* Posts by Robevan

20 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2011

Latest F-35 flight tests finish – and US stops accepting new jets

Robevan

Re: Billions for an "aircraft carrier"....

The Syrians knew precisely which targets the various missiles were directed towards and approximately when, this saved Macron and May from the small risk of being indicted for murder at a later date but also made it far easier for the Syrians to bring a portion of the missiles down, in a genuine war that would not be the position and much shorter radar detection ranges would be a considerable asset.

Robevan

Re: classic capitalism

Nothing new about British Governments dipping deep into the public purse to save the pockets of their relatives and friends, been at it for centuries, The East India company was on an almost permanent drip of public cash till they bungled so badly as to trigger the Mutiny and finally the Government had to come clean and nationalise the lot.

Royal Navy's newest ship formally named in Glasgow yard

Robevan

Re: OMFG

Almost the displacement of a WW2 destroyer but a single 30mm cannon instead of the eight 4.7" guns, 21" torpedoes, and four 40mm Bofors guns of a wartime Tribal class destroyer, 10 knots slower too. But the captain and crew have much nicer cabins and facilities.

US Navy runs into snags with aircraft carrier's electric plane-slingshot

Robevan

Re: Schadenfreude?

Put arrester wires on them and they could fly Mig29Ks and the marine version of the Su 57 if ever the Russians can get it right.

Robevan

Re: a million from our treasury for something we then have to buy spares for

I believe the RN used British stocks of sidewinders in the South Atlantic, but that meant none left for use in Britain or the North Atlantic for NATO posturing, The USA provided the replacements for those, we paid for them of course.

Why SpaceX will sort out Sunday's snafu faster than NASA ever could

Robevan

Re: NASA inefficiency: The hint is in the name

New Horizons, the Mars rovers, Cassini etc might suggest you are talking bilge. NASA still seems to be capable of astounding us with its capability and competence.

Goodbye Vulcan: Blighty's nuclear bomber retires for the last time

Robevan

Re: A beautiful aircraft though

A certain amount of mythologising going on here. Vulcans did penetrate US defences, but with full US congniscience and permission as part of operation Sky Shield. They were apparently embarrassingly good at it almost completely foxing defence radars and interceptors and "hitting" all targets, As usual Lewis's virulent anti Britishness leads him astray, Vulcans and Victors almost certainly were an effective deterrent throughout the 1960's. British ECM expertise was considerable and aircrew extremely well trained in evasive techniques as their success at penetrating North American defences demonstrated.

Robevan

Operation Skyshield

They did embarrassingly well against US defences in 1960 and 1961. Flying from Bermuda and Lossiemouth at very high altitude they penetrated US defences, evading radar and interceptors using ECM, in one case reportedly outflying a supersonic delta dagger at altitude. I believe they only had a single "loss" and "hit" all targets, returning to bases in Newfoundland, or in one case landing at Plattsburgh Air Force Base

Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high'

Robevan

Re: So this has just happened suddenly?

Clouds are not water vapour they are liquid water droplets or ice crystals. The antarctic sea ice almost all goes in Summer, and theres your worry, the ice is no longer in equilibrium, it is reducing, steadily, year on year. And as legions of scientists, not ecofreaks whatever they are, learn more about the interesting processes that influence our climate it becomes more certain that the relentless biassing of the carbon cycle through increased transfer of carbon from geological stores to the atmospheric and oceanic stores is stressing those climate systems. Civilisation arose in a narrow climate window of opportunity, should we close that window, it is not certain that civilisation will continue.

Robevan

Re: Its still a wonderful excuse to tax some more

You don't have to do these things, you choose to do them. I suggest you do little research into exactly how little electricity could be generated from methane in the sewerage system rather than blather mindlessly. When or if 30 year plus coal plant does go to China, then it's in the form of scrap metal as feed for their steel furnaces.

If your working analytical skills are as those you demonstrate here, maybe your best place is at home.

Schoolgirl's Hello Kitty catonaut soars to 93,000ft

Robevan

Re: Excellent

Cambridge University spaceflight club with students at Parkside and Coleridge secondary schools 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3548363/Teddy-bears-in-space-first-pictures.html

How to destroy a brand-new Samsung laptop: Boot Linux on it

Robevan

Re: French cars

Can't blame Red Robbo for the design faults, they were down to management and poor engineering. Robbo was just a symptom of the British disease of lazy couldn't care less upper class and middle class pricks.

Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be fine

Robevan

Re: Free Markets Reduce Emissions

Is that so when you factor in consumption of Chinese imports? And it stands against a very high per capita carbon dioxide footprint, Is that down to European levels yet? Europe's switch to gas was much earlier. The devil is in the timing of the statistics and the baseline set. The USA has a long way to go before it can lecture Europe.

Fusion is still off the practicability horizon , Thorium fission is laden with very serious and unresolved engineering challenges. It is taking a decade or more to build current generation nuclear plants, we are nowhere near being able to simply replace carbon intensive energy without seriously addressing consumption rates.

New Mac mini: Business in the front, party at the back

Robevan

Re: Afordable?

No more expensive than a similarly specified DIY box, if you include the cost of a Windows licence. Not bad value.

Paul Allen: Windows 8 'promising' yet 'puzzling'

Robevan

Re: tweak to the bumper bar, grille and taillights

But if it's an operating system upgrade, they will only charge you £13.99 for it, not the £70 + that Microsoft do, and thats the buggered up mickey mouse version that won't even let you swap language support. Having just rejoined the windows world because i need to use Windows software, I am not impressed with the rapacious habits of the Redmond crew.

Polar sea ice could set another record this year

Robevan

Re: "something almost equally unusual"

it's winter ice too, it may well be the case that arctic winter ice will also edge up in area, though not perhaps volume, as large areas of open water loose surface heat faster than those shrouded in ice cover, and so average water temp in the arctic winter falls faster as winter progresses than in high ice years. The consequence may be a deepening oscillation in ice cover area between the seasons.

US military gives NASA two better-than-Hubble telescopes

Robevan

Re: Is it just me...

But are they? Are these the relics of the failed Boeing Future Imagery contact to build spy telescopes that would solve the "looking through a straw" problem with the conventional telescope spy satellites? Around $10 billion dollars down the drain according to the Washington Post article I read. If they are those telescopes then clearly they were not good enough for the NRO, and making them good enough was outside the enormous budgetary resources of the NRO.

Robevan

just surplus junk now

I dont suppose the DOD needs many space telescope spy satellites now they have stealth drones capable of photographing anywhere on earth continuously from 20, 000 m at loitering pace instead of 100,000m at 25,000 kmh with passes over target only every few hours.

Brit boffins' bendy bamboo bike breakthrough

Robevan

Not quite so new

My neighbour as I was growing up in the 1970's had been a keen cycle racer in the 1940's, his racing bike had bamboo wheel rims, so I think this one has missed a trick there. The ice axe I still use for general mountaineering use still has its laminated bamboo shaft from the late 1970's.

RAF Eurofighters make devastating attack – on Parliament

Robevan

Come off it Lewis we spent the money and got the Typhoon, Time to make it work.

It's the RAF fucking us about here, they want the next new toy on the block and are worried that they are going to be told "you've got the Typhoon to do the attack work, play with that a while, we can't afford the F35". So they have been dragging their heels on making and keeping the Typhoon mission worthy and have been caught out. The Typhoon is so expensive because we have been playing technological catchup with the Americans and are now spreading the cost between far too few airframes. The RAF should be told to sort out its Typhoons, get pilots trained and qualified and that it had better show that it can do that at a decent cost and availability ratio before it gets any more toys to leave broken in the chest. If we seriously need some hardened low tech attack planes for the likes of Afghanistan some NATO compatible SU25's would do the job perfectly and cost a fraction of the bill for a bunch of unnecessary F18's that Lewis pines for. We could even get some nice cheap Polish and Czech ready trained type qualified pilots to go with them. Ultimately we should merge the RAF with the major European airforces to form a unified European air defence force. If we need to keep a UK sovereign force for intervention then it should be a single one with a capability modelled on the US Marine Corps.