I DON’T BELIEVE THIS CRAP the U.S.N. said the same thing when the Su-24/27’s flew over thier Carriers, his is just “face saving” hahahaha!!!!

I’m sure the peacetime USN, relaxing at normal states of peacetime readiness was soooo shocked that a couple of old fighter bombers in international waters flew by. The same stunt in a time of tension or war would have a very different outcome…. would like to see a 30 year old SU24 with next to no modern EW get near a USN battlegroup then.

For that matter an RN, FN or Dutch BG either….

Funny how people think a carrier which CAN move and defend itself is a sitting duck, yet a landlocked airbase which cannot move (unless it’s built on a geological fault!) is a smarter bet. At least a carrier makes an enemy work a bit to locate it, and then makes them run the gauntlet of layered air defence (or the ASW screen if the threat is a sub). How many airbases (which cost an OBSCENE amount of money to build) have been handed over to hostile nations without a shot being fired in the last century? The Soviets apparently really enjoyed the facilities at Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam, constructed for the the USAF. A lot of former RAF bases are now in the hands of nations which, if not hostile now, have been in the past and could easily be again. By contrast, how many carriers have changed hands in such manner? How many have been lost to enemy action since WW2?

Then there is the famous story of the jungle airfield in Burma that the RAF regt would storm in the morning allowing the RAF to use it through the day and then they had to allow the Japanese to take over at night before restorming in the morning. Never have the rock apes earned their keep more.

Apart from the ones replaced after the Luftwaffe flattened much of the city?

Then there are the ones the saxons gave a good shoeing to

All the best stuff comes from Bristol :P.

My wife says Bath, but you all sound the same to me….:cool:
ducks behind parapet and looks over shoulder for misses.

Ah well, i wonder if they are very collectable. I hope so if not intresting reads for kids if they have an intrest. We did have awesome rocket names namely thanks to our rocket men 😀 men with beards given a chunk of the Isle of Wight and some money and left alone.

I knew a bloke who helped design the nose cone for TSR2 and Concorde and he did have a massive beard.

I’ve always fancied building a big secret rocket base on Ascension Island or one of the other isles in the South Atlantic nice and quiet out of the way. Perfect for secret stuff also since it southern it’s not totally covered by tracking radars.

Actually Spadeadam where the RAF practices EW was considered as a space port back in the day. You can read why it wasn’t taken up here…

http://www.spaceuk.org/bstreak/bs/cumbria.htm

If we are going to build wacking great hypersonic jobs then any airfied will do, I would have said Benbecula would do.

Im sure at some point mankind will unite to go into space and we’ll build some big starships. It’s only a matter of time i hope, first step is back to the moon which i think will be possible. Build a moonbase and ****** off into space once we have health and other issues nailed.

Not in my life time, and probably not my daughters I would have thought, but I am sure it will happen at some point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon

surely adaptable to our purpose….and designed in Bristol!

Oooo! Keep those comics safe they will be worth quite a bit if they are in great condition.

Well worn and well read i’m afraid.

You have a point in a way, we should really spend more money developing exotic technologies that can be dual use. Space technology is an area that frustrates me if you know your history well you should know why. We had the option of Concorde or Space we chose Concorde the French chose both Hmmm! Ooops so much for the idea that people dont want to blast things into space. Now we are reliant on foreign powers for space access so we cannot put something up there with others not knowing what exactly it is or does. The US are still toying with that idea of a suborbital bomber as part of a program to develop global strike components.

Ah Black Knight, Blue Streak, Black Arrow! we did have coolest space rocket names. Really irritating thing is that the original Euro rocket used Blue Streak tech and concorde was a british design, as was the bloody mirage! 😡

When it comes to Sat Comms and GPS we over rely on them far too much as either can be taken out quite easily or jammed by a foreign nation. I know it would be a bigger adversary but there is no political or human cost in war of popping sat’s outta the sky.

Back in the 80’s when running the normal big NATO Op’s some US commander came up with the idea of saying all our space assets have been taken out. The yanks dropped a brick and struggled to use the older kit, our blokes broke out the codebooks and got on with it, rerouting US traffic as well for the Op. It was obvious that the US stopped training their blokes how to use the older kit. One thing i know is it hacked the Royal Signals off to no end 😛

In my experience that was never hard, using the bendy stick thing on the top of the clansman for drying washing or digging **** out of your boots usually sent the sigs blokes purple….:D