I recorded hundreds of voiceovers with Phil over the last twenty-odd years – up until just a few weeks ago. Genuinely good bloke who relished the daftness of what he did for a living.

Some nice footage….

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/36058154

Though as mentioned above – they do seem a bit too large and obvious to have been exactly “lost” all these years

I think if you consider projects like the HAV above, or designs like the Skylon straight-to-orbit spaceplane and Sabre air-breathing engine – not to mention companies like Rolls Royce of course: then the British aircraft industry is as innovative and world-class as ever. It is that word “manufacturing” in the thread title that’s the problem – and as Beermat says above you could probably apply that to the majority of British industry over the last fifty years. Lack of investment, politics, uncompetitiveness… same old same old.

Clutching at straws is part of the fun..!

There must be some reason behind it being originally identified as Do17 though- or at broadest I suppose “a German aircraft”, whether it’s correct or not. From joeslacks description it’s obviously not directly from a crash site: I wonder what crashes occurred in the slightly wider area.

Like pogno – I was wondering if it is actually symmetrical: could just be the angle, but the curve seems shallower on the left of the photo. I would imagine the dark material is probably dirt from it’s greenhouse years. The “wire” too looks like something horticultural: I was also wondering if the lower layer of plastic visible in the larger broken area is actually some sort of later patch – though the damage does look consistent with the upper layer.

I think the P also had straight edges at the bottom… see attached image from the same site mentioned above

[ATTACH=CONFIG]244117[/ATTACH]

wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Well the figures are notoriously flexible, but I think the UK Government currently says the total cost of replacing Trident is up to £25billion total. Critics say it’s anything up to £100billion total over a 40 year lifespan.

Annual US military budget around $600billion…. China around $200billion annually.

So even if it cost £200billion over 40 years, I can’t see that scrapping Trident buys enough extra conventional capability to make much of a difference.

Especially as all that expensive new hardware would be easily wiped out by a couple of well-aimed Pakistani nukes :).

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Hmmmm… I’m not sure that any nuclear attack – however small could be considered “trifling”!
And take a look at the attached image from a cold-war Soviet bunker. There’s some familiar-looking aircraft on there that seem to suggest the Soviets didn’t consider the risk of a UK attack entirely “trifling”

[ATTACH=CONFIG]244058[/ATTACH]

I’m confused by your argument: You say Britain only had nuclear weapons to “keep us a player on the global stage” – but deny that they offer the UK “an outsized role on the global stage”. What’s the difference?

You also talk about nuclear weapons being useful for weaker states who can’t guarantee security by conventional means”.. well wouldn’t that also apply to the UK or France just as much as to North Korea, or indeed any smaller nuclear-armed state potentially facing the conventional forces of America, Russia or China? Once again – it’s the whole argument of deterrence.

As you say yourself,”no one has ever threatened the survival of a nuclear-armed nation” So doesn’t that alone justify having them?!