Perhaps, but posturing to what end?

Hell let them go. Why should we give in to blackmail just so they can incorporate our best stealth technology into their industrial base and use it to compete with us?

What are you ranting on about?

This is about software, not stealth technology.

Why wouldn’t the UK want the plane they have agreed to pay for, rather than some cut-down monkey model? Their position seems perfectly reasonable to me.

If you bought a car and paid for a bunch of optional extras, and then found out it was going to be delivered without them, wouldn’t you be pissed?

I’m skeptical.

Take night vision goggles for instance. They amplify low light, but if they’re suddenly hit with a high-intensity flash (e.g. from an explosion), they’ll cut out before anything (including your eyes) is damaged. Those audio amplifiers that you see in spy movies have a similar safety feature.

I can’t imagine they couldn’t include something like this in a multimillion dollar uber-jet like the F-22.

In practice, however, the trend is very different, with the number of women interested in applying for the course dropping.

The commander of the air force’s flying school, Colonel Adi Shaham, said this week that he believed the reason for the decline was a sharp drop in motivation among female inductees.

So they’re not applying because they don’t want to? Not much of an explanation …

1) Get a huge ship on the high seas with around 40-50 powerful boeing 747 type engines
2) Point all the exhausts up and turn on the engines at max

3) Watch the ship shoot straight to the bottom.

Storm Shadow’s on the inboard pylons might look a little strange but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Those inboard pylons will be able to handle the weight of a Storm Shadow (about 1300kg).

How much of that 1300kg is explosives (and, for context, how much of a 2,000lb LGB is explosives)?

It bugs me that they decided not to take the radars from the Sea Harriers and put them in the Gr.9s … until the F35 comes along our carrier capability is severely reduced.