What a hideously complex arrangement that engine is – 3 crankshafts and pistons flying every which way. Horrible waste of space in the middle too. I doubt it if helped with cooling.

Can someone explain (in laymans terms) what advantages the Deltic held?

£1.36m

I’ll take 2, do they accept housing benefit cheques?

Okay, but you say “in the bus stop”. I don’t know the bus stop, it is just that if you were inside it, it might have a glass or perspex roof or sides, and these would probably affect the focusing system on your camera. Some auto focussing systems cannot see through solid objects, no matter how transparent they are.

for a SIM perhaps

Speaking of which, what will happen to pukka Harrier sims when they are finally retired. If it were possible, one set up for public use would be awesome.

The Fuji S range of cameras have 10x optical zooms – the S9500 might be what you’re looking for.

Or there is the Samsung Digimax Pro 815 with a 15x optical zoom – a little bit more expensive, but worth looking at.

Am I right in believing the back end flies, when the run is long enough?

I’ve been seeing a lot arguments recently for using a good quality prosumer type digital camera, and not a dSLR.

The problem with DSLRs is that the sensor is exposed to the elements every time you change the lens, and this can have a detrimental effect, or two.

A high quality prosumer which incorporates manual focus and a decent quality zoom lens built in should be a more ideal solution because it is fully enclosed. Sadly, I don’t know of one which entirely fits this description – the closest is probably the Fuji S9500 – which uses a fly-by-wire focussing ring around the lens!

Such a camera would also need a decent quality sensor, macro function, teleconverter and wide angle lenses too, to increase it’s flexibility. Although, of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have different cameras optimised for a particular role. They could be much smaller.

I saw someone using that yesterday, thought it was commercial software – looked good. I’ll find the link and post it. (Picasa, I mean.)

Here we are:

http://picasa.google.co.uk/