So.. these are economic migrants we want? Not ones who work and pay taxes in their thousands but a handful who do neither and put house ownership out of reach of our children?

It’s like when the multinational banks (or Phil Collins) threatened to leave. A lot of people said ‘bye then’.

I agree that would affect the tax take, but in a miniscule way, as they only pay tacitly agreed token amounts now. Renegotiating these amounts upwards and enforcing payment would possibly net more – it has to be worth a try.

Well they do pay taxes, just not as high a rate as you would like, but even at the low rate, they still pay as much tax as maybe 10,000 average income workers and pay a lot in indirect taxes, whilst buying things that keep the economy going, e.g. when they buy a superyacht made at Devonport. They often also keep people here employed, like the guy who owns Tata. And these particular folk only put houses out of reach of your children, if your children were aiming for £350m homes in Kensington Palace Gardens and Regent’s Park. As an aside, it’s often criminal money laundering that puts London property prices out of reach. Empty properties rented from overseas.

But those same people would complain when their taxes went up to compensate.

Or more businesses might just use the Ireland loophole, or set up somewhere else. This is the problem and why the solution lies beyond the reach of national government. It’s not a problem you can fix without controlling tax everywhere on the planet.

Well I’m all ears Merc, can’t wait to see these multi-spectral, holographic flares. It’s a wonder these idiots are wasting their time developing DIRCM systems.

Well 0.0001m^2 is the kind of RCS we’re talking about here and the old covers-all classified excuse. A target vehicle that’s more classified than front line stealth fighters and bombers.

“If you know the design approach the other side takes.” Which you don’t and we’re also talking about the threats themselves, not the missile seekers, e.g. RCS, ECM. Claiming to know what the other side has is one thing, claiming to know how and what they’ll next develop seems more like something from Minority Report than an exact science.

Well I’d love to know how a grey-scale image of an aircraft can be mistaken for a ball of light. Sounds like the problem there is some very, very limited software behind the seeker that isn’t bothering to tell the seeker to make an extremely obvious and easy discrimination. By extension of this phenomenon, maybe bunkers should deploy flares so they can cause the DSMAC system on cruise missiles to fail.

Don’t suppose you have a picture of this 0.0001m^2 RCS target vehicle with advanced ECM.

Well that’s all very well if you’ve actually encountered a given system being used in anger in combat, but sadly the threats being modelled here haven’t even finished development.

Maybe a better policy would be proper enforcement?

It might be easier if you hadn’t been to school with them, who knows?

The problem is simply that the top 5%, for the most part, can choose not to pay taxes here at all if they think they’re too high. Indeed, many of the mega-rich in London are only there because of the low taxes. At least 3 Indians in the UK top 10 richest, several Russians in the Top 10-20 etc. The fact is that with higher taxes, they might well not be there and then the tax intake from them is zero rather than something, which is worse not better. The better way of actually balancing the rich poor divide in our country is arguably import tariffs, at least that way you’re forcing mega-rich people who hire low income labour in other countries for the privilege of selling at higher prices in the UK market and at the same time encouraging more jobs to remain in the UK.

BM, I do agree that there needs to be change in our political system. We need to get to grips once and for all with benefits, with the low paid, with the education system and with the NHS. Proper boundaries, if that is the word, need to be set, to determine how we target help to those most in need.

Arguably mandating workplace life insurance/healthcare instead of workplace pensions would have been more effective, at least for the larger companies. That would have taken a lot of the burden off the NHS altogether whilst they still received the same amount of money for looking after everybody else.

So basically, sometimes brain surgeons make mistakes, therefor you are just as qualified at brain surgery as a brain surgeon, right?

Perhaps if a brain surgeon went against a trend that had proved true over more than a century of brain surgery then people would question them too. I definitely see a benefit in MDSM for shooting down incoming missiles, but in terms of achieving actual kills, my money would be on missiles with more energy, especially when not all shots are frontal hemisphere.

But the rotary launcher idea and folding fins seems like a good idea for either weapon. Draw a rectangle width-ways, now draw another larger rectangle around it. Shade in the area in between. That is what my proposed rotary launcher would look like from the side. The top rung would attach at the top of the bay, the bottom rung would be rotated by motors powered by cable embedded in the frame, with the sides of the rectangle running down the front and rear of the bay. The folding fin missiles would be 200mm in total effective diameter, including folded fins. One missile would go above the rotating rung, one below and one at either side, with possibly a 5th on the separate door mount. The same arrangement could also accommodate 10 SDBs/SPEARs or 10 folding fin MSDMs/Brimstones/JAGMs. This would allow a total internal load of 10 Meteors/T-3s or 20 SDBs/SPEARs/MSDMs/Brimstones/JAGMs or a 6+8 mixed load of the aforementioned, which would be enough to bring down an entire crapstorm on an enemy air defence.

They are fully informed on the state of the art in electronics, low-observable technologies, missile components etc because the same broader organization that funds them or decides these things is also heavily invested in these very areas and diciplines. So yeah, please excuse myself and others that may pay slightly more attention to what they may be cooking up in their labs compared to what you may think.

AFRL’s munition directorate would be just about the most well informed organization in the US when it comes to matters concerning munition technologies, and AFRL entire focus is on investing in S&T and R&D on matters covering pretty much the entire gamut of air-combat. That is the scope of where they are coming from. What about you?

You on the other hand are yet to prove that you have access to anything beyond what is available for free on the internet. The very fact that you can’t seem to tell the difference suggests that you have no expertise in this matter unlike the folks that actually work on these things.

So were the people who made bad assumptions in the past.

Apples and Oranges. As I have explained earlier, analysis feeds decisions which then escalate to more robust and substantial S&T and R&D efforts. This all started in the conceptual phase and then matured to something that was promising enough to invest in both by missile OEMs interested in developing capability in anticipation of an eventual need, and by the research organizations tasked with pursuing promising future technologies.

This is what has happened here. On the flip side, we simply have a couple of pages of you thinking out loud which you insist is at par with the analysis and research work done by the likes of AFRL, RTN or LMMFC.

Not apples and oranges at all. The people who made bad assumptions in the past also did all that, especially DERA with JOUST. The range of air combat kills has been increasing consistently since the start of air combat. Misses (excluding mistake launches) have predominantly been due to out of envelope firings against aircraft that had sufficient energy to evade the missile. Plenty of kills were also down to indirect hits (blast frag). Seeing and knowing all this, I’m reluctant to place much credence in what somebody fed into a computer somewhere, especially if the conclusions depart from historical trends.

Seriously though, this is the sort of thing kids say in freshman level literature classes. “I have an opinion too, my opinion is just as valid as ____ literary great.”

The people who design missiles for a living have vastly greater resources and knowledge than you do and don’t base their opinions on vague feelings. They will do detailed trade studies on cost, weight, power, space, cooling, center of gravity, etc etc, against desired performance metrics for range, speed, maneuverability, etc.

Literary greats were once Freshmen too and a great physicist once flunked the entrance exam to Zurich.

Where do the desired metrics for range, speed and manoeuvrability come from? To me the ‘metrics’ behind Cuda and co. seem to stem mainly from the dimensions of the F-35’s bays rather than any thorough attempt to assess future air combat, except they’re choosing a more complicated way to address the issue that may actually impede air combat success. The simple solution is to realise that non-retractable fins make a 180mm diameter missile 540mm in effective diameter and that’s what’s taking up the space. Realise that and you don’t even need a fancy layout for 6 AAMs, you can put 2 AAMs next to each other at the top of the bay. Then realise that you’re only using the bay’s width, not its height, apply a rotary launcher and you can fit 4 missiles on the launcher and possibly even one on the door. Fins just aren’t efficient for internal stowage, which is why folding fin missiles have been around donkeys’ years in VLS and tube launch applications but until recently, aircraft have always carried AAMs externally, so nobody has bothered.

Wait, are you comparing your assumptions to simulation and modeling of resource rich OEM’s, and Air Forces that have followed a process analysis to derive to a particular decision whether to support a particular effort?

Assumptions are assumptions, whoever comes up with them.

Problem is that there are no companies designing those missiles and trying to cram 8 Meteors on an F-35. I’d be glad to be proven wrong though. Do share.

Doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Folding fins and coat-hanger style rotary launchers.

And we know the credentials of missile design teams and manufacturers and the services that fund them. How do yours compare to them?

Often better and with zero financial bias.

So what you have are then two contradictory cases, Pepper vs Hart – a trivial matter on whether a teacher should pay tax on the perk of reduced school fees-, and Davis vs Johnson – a matter concerning domestic violence -. On the more serious matter, purposive interpretation was refused. The Pepper vs Hart case also post-dates joining the EU (1992), so this was effectively the ECJ taking effect, because judges knew the matter could be appealed successfully at the ECJ. Also, one person’s statement on purpose in Hansard does not a purpose make.