Maybe they’re some obscure form, to us, of interstellar planning notices. Perhaps the Vogons are building the Hyperspace By-pass after all, I’d better go up to Sainsburies and get some peanuts, cans of bitter and hope that Ford Prefect turns up pretty quickly.

It’s not the Vogons, it’s the Thone. Do let us know if you see any errant seaweed in your parts 😀

might go trawl through it now for giggles.

That’s about all it’s good for. Any site that gives Bob Lazar a place to rant about aliens in the Nevada desert has serious issues :rolleyes:

As of right now no NEW Tu-160 airframes have been made. There is a lot of talk about it… but for now its all about refurbishing old frames.

That’s not necessarily true, they did complete an airframe that was on the production line at Kazan, and there are still two more to be finished. Technically, since they were never completed, they are in fact new build jets.

Also, the Russian Knights only got six of the Su-27M/Su-35s, not twelve. Apparently the idea was to use them because they had IFR capability and could move about the globe easier. In the end, the last I heard was that they were being cannibalized for spares to some degree and are basically now unflyable.

Regarding the Su-35s, there were 15 jets. Three “pre-production” jets that were at Akhtubinsk/Lipetsk and the 12 jet test fleet. Out of those twelve, one crashed (711), at least one is actively used as a testbed (710), and one was sent to Monino (701). The Russian Knights got two of the test jets and the three “pre-production” birds.

No it failed your fanboy test, you fantasised that Russian SLBM’s were better than Trident, that is not the reality. Not only does Trident D5 better every in service Russian SLBM is every single performance parametre but it is also a more compact missile. Your fanboy brain can not accept this so you keep making pointless posts.

More compact? Irrelevant. Look at the SS-N-20. Why should Russia bother to undertake a complicated, lengthy, and expensive campaign to make the missile smaller when the Typhoon sub, due to the nature of under-ice operations, was going to be freaking enormous? Being shorter ranged wasn’t a disadvantage either, given that it was not being used as a counterforce weapon to strike hardened silos. They had the SS-18 to be used as a hard-target killer for counterforce strike. No need to make an SLBM for the same role, and if the SS-N-20 didn’t have to fill the job that doesn’t make it “inferior”. Truth be told the D5 was a different class of weapon system, and comparing it to Soviet and Russian SLBMs is a wasted effort as they were intended for different roles. Ergo, again, on the whole, the nuclear arsenals were technologically on par with each other, once you look at the overall capabilities each one possessed. The only advantage the USA had was when the B-2 came into being. The Soviets/Russians had nothing remotely capable of deep interdiction as they had no LO platforms. But remove the manned bombers from the equation, and you’re back to overall technical parity.

Watched a few movies today. First up was Hitman (blu-ray). I thought it was pretty good. Didn’t really relate to the game so much, but it was still a unique and interesting film. Then, I decided to really test out the upconversion on the Blu-ray player. Threw in a copy of 1996’s Screamers, one of my all-time favorite films. I was really impressed, you’d have thought you were watching a high-definition film. There was very little noise in the picture (a common issue with upconverting older DVDs) and the level of detail that the Blu-ray player brought out was really suprising. Had I known it would be this good, I would’ve gotten a Blu-ray player a while ago. It really is worth the investment for that feature alone, I think.

Oh yeah, also watched Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie. We got it for Alex for Easter (he actually sat through the entire thing, which is rare) and it was really pretty good. Matthew Broderick, Patrick Warburton, Chris Rock, and John Goodman were great additions to the voice cast. A really enjoyable and hilarious film.

But rather unfortunately all Americans think, technology and economics is the complete
equation, which makes them feel that they are above everything else, which is in essence a “cultural schizophrenia,”

I’m an American, and I just told you that technology isn’t the whole picture 😀

Does your,or any,new Blu-Ray player upscale ordinary discs?

It does upscale normal DVDs, and does a pretty freaking good job of it, too. As far as I can tell, all blu-ray players will do that. Just make sure you get one with a LAN jack in the back or you’ll have problems in a few months!

The Mist-based on a Stephen King mini story.

I saw a commercial on TV advertising the DVD release, they showed a lot more of the badness going on and I have to say it looked pretty good. I’m not a King fan, but this is one I will definitely pick up. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be coming out on HD-DVD (yes, they are still releasing those) or Blu-ray.

I sat down and watched Will Smith in I Am Legend (blu-ray) tonight. Now, I never read the book, nor did I see the old adaptation, so I had no preconceived notions of what I should’ve seen. What I did see (in really awesome clarity I might add) was yet another flawless performance from Will Smith in a really good movie. The flashback sequences were done really well, telling the story of how New York came to be a wasteland. This was just a really, really good movie I thought.

Aliens – what more can I say?

You could say…second greatest movie ever (behind Predator)? 😀

1, The purchase, operation and maintenance of an aux steam plant. Remember this will have to be fired off the vessels dieso bunkers, reducing endurance as compared to STOVL CVF, and the plant will have to be kept at full operations output 24/7.

Can picture the scene as Wings has to try to explain to the captain that he’s sorry but no aircraft can be launched as the boilers haven’t got sufficient head up yet – as the Sukhois come barrelling in!. Remember this IS NOT like the cat ops on a US CVN – they have plenty of steam budget at all times thanks to the kettles back aft – CVF/PA2 are going to be vastly different animals.

You don’t have to have a CVN to have continuous access to steam for your cats, the USN used non-nuke flattops and did just fine.

1 There’s between 6400 and 8500 S-300V/PMU-2, and 1 Battery (32 missiles) of the S-300PMU-3 AKA (S-400) Who many missiles does Ageis/Thaad/Pac-3 have deployed, are they spred out across U.S.A protecting the homeland against incoming ICBM’s?:confused:

1. It’s S-300PM-3, PMU-3 would have been the export variant. And it ceased being the PM-3 when they rolled the 400-km missile into it from the S-350 and made the S-400.

2. Very few systems are actually deployed to defend the US mainland. Apart from a bunch of PATRIOT batteries at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the GBI silos in Alaska, I can’t think of any other stateside defensive weapons. AEGIS ships could be deployed along the coastlines, but they aren’t right now. THAAD is a theater asset to be deployed overseas to defend military forces, same for PAC-3 ERINT.