I doubt there would be a weight saving.

Dude, you should have said so before! Man, those guys are going to be pissed when they find out that they totally failed to achieve the goal that started the whole project in the first place!

ZU-BOI stars in Hollywood production
ATE helicopter selected for Hollywood production due for release this year.

ATE was approached by a major film company for the participation of its Hind helicopter in a film production. Filming took place on the tropical East coast of South Africa in the Port Edward region.
ZU-BOI, which is the only Hind helicopter in the world owned by a private company, was flown to Port Edward in December 2005 for three days for the initial preparation prior to the start of filming.

Anyone know what film this is?

In what ways would an all-new design improve upon the Longbow? You can be sure that if the UK had embarked on a unilateral attack helicopter project there would be even more people questioning whether the market really needed yet another design, and asking why don’t they just buy off-the-shelf, or at the very least cooperate with other countries to produce it?

And AFAIK the reason the Apaches were put into storage was because of pilot shortages, not because of inherent design flaws.

Are there any GR9/9As yet? If so, why aren’t they in Afghanistan?

Excellent point about the helos. That is getting scary. BTW where is the UK’s Apache? It is a very useful asset in Afghanistan.

Yes, I would also like the answer to this question …

Not so much that you would notice… in the 1-2 seconds it would take for the gravel to travel through our atmosphere how much gravel would be turned into ash?

1-2 seconds? Where do you get that from? And please don’t quote the speed of impact, the faster the gravel enters the atmosphere, the more likely it will shatter and break up further.

Underground nuclear explosions rarely create gravel pits. A large Sphere is vapourised… and area outside that is turned into a type of glass, and outside that there are major cracks but the size of the weapon required to actually blow apart a very large lump of rock is enormous and far beyond what we can currently make.

That’s because it’s in the ground, the surrounding PLANET contains the explosion. An asteroid will not have such mass.

At 60km per second… no it doesn’t. The energy released will be the same… hardness has very little to do with the energy released, though it effects the depth of penetration… that will mean little to those on Earth at the time of impact..

The energy will not be the same. Many asteroids are low density ice – snow in other words – meaning the mass is lower, thus the kinetic energy is lower. Snow is also more likely to disintegrate and break up on impact with the atmosphere compared to iron. Depending on the size of the asteroid, it could mean a lot to those in Earth at the time of impact.

Something else intelligent people with knowledge of Newton’s laws of motion, the inverse square law and other basic laws of physics seem to have problems with… objects from space can be moving from 30km/s to more than 60km/s. We can’t even make bunker busters to take out deeply buried bunkers… does there exist a nuclear warhead that can survive a collision at well over 40km/s (target speed plus the speed required to leave earths orbit) and penetrate several hundred metres of an unknown material that could be iron or could be ice and detonate at exactly the right time?

As Charles Babbage said, I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The main problem with coal-to-liquids (coal gasification followed by Fischer-Tropsh synthesis) is that the process releases huge amounts of CO2. In fact about half of the carbon in the coal ends as CO2.

A rather unsurprising outcome, since coal contains way more carbon than fuel. It’s got to go somewhere.

Against most asteroids worth firing something at to stop it a big nuke probably wouldn’t be too much use. Blast waves in space are nonexistant… a nuke generates a lot of heat and concentrated energy in space but its blast effect is pathetic. A lot also depends upon the material the rock is made from… a perfect hit with a powerful nuke that burys itself to the core of the object might just turn it to gravel but not have the energy to disipate that gravel. At 60km/s it is mass times velocity that converts the energy… a trillion tons of gravel, a trillion tons of pure iron, a trillion tons of ice cream… they would all explode with very similar force on impact with the earth.

If a nuke has a poor blast wave in space, it’s because of the lack of matter through which it can propagate. Since asteroids are made of matter, a direct hit will produce a fine blast wave through the asteroid itself. As long as it’s turned to gravel, the massive increase in surface area to volume ratio will mean it will burn up in the atmosphere, trillion tons or not.