COME ON ENGLAND COME ON ENGLAND COME ON ENGLAND COME ON ENGLAND………

Bahh, you’re all thinking you’re already in the semifinals or finals, we’ll see in a few hours time who’ll be laughing 😀

I’d love to see the goalkeeper Ricardo score you the winning penalty kick again 😀

Carlo Kopp Who`s that?? Sounds like a fake name from a movie?

He’s an australian defence journalist/analyst who has an unhealthy obsession (to put it mildly :)) with the F-111, and barring that, the F-22. The way he writes it is almost like if it wasn’t for the F-111 during all these years Australia would’ve already been invaded by Indonesia and China, and the same is bound to happen in the future if they retire the F-111 and don’t replace it with the F-22.

Apart from that, some of his more technical articles (like on missiles) articles seem pretty good.

Shadow1, they are not primma donnas, they just know how to take full advantage of the game, especially the deficiencies in the refereing system ( I think another referee is needed, and also tv recordings should be used to evaluate the more polemic plays).

Shevshenko overrated ? Nahh, he’s probably the best striker out there at the moment, look at what he has done in all those years in AC Milan 🙂

Dude it’s the italians what were you expecting ?

They defend the whole game and then score the winning goal with a dubious penalty in injury time. What better way to describe italian football ? 🙂

The order is valued at roughly 1,5 billion dollar

US or australian dollars ?

I’ve seen a lot of confusion generated on other cases because of this 🙂

I agree 100% on the bridge. It’s the loadout that impresses me. 104 Talos and 84 Tartar. And yes the other is a Virginia class CGN. IMO the one they should have built Aegis on but it seems the Spruance hull was the more economical choice. Aegis AND nuclear power was apparently too many $$$$.

And the original Baltimore class had such fine lines…

And yeah that loadout is quite impressive. It took a ship as big as that to carry so many missiles 🙂

Speaking of WWII ships, I’ve always been partial to HMS Warspite.

Not only she has the classical lines of a battleship, but her history in both WWI and WWII is impressive.

I doubt many big ships saw so much action…

from http://www.vectorsite.net/avmirf1.html

“One of the interesting footnotes of the Mirage F1 story was that in the 1970s one was built with the SNECMA M53 afterburning bypass turbojet, with 83.4 kN (8,500 kgp / 18,740 lbf) afterburning thrust. Fit of the M53 demanded structural changes, larger inlets, and heftier landing gear. The external appearance was generally the same, though the fuselage was stretched by 23 centimeters (9 inches) and empty weight increased by a little over 8%. It was originally designated “Mirage F1E” until that designation was passed off to the export multirole variant (discussed below) and then “Mirage F1.M53”. Initial flight of the one-off machine was on 22 December 1974.

The Mirage F1.M53 may have originally been simply an engine testbed, but it seen as a possible contender for a requirement that had been issued by a number of Western European nations to obtain a replacement for the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, then in widespread service but facing obsolescence. However, this “deal of the century” was snagged by the General Dynamics F-16, and work on a second Mirage F1.M53 prototype, which was to be fitted with full multirole combat avionics kit, was abandoned. The M53 was used in the Dassault Mirage 2000 second-generation delta fighter series.”

At the moment the FAP F-16 fleet consists of :

-19 F-16 OCU flying ( out of 20 original,, 1 fell some years ago), which were bought new in 1993

-25 F-16A bought second hand to upgrade to MLU pattern in 2000 I believe ( plus 5 for spares). Since then the program has evolved at a snail’s pace, so at the moment only 4 of these are flying, and 3 of them are undergoing modifications. The rest of them are still in crates.

Reportedly 40 MLU kits were bought, as the original plans called for upgrading the whole 2 fleets.

The main problem is, as always, money. FAP already had problems in manning just the original 20-aircraft strong fleet, due to lots of pilots contantly leaving for the civilian sector. When they started the whole 2nd fleet/MLU program it was hoped that knews how to sort things out in the future with the doubling of the # of acft, but the problems and delays surrounding the program since then suggest ( at least to me) that the process was poorly-thought of.

Some reports in the press say it will be the OCUs to be sold after upgrading, other that it will be the A/Bs ( Peace Atlantis II), so things are very shady at the moment. Still, the plan is to upgrade all of them.

As the first batch has suffered some structural strengthning, their expected lifetime is bigger.