I know you love the sceptics angle Lewis but really you could have made more clear that actually the ship is quite a few months away from deployment and therefore we shouldn't expect to be all ready and loaded to go.

Do you love your poo poo of the Telegraph article, sometimes the papers/internet just make stuff up which is just nonsense which irks me.

There were some stories about the RN running Windows weren't there?

The combination of crap pre-war AA guns and crap post-war OS makes me glad I've left the UK

So even less well-equipped for the job than Thunderchild then, but at least we have swine flu to fall back on....

Does this also explain the RNs impotence in the face of lightly armed Iranian dingies?

Wow, Lewis, you didn't even read what you wrote!

"The guns on the ships are powered by radar,"

Kryten turrets are not powered by radar!

A proper journalist would have done some basic research, and reported which previously unreported, radar powered weapons system was almost used.

...a billion £ destroyer, with most of it's primary weapons from the "oooh, it's shiny" category not fitted????

May as well put a sign up saying "We're british, we're skint and we're shit!"

FAIL.

"A Royal Navy warship may have come within seconds of opening fire on Unidentified Flying Objects above Merseyside"

ey, ey, ey...cehm down, cehm down

Brown must be relieved of duty; these crackbrained plans of his to save the regime are getting more and more dangerous every day. Starting a fight with a transgalactic civilisation is _NOT_ the way to distract the taxpayer.

must have been the same UFOs that painted a large jellyfish on a barley field in Oxfordshire!

Time for Playmobile?

That would be the invaders described in John Wyndham 's "The Kraken Wakes".

You can easily tell if it's true - you'll start hearing stories about the ice caps melting and sea level rising.

... Playmobil reconstruction?

The cost for the licenses for Windows for Warships must have been staggering.

I'm from Liverpool and I saw something similar in description to that a couple of years ago. they must be repeat visitors

I'd have thought that the guns were in fact powered by high pressure hydraulic lines or by some beefy electric motors.

(The one with 'Annoying Pedant' written on the back)

In other reports the Royal Navy has reported high accuracy with the SB-7 spitball cannon. The Vice Admiral of the Ex-checker has reported that...

I'm pretty sure that civilian air radar is capable of detecting and showing real targets as well as transponders [well that was the case when I last worked with radar systems 20+ years ago]. Same deal with marine radar.

However the system can be set so be selective as to what it shows ("raw return" - ie what signal gets received, "doppler only" - ie. only moving signals and ignore reflections from buildings etc, transponder - ie. decoded transponder data that shows up as a symbol).

Raw transponder data looks like a line of "blips" and lots of transponders going off, as you get with air traffic control for a busy airspace, would just look like a screen full of tracer fire. Generally air traffic control terminals are set to not show anything except for translated transponder symbols.

You can see them every weekend down Mathew Street, usually with bad bleach jobs.

The floating orange balls were actually seen in navy simulation exercises. They were using the Crysis Editor.

Don't you realize that the aliens obviously have the tech to disguise their ships as signal flares???

Not to mention their soldiers are disguised as discarded rubbish? We're surrounded!!!

Having actually been a test engineer in the past though, they may have been using camera equipment to track the plane (or just the flares) visually, while it dropped the flares as it was being filmed? Maybe? I dunno, I might be crazy. I know when things with any kind of technical sophistication are involved, the tests created are completely up to the imaginations of the people who are working with/on it. There's almost always something worth seeing from the test results that wasn't expected, or needs to be verified through multiple kinds of observation, so the more you add to the test to observe, the better.

One thing I would use the radar/flare test for is to see if long range visible light systems can track in synch with radars when it comes to range finding and doppler effects from objects in motion, or to calibrate a visible-light based system (and/or infrared) with the radar system, since the flares literally cover at least those three spectrum.

Why would one do this in public? It's (probably) not involving secret tech, and the land based part of the test probably wanted to show off to family or just thought it would be cooler :) I'd show up to watch if I had nothing better to do. And everyone loves pyrotechnics ;P mmmm, fire.

Of course it could be the government getting us used to weird things happening so that when the true alien overlords do finally show up soon, by the time we realize it isn't a hoax we'll be easy pickings. Of course. Or it could be....

Mine's the one that says, "My tinfoil hat is my other pants"

Yeah, repeat visitors. You keep telling yourself that.

I reckon they just got lost following the M6 and hit the M62 instead of the M55. I can't imagine anyone intentionally visiting Liverpool twice.

Dont know where you get the idea that the Kryten gun is a WWII design. its actually based on the abbot from the 60's. but only called the Kryten after a redesign in the 80's.

after all WWII guns had manned turrets, this ones automated.

I too used the cadet, single shot, manual loading version of the SA80 (L98A1) in the Air Cadets (ATC) - however my experience was somewhat different to yours. The only issue I remember happening were jams when cocking it - is you pulled it back and let it spring forward on its own, everything was fine - but if a cadet pulled it back and pushed it forward - then it would jam. Consequently, it taught the cadets good cocking technique. I can't remember jamming it myself more than a couple of times over my 5 years in the cadets.

Having used it on a 200m range with basic uncalibrated iron sights, in the hands of a cadet it wasn't going to win any awards - but at the usual 25m ranges it wasn't impossible to get both the ATC Marksman and RAF Marksman awards if you had a little skill, took your time and breathed properly.

Why not go the whole hog & rename the ship HMS Dwarfer?

A billion pounds down the swanee & in the event of war it's "Engage panic mode"

Paris, because she's disappointed by someone armed with a mere 4.5 inches too!

An easy way to check if the MoD explanation is BS is to see if there was a NOTAM published for the flare dropping activity. I'm an ex ATCO so don't have access to daily NOTAM notices although I know it's out there on t'interweb but can't be arsed looking for it - I am not after all, a UFO investigator.

Anyone????

Or we are all doomed!, doomed I tell you!! ... DOOMED!!! ... Either that or I've had to much coffee this morning!

So anyway, between the alien invasion and the rise of the robot (ships) we are doomed.

Maybe the aliens and the robots are working together?! ... It makes sense. (Well my nurse agrees). The answer is simple. The aliens and robots just (for a laugh) throw some flares at the fleshlings and point their gun at them, then watch them scatter and hide.

Anyway I have to go now, its time for my medication (for some strange reason it glows green).

to all the idiots - the ship is currently being fitted - not in service

in other news parts of a plane in BAe cant fly at the minute cause the wings are still in Germany

MUPPETS

Seems most likely to me that an RAF plane happened to be in the area, got 'lit up' by the ship's radar, and followed his training without thinking about where he was.

No AA missiles either? On a Type 45? What's it for, then?

The idea is, if you pretend that you can fend off everything, even aliens, then no enemy would dare to attack you.

Lewis, you let something like hot air out of the bag.

Firstly the new ship doesnt have its PHALANX guns installed yet

secondly less of the anti-liverpool jibes you southern fairy poofters