Posts by SkippyBing

Re: Dihedral

I'd imagine the lack of dihedral is from a desire to keep the thrust line and centre of lift aligned to minimise any pitching moment when turning the rocket on and off.

Re: Kneel

“I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things”

Re: Upholder class

I was talking to someone recently who was of the opinion that as we've failed to procure major military projects to time or cost since the days of Samuel Pepys* it might be an idea to accept this failing and allow for it at the start of the contract, rather than continuing to be astounded by a level of incompetence** that's been ongoing for several hundred years.

*It's apparently mentioned in his diaries.

**By all parties involved.

Re: SkippyBing Remember battlecrusiers?

Matt, I'll try and ignore the ad hominem attacks in my response.

Did the UK have the best air defence network in the world at the start of the BoB? Yes, however my point was that their plan for the use of the fighter once the intercept was coordinated was poor, i.e. having a section of fighters take it in turns to line up behind the enemy bomber and engage it while the tail gunner had a perfect shot. Never mind the original concept of use for the turret fighter. My point was that they had to rapidly relearn the basics such as operating as a number of two ships rather than having a whole squadron try and manoeuvre its way around the sky in formation.

Similarly in Vietnam the aircraft that performed best in air to air combat were the older ones as they'd been taught it, whereas it had been assumed the Phantom would never need to under the new concept of operations. Hence the response of setting up Top Gun et al as a response to the poor performance of the F-4 in the air to air arena, or are you saying it was set up for different reasons? It's a particularly literal reading of my post to assume I meant the entire USAF had forgotten about dog fighting. My point was they'd had to do something to address the lack of ACM training for a large part of their fleet as they'd thought it was no longer relevant to the next generation of aircraft.

I'm not sure how you prove I'm very wrong to say " it's the speed and range that's increased, including the detection range" and then go on to say how the range of various sensors and weapons has increased, like I said it had.

Regarding kill ratios there are various ways of reading the results in South East Asia, and it's hard to know the true story. For instance after the engagement where Cunningham and Driscoll became the USN's only F-4 aces they had to eject due to damage sustained in combat. The US don't count that as a kill for the NVAF as it happened after the encounter, whereas they'd be quite happy to count a NVAF aircraft that crashed on landing as a kill for anyone who'd fired shots at it.

Re: @AC

"their security services are, thinking they have the right to spy on everyone else"

That's kind of what security services do, especially the spying ones. If I was funding the NSA and they weren't spying on everyone they could I'd be pretty pissed off.

Obviously no spy agency thinks they have the right to do these things, otherwise they wouldn't try so hard not to get caught.

Re: GPS spoofing

'If you wanted to cause a ship to alter course, wouldn't it be easier to spoof local GPS signals?'

Depends on what your goal was. If you want to create an alteration of course in a limited geographic area it's probably a better bet to inject a ghost ship into AIS as the ship's reaction is fairly predictable, it'll turn right*. GPS would work if you wanted it to end up somewhere different at the end of its voyage, i.e. it'd be quite noticeable if you made such a large shift that it made a 10 degree alteration of course within a few miles. Depending on your target vessel of course, you'de have to have fairly unobservant crew to not notice a tanker avoiding a non-existent ship.

*Slightly simplified but this is the general solution for all give way vessels in the international regulations for avoiding collision at sea. Give way vessels are the ones that have to give way to the stand on vessel and to make things easy, if you can see the other boats red navigation lights you're the give way vessel.

'That you think the whole phone-hacking thing can be prevented in the future by just saying sorry?'

Or the Police doing their actual job of arresting criminals rather than accepting bribes from them...

Ahh Compton. I've been there once, in a helicopter, it actually has an airfield which threw me somewhat. The 'I've heard it all before' tone in the voice of the air traffic controller as I reported I was 'straight out of Compton' did tarnish the experience somewhat.

Re: No need for revolution

Which I agree with, the problem is Apple make such a song and dance about the release of a modest update. If they'd just put out a press release or mentioned it along with some other stuff that would be fine but having a massive presentation that can be summed up as 'buy a faster one or a hideous plastic one' and youopen yourself up to ridicule, or at least mildly biting sarcasm.

Re: Truth or consequences

'If I'd behaved like this towards my previous employer I'd expect them to tell any future employer.'

The difference being your school doesn't employ you and given the vast sums of money you have to pay a university to go there it's more like they're your employee.

Re: 007 watch!

Me too, although I hate to think how fast I stuffed packets of crisps down my face to be able to send off for it the same day I saw the offer!

Re: How long the data is held.

@SP, there's what I should do and then there's the reality of moving several years worth of credit card statements with a balance of £0 on them. So I took the easy route.

In Mr. Ballmers case the 'ly' on the end of stupidly is optional

The question being, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

'There appears to be individuals in and associated with the EDL, who have been found guilty of many offences'

So like a proper political party then?

Re: Tommorows announcement...

It may be too late to call it 'Fondleslab', one of the guests on Radio 4's today programme yesterday used the term to refer to tablets generically. So either she's a keen reader of El Reg or the term is already deeply embedded in the lexicon.

Re: What's really weird

My money's on the multi-armed elephant, best celebrity death match ever!

Re: "one to go down it and shatter it"

I'm probably missing something obvious, but if we shatter it into lots of tiny pieces that then hit us, aren't the smaller bits more likely to burn up in the atmosphere than the one big bit? I mean I'm guessing that wouldn't be great but presumably less bad than one big bit hitting the surface?

Re: The real question is

True, but they're not short of coastline either and it's not all a world heritage park, so why not use one of those bits?

Oddly it should be easier hitting an island than an area in the middle of the desert as it'll give you a more discrete radar target to lock on to.

Re: Plastic Vs Aluminium

Apparently I should be more explicit when I make my points.

Is a slightly warm London the warmest conditions a 787 will have been parked in? I doubt it, ANA uses them and last time I was there Tokyo was pretty warm as well. Shockingly airline manufacturers heat and cold soak their aircraft as part of the design and certification process.

Will there be procedures for parking in warm weather? Probably if it's thought it could be an issue, if not it's likely adverse reactions would have occurred somewhere else first as a seasonally warm London is quite mild compared to a lot of places.

Will these procedures list the airport they should be carried out at? I doubt it, they'd probably use something more reliable like the air temperature. If only there was some way of getting that at an airport...

Re: Carrier Nonsense

So your proposal is:

1. Stop building military vessels with integrated defences and networked escort vessels because they're too vulnerable.

2. Replace them with converted merchant shipping which for some reason isn't, despite not having any defences.

3. Add some containerised defences, much like the ones on the naval ships you got rid on in 1, in fact the two examples you listed are already on Royal Navy ships.

Oddly this to my mind puts you back to square one, just without the survivability of a naval vessel in the event of actually being hit.

There may well be an imminent revolution in naval affairs, this isn't it.

'And how, exactly, does the Weight on Wheels switch work in comparison with an actual physical isolator in the cockpit? '

Pretty much the same way, they're both switches just the location is different. Certainly the flight/ground switch I've used wasn't a physical isolator it was just a switch that made a circuit live that then set various relays, e.g. one to allow the radar to transmit.

Weight on Wheels switches have been around for decades so are a tried and tested mechanism, and besides it's not as if they're directly connected to the 'start fire in aft of aircraft' circuit, so if if it was faulty it's unlikely to be the direct cause of the fire.

Re: WTF?

'An interesting case would be if someone finds a really valuable asteroid. Salvage? No, because no one can own anything of "outer space."'

Is that true, it says no state can claim part of a celestial body, it doesn't as far as I know say an individual or indeed company can't. It may also mean the Queen could lay claim to the moon which would make it British territory as part of the Crown Estates, but that's probably cheating.

Re: Offline maps gone... or not?

As I understand it from reading the actual press release, the difference now is that when viewing the area you want to cache you just type 'OK Maps' into the search box and it'll then be saved to your device for later use. Apparently there will be updates, hopefully to add a button for the feature rather than typing something only tangentially connected to the task into the search bar...

Re: Hand Grenages are more effective

I know they say fight fire with fire, but to be honest if your house is ablaze water will work better...

Re: Non news. Really?

Indeed, the "rogue flight plan" line does smack of 'lies told to children' rather than being a plausible explanation of what happened.

Re: Mind you, looking at the boat

Isn't it the wrong way up for the clinker design to work? Each overlap provides somewhere for the water to pool which doesn't strike me as a good idea.

Re: Well, I know which manufacturer not to buy form then.

So where do you get your ethically pure phone from?

Re: Note these words...

Of course there are, until you actually drill down there it's all very highly educated guess work.

I used to work in oil exploration and it wasn't unusual to hear of exploratory wells that produced pure clean water, one underground reservoir of liquid looking much like any other. Still cost a fuck load to drill that first hole mind.