Posts by SkippyBing 2364 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2008
CV-5 was the Yorktown, the previous Enterprise was CV-6, although they were sister ships. Yorktown was sunk at Midway however Enterprise survived the war with more battle honours than any other US carrier not being scrapped until 1958 by which time the decision had been made to name the current ship Enterprise.
In my defence I only learnt this when I got asked to make a 3D model of her...
I remember in my first year at University coming across some NASA papers in the library. Some researchers basically exposed a number of monkeys* to a vacuum to see what happened. They didn't look too impressed, the monkeys there weren't any pictures of the researchers, but they were alive enough to look unimpressed.
The time of useful consciousness is ~10 seconds at 40,000' and there's still an atmosphere there so without one it can't be long. Note holding your breath doesn't help as there's not enough pressure to keep what little oxygen there is at 40,000' in your blood.
*Could have been chimps, it's been a while.
That's not what they're saying, they're saying that theories that explain the universe by having it start with a Big Bang, Big Bang theories as opposed to say Steady State theories or religion, predict that dark matter will exist.
If they find dark matter where the theory says it should be then their theory isn't proved wrong.
Personally I feel it would be better for the money to have been left in my bank account to do with as I want rather than taken as tax to be frittered on a European vanity project. Incidentally money is 'lost' as you can't spend that £22 Billion on a GPS system and propping up Greece, it's one or the other.
Incidentally if we bowed to pressure to move frequency so it's easier for the US to jam the European signal without affecting theirs, you do realise it works the other way as well don't you? I'd imagine this would allow a choice of which system to use in a war zone and then denying the enemy the others. In a multi-national operation you'd want everyone on your side to be using the same system anyway, if only for synchronisation of time sensitive devices.
Really, I've never seen that mentioned in any of the literature, the satellite orbits aren't biased that way and it wouldn't be the most useful thing for the US military. Do you have a link to something detailing how that works?
Incidentally the US GPS system is called Navstar.
If it's that easy to get a photo of an eye, why didn't they just take one themselves? It'd be easier than trawling image libraries etc. to find one.
But obviously they wanted an image of a certain quality and impact and for that you have to pay.
That's because you get metric and imperial aircraft, depending on where and when they were built. They do however almost all measure their height in feet and altitude in flight levels which are based on hundreds of feet. As many news organisations (the BBC) have proved inept at converting the numbers they're given into the metric equivalent I'd rather be told the original number, rather than what the work experience lacky thinks 2500' equals.
Why would you convert 35000' to miles? Airliners tend to fly at intervals of 1000' making feet a perfectly sensible base unit for measuring height and altitudes in, flying at 6.628 miles and then climbing to 6.818 is just asking for trouble. The metric equivalent would be something like 10700m and 11000m, but there's a certain error with the conversion.
The fact is aircraft generally fly at heights and altitudes measured in feet (stand fast certain former and not so former communist states) so any reports about them will quote the height in feet as that's what the stick monkey will be reading off their instruments, any conversion is just going to introduce errors.
Partially true, planes above the transition altitude fly at flight levels based on the standard pressure setting to allow for coordination by ATC. Below the transition altitude they fly at heights above mean sea level measured in feet based on the regional pressure setting, that way you can plan your flight not to bang into that hill that's 1680' high which is quite tricky to do using flight levels.
What's the transition altitude I don't hear anyone ask, well in most of the UK it's 3000', around London it's 6000' as it is in Scotland where the hills are a bit higher. But then in the USA it's 18000' as some of the hills are really big and they wanted it standardised across the country. God knows what the rest of Europe uses but I think they're trying to standardise it a bit more.
It was in one of the Tom Clancy novels as well, the one where Japan tries to recreate the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by taking back Guam etc. after inevitable defeat at the hands of the US a JAL pilot flies his 747 into the Capitol where the US president is doing something in front of a big crowd.
If this planet is orbiting its host star in 18 hours how god damn fast is it going?! Is it fast enough to be affected by relativity, I mean GPS satellites are slightly so presumably it is?
I would try and work it out myself but the amount of swearing may give away the fact I'm not working...
Actually the unit to measure flight levels is defined by the air space the aircraft it's in, not where it's from, it tends to avoid the inevitable carnage of your system. I think China and the former Soviet Union are the only places to use metric flight levels and since 2011 Russia uses flight levels that are the equivalent of the Imperial ones, so they use 10350m which is 34000' or FL 340.
The aircraft themselves are free to measure altitude and flight levels in whatever manner they desire, but for certification purposes airliners have to have an altimeter that reads in feet or meters and I suspect the larger ones can display in either.
Bollocks. I have a night rating, it's Visual Flight Rules only, legally I cannot fly with reference solely to instruments.
You don't appear to know a lot about how the eye adapts to darkness either, suffice to say it's a protracted sequence of events that are all too easily reset by bright lights. At which point it doesn't matter if you're flying by looking out the windows or looking at the instruments as you won't see either, does this mean you'll crash? Not necessarily but it does raise the odds somewhat.
Still I don't live near a major airport so it's your problem not mine.
Re the aiming problem, the speed is only a problem if you're standing directly to the side of the approach path, if you're standing head on the aiming problem is much simpler as the aircraft is pretty much on a constant bearing, it's just getting bigger.
I do know some people who's aircraft was hit by a green laser, the lesson for the people on the ground was don't point bright lights at a military helicopter as they'll be able to pass your exact position to the police very quickly and you'll get arrested. On the flip side green lasers and NVGs do not mix.
Can I patent making a mobile phone out of carbon fibre? I mean just to get in before Apple do the blindingly fucking obvious.
Also, diamond, bamboo, oak, cedar, MDF, acrylic, slate, paper mache, tungsten, titanium, aluminum, aluminium, unobtanium and ice. Oh and the skin of Steve Jobs. What? Too soon?
No it isn't, unless you're planning on the sort of proximity and manoeuvres the Red Arrows display which due to the amount of turbulence you'd experience you wouldn't be. A few airliners heading across the Atlantic with minimal heading, height and speed corrections would be easy, and allow fuel savings as demonstrated by NASA a few years back.
Disclaimer, I've flown formation in aircraft less manoeuvrable than a fighter, I've even done it in helicopters which is the opposite of exciting.
I believe the major problem with the flying wing design is getting people off inside the time limit required by the regulators, there's far more volume per unit surface area than there is with a tube making it hard to fit in enough doors.
The major advantage with having the engine hanging off the front of the wing is that it counteracts the aerodynamic twisting moment. Without the engine there you'd have to build a stronger, heavier wing leading to increased fuel costs etc.
Plus it'd be pretty tricky fitting a Trent 800 or similar high bypass engine into the wing root these days, never mind two of them.
You don't understand what that means do you? Although weirdly you do describe it perfectly well...
Incidentally, I live in a town, on a good day I can get exactly 1 radio station on my DAB radio, on a bad day I get fewer. It is now permanently on FM because quite frankly I have better things to do than piss around with something that works worse than the thing it's supposed to replace. It's like the Swordfish and the Albacore all over again...
Not if they've got any sense. Incidentally I have firm evidence that English is descended from the language of the Carib people and merely need a trivial amount of funding to finalise my research through some field work in their ancient homelands...
Evolve or die, much as I'd like to I can't afford to subsidise their working practices if they don't suit me, and to be honest if I'm not in for parcel deliveries because I'm at work I probably can't go to the shops either.
Radical thought, why don't they open when most of the people with money aren't busy earning it?
Well at the moment they get killed a few days after hatching so it'd certainly increase their lifespans.
As for the difference between young pretty women and masturbating men, you'll probably find it's not possible to make a living as the latter because not many people will pay to watch it.
Men only capable of random thuggery? I believe boxing and professional football take care of that.
There's a difference between people being exploited and a gap in the market being exploited. Which you partially admit in your last sentence.
That may be a slight over reaction, there was no racism in the previous post merely some statements of fact, i.e the Indian government has decided to spend some of its money on a space program rather than a sanitation program. That's its prerogative, it's just a bit galling when your own country is funding the sanitation program instead and you haven't even got a space program.
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