.

No the Type 23s originally had a design life of around 16 years, the CVS weren't so restricted. I think the planned out of service date for the Ark was 2015/16.

I'm assuming it's a compliment? Everyone I know is taking it as one

Oh I can, but you'd have to really f*** it up to make it more expensive than navalising Typhoon. The nose gear alone would need a complete redesign which knocks on to the whole forward structure, never mind reducing the water reactive alloy content and changing the construction to avoid galvanic corrosion writing it off over a weekend embarked. The Navalised Typhoon is basically the RAF's idea to justify buying the full production run and to try and keep more RAF FJ squadrons going. Comparing the two Typhoon has done some nice airshow appearances, Super Hornet has dropped bombs on Afghanistan. Typhoon has an upgrade to the radar in the Sea Harrier, Super Hornet has an AESA. The RN would rather have Super Hornet than Typhoon. The RAF would like to keep all fast jet flying in the RAF.

Never going to happen, the AoA on finals to a carrier mean you can't even see the boat. Add to that the major upgrade to the undercarriage and you could never sell it as a cost saving measure vs buying F/A-18 off the shelf. The only reason F-35 is in the running at the moment is because the RN didn't want to risk paying for a pricier carrier, now the cost saving of not buying F-35 looks like being greater than the cost of getting EMCAT* for the new carriers it's all change. They've actually resurrected the EMCAT program which suggests to me this is more than just posturing prior to the SDR. And yes, the recession may be coming to an end, but even with the planned spending cuts the UK is looking at a £1 Trillion debt by the end of this parliament, don't do what the Labour Gov wanted and confuse debt with deficit. *EMCAT is the British Electo-Magnetic Launch system, Janes had an article recently about how it was being restarted after a halt was called in '07/08. As I understand it from an article in Naval Engineering Review the team had solved some issues the USN's system had whilst having others of it's own. If anyone's really interested I'll see if I can dig it out.

As far as you can really, that allows you to manoeuvre your aircraft to the optimum position to engage while remaining safe yourself. Basically it increases your situational awareness. As for ranges, and slightly off topic, the Blue Parrot set in the Buccaneer S.1 could detect shipping contacts at 240NM. It didn't bother displaying anything within ~100NM on the display at that setting mind otherwise getting an accurate range and bearing off the display would be tricky!

Personally I'd say the Mi-17 is the right helicopter. Having seen the situation in Iraq where lots of nice Western equipment falls apart after a month because the maintenance routine is too complicated. They need equipment they're familiar with and that can be maintained with a sledgehammer!

Ahhh... yes, I actually have a completed model lying around, I just need to export it to SF. Bit embarrassing considering I said I'd do it seven months ago when I released the FSX version! Two weeks? P.S. Screenshots of the FSX version if you follow the link in my signature.

One thing worth bearing in mind is that the model might not actually look for DDS textures, there's a tick box when you export stuff for FSX that lets you chose what format textures to look for, e.g. BMP, DDS or both. Thanks for the comment on the website, admittedly they're mostly done by other people, I mainly make the models, so I'll pass it on!

What are you trying to skin? A native FSX model generally has the textures stored in DDS format to start with so they should open in Photoshop if you've got the nVidia plug-in installed. If that's not working grab DXTbmp by Martin Wright from here, it can open pretty much any FS graphics file format. After that it's like skinning for any other sim. The only minor difference is that true FSX external textured are flipped vertically to speed up loading times, consequently any text looks back to front.

I don't think there's a lot the pilot will be able to do to break lock, if the turret they're using is the latest version of Phalanx it can track a Sunburn anti-ship missile through a 20g terminal weave. Pretty much all point defense weapons systems can track faster than a jet can manoeuvre other wise they'd be redundant, the bonus with this is you don't have to move the mass of a gun as well, just a mirror to direct the laser energy.

More in depth article.

That's pretty true to life, depth perception only really works out to about 18 feet (depends on the individual to some extent) after that your brain is using familiarity with objects to estimate their distance. I.e. you know how big a house usually is so it's got to be about xx feet away, this has caused problems in the past when people have been low flying over wooded areas in low light and come across a wide area of new growth, they compensate by flying lower than they should be to maintain the same visual picture.

Sod the 4x4, I'll have the thing Derk posted!

You can order an un-locked one now from the UK Apple store, I think the price was £499 for the 16GB version. Refusing to look myself as I just got an HTC Desire as a present to myself for R&R!

I know I did it a few times in XP using the nVidia drivers to treat my two displays as one desktop, it was then just a case of fiddling with the display settings in game. However I don't think I've got that option in Win7 which is a bit annoying as it worked on quite a few games.

Gepard, the word in English is harmonic or harmonic frequency, essentially the vibrations are in harmony with the natural frequency of the object. I think the German actually makes more sense! There was a similar thing with some power station cooling towers in the UK. The original set-up had been tested in my university's wind tunnel with four towers. They then added a fifth to the end of the row without doing anymore testing. At that point a relatively light wind running along the row demolished the end tower by getting it to vibrate at it it's harmonic frequency. How we laughed.