SKB wrote:Added a poll to the thread. (See top ^)

I think it could do with a few more options instead of just "yes". For instance, whether to have separate aircraft for the royal family and for senior government officials, or whether it/they should be shared.

btw "filled with helium" is maybe a little misleading as I think they use around about a 1% helium-to-air mix

It seems likely with the timing of it that they were mobilised as a revenge attack in response to the massive self-congratulation about killing Emwazi. One thing we could do would be to try to keep such high profile events out of the press - 4GW and propaganda are tightly linked, and it takes the wi...

Lugzy wrote:

Tiny Toy wrote:Lugsy: sorry, how does that differ from us exactly?

Apologies TT could you give me a clue to which part your referring to please ,

The bit about the Gulf states using defence contracts as political pressure.

Lugsy: sorry, how does that differ from us exactly?

Rest in peace sir.

mr.fred wrote:Well, our new transformational medium weight technology will use network enabled technology and an agile methodology will enable our effects based concept to open up a different paradigm and be a real game changer.

I have tea in my nose now.

The good guys are held to a higher standard. That's why they're the good guys

I see, so building a base big enough to accomodate the new carriers alongside, and costing £15m is 'fluff' is it. :roll: That decision has already been made. The SDSR is about future decisions. We may or may not decide to invest more or less into the Gulf region. But you cannot possibly take Dunne'...

Dunne: UK Review Will Feature Gulf Region Prominently in Planning DUBAI — The Gulf region will feature prominently in the United Kingdom's upcoming strategy review, a top United Kingdom defense official said here Monday. This is standard "ich bin ein Berliner" stuff, it means nothing. He'...

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/policy/2015/11/07/ahead-latest-strategic-defense-and-security-review-uk-faces-tough-choices/75163240/ Does anyone know what possible new submarine capability Alex Ashbourne-Walmsley is hinting at in the above article? She does have very credibl...

Exactly. This is why the Conservatives have been pushing the Whole Force Concept thing for years: they have a vision that PMCs are at least as good or better than regulars and reservists, and are keen to reduce the numbers of the latter in favour of the former since it reduces the numbers in (some o...

The latest NAO report unfortunately says that the Thermal Metal Spray application system isn't quite ready for coating an area the size of QE's deck, and that it is likely that only parts of it will receive the coat, with the rest using legacy coating. I should think the pilots will be quite intere...

I wasn't able to determine from your link which version this "W for Warships" was and is based on? I think that it was Windows 2000 based, but that's come from some dim recess of my memory, so I might be misremembering. That's correct. There is some more information about how this was ste...

Don't get me started on "Windows for Warships". A proprietary closed-source OS with well-known unpatched security vulnerabilities and a backdoor for a foreign government? Sounds like an excellent choice, not.

Whilst the P8 is the preferred solution, was wondering what the cost of the high altitude delivery systems and the reliance on sonar buoys has in regards to operating costs. Would a MAD boom as fitted to the Indian version be more cost effective. As has been pointed out already in this thread, ther...

The primary advantage of using the Meteor airframe is that it will fit directly with Typhoons, whereas what I'm saying is that it would be better to remove the criterion of manned aircraft platform compatibility altogether since it's too complex, expensive, limits the number of launch vehicles, and ...

There are several ways to conduct SEAD; of these the 5G MRCA + ARM combination has to be by far the most expensive. Using drones both as decoys and to deploy ARMs has to be the way forward both to reduce complexity and also the risk to pilots. The main problem with this is that ALARM and HARM are bo...

This article is telling.

Yep, within the last four letters (the alternating 4+4 making 100%, at least 25% of the CAPEX would be redundant, because the energy mix has not been optimised against all relevant constraints... It doesn't work like that. You work out what you need (including redundancy) and expenditure is based o...

W is probably most of R.

The baseload is not being used as backup. This picture represents overall supply during, say, a year. One day it could be NNNNNRRRRR and the next day (becalmed, overcast) NNNNNGGGGG, but hopefully we're only using the gas 40% or less of the overall time. Does that explain?

- you are not saying that we should hedge against interrupted LNG supplies by building more gas fired stations? No, as I said before if we invested more heavily in nuclear and renewables we would be using less gas, not more. Current picture: NNCCCGGGGR Ideal picture: NNNNNRRRGG where N=nuclear C=co...

This assumes that we would need more gas. But if we were building gen3 or ideally gen4 reactors now then we could phase out coal and still use less gas overall because most of the gas/coal energy production currently supplies baseload. I agree with you that it's crazy we have such a dependency on LN...

Capex is not a problem since it is predicated on the real output including downtime. You are absolutely correct that demand is very variable over time, which implies that we can't go full nuclear since that would provide us with a massive surplus and nobody to sell it to (like France, although they ...

Tinman wrote:Whats your suggestion.

Just stick to the facts as you see them and make your case on that basis rather than resorting to ad hominems.