One for Fade and Smerf

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As a Brit, I take a great deal of pride in the superior build quality of all our products.  No doubt the engines in this submarine were built to the highest standards by a team of dedicated engineers, probably fresh from the Land Rover production line...

:lol:

In all seriousness, I hope those poor sailors are rescued quickly.  A submarine is never a nice thing to be in when drifting about on the surface, let alone in a 35mph gale.  

If I were the captain of said sub, I think I'd be stripping down the gearbox, just to make sure no-one's filled it with sawdust prior to sale.  

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Yeah, it was advertised as "Low mileage, one careful lady non-smoking owner. Full service history".

A man wearing a sheepskin coat said to be a representative of "Honest Arthur's Second Hand Naval Vessels" was unavailable for comment.

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We have a proud tradition of third rate lashups when it comes to the military?

Remember the Tornado F3s that were still awaiting a radar when they entered service?  They were patrolling Britain's skies with a nosecone containing a concrete weight and paired with a Tornado equipped with a working radar.

Then there were the Phantom jets we bought from the Americans, insisting that they had to be fitted with Rolls Royce engines to guarantee British jobs.  Turned out we had to redesign the whole rear end of the plane to make them fit (the Rolls Royce Spey was designed for airliners, not fighters) and the resulting drag made British Phantoms slower and thirstier than everyone elses.

We equip our soldiers with boots that melt in the desert, fought the first Gulf war in European camo because we'd just sold our desert camo to the Iraqis...

And best of all, we're STILL at it.

In order to save a couple of million, British Eurofighters have had their cannon armament deleted.  However, the costs of removing the weapons are higher than leaving them be, so the guns are simply "deactivated".  In English, it means that there's no ammo for them...

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odin wrote:
Concrete nosecone? :roflmao: :crazy: *cuckoo* *cuckoo*

Can you imagine the fear etched on the faces of Soviet pilots being confronted with a flying patio?  

Are those Typhoon/Eurofighter things already in service? Oh well, it seems the JSF is going to be a major {bleep}-up too, and the Dutch government insists on participating :roll:

They're "currently entering service" which means they'll be slowly coming in over the next ten years or so (from the projected 2000 in service date).  We're also on board with JSF too, to equip our forthcoming aircraft carriers (which no doubt will be redesigned, and re-redesigned to cut costs), but the JSF has been on the pies since it's debut and is desperately shedding weight...  An in service date eight years from now seems wildly optimistic, especially considering the F22 took twelve years from first flight to being in service.  

. And the idiotic defenseminister we have now wants to Purchace Tomahawks. I mean, wtf?

Ah!  Nice to see that putting cretins in charge of defence policy isn't a wholly British phenomena!  

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bloodline wrote:

You've can of worms there!! Remember that the Phantoms were to replace the Buccaneer because it was old and sucked... And the Buccanners were given to the RAF who were still wating for the F-111 (the promise of an early delivery, caused the cancellation of the superior TSR-2 project)... Since the F-111 never materialised on time or at the promised price, the Buccaneers got new engines (The Spey?) and then proved to be rather good (but not as good as a TSR-2), and stayed in service until 10 years ago...

Yeah, the TSR2 was suddenly cancelled in 1965 with no warning, courtesy of the then Labour government.  Prototypes were to be immediately scrapped and design work was to be immediately destroyed.  At the same time Britain was negotiating for a substantial loan from the IMF.  The US threatened to veto the loan unless we bought American (the F111) and promised not to sell TSR2 to anyone.

Over in Germany, the Luftwaffe were quite excited by the Lightning project as they needed a short range, high performance interceptor.  BAC would have supplied the Germans a large number of Lightnings (still one of the fastest jets ever in service), which would in turn lead to further orders from other NATO countries.  

Luftwaffe staff were surprised when after being impressed by one British delegation selling the Lightning, another turned up to beg the Luftwaffe NOT to buy it!  Turned out the Americans didn't like us competing with the F104 Starfighter and put more financial pressure on us not to sell.

The Luftwaffe eventually settled for Starfighters, as did the Italians, Greeks, Turks, Spanish, Danish and Norwegians.

You want F*** Ups The MOD have got a whole history of them...

At least the Nimrod is pretty... well before they shoe horned in a radar system that was twice the size of the airframe... :roll:

Not just the MOD, we have had a fine tradition in employing gloriously inept beaurocrats too.

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bloodline wrote:

Hahahaha, that's right I had forgotten about that one... I was speaking with a Luftwaffe officer in...  he told me about the Starfighters which the Germans bought and then found were totally unsuitable for any role the Luftwaffe could find :lol:

Which is why a Mach 2 high altitude interceptor carried anti-ship missiles while in Luftwaffe service.

Don't forget the Americans pulled the same trick on Canada, where Avro (of Canada) was developing a new fighter/bomber for a similar role to the TSR2, called the Arrow... but the Americans told them to stop and buy the F-111... that was the end of Avro :-(

The Arrow was at least 10 - 15 years ahead of it's time.  Ultimately, it left Canada without a decent interceptor until they took delivery of the F18 in the 1980s.  As we all know, the only foreign customer for the F111 was Australia - who were a dead cert for either the TSR2 or the Buccaneer.

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bloodline wrote:
Anyway the USAF guys were saying how they were amazed at the Buccanner... it was 40 years old, or something stupid, during the Gulf conflict and the Americans found the idea of using a very old carrier fighter as a laser guided bomber for low level work in a desert hillarious... until it out performed all their aircraft :lol:

Yeah, they were equally suprised by our Lightnings.  One managed to claim the 0 - 50,000 feet altitude record from a specially modified F15 "Streak Eagle" during the 70s.  The Lightning in question was a T5 training aircraft (albeit "slightly" modified...).

During NATO exercises in the 1960s a pilot of a U2 flying at 70,000 feet was told he'd been claimed as a "kill" by the opposing RAF contingent.  The pilot expressed disbelief until a Lightning cruised past at an altitude supposedly beyond reach of any known interceptor.  

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bloodline wrote:

Yeah, but then the Lighting was just a Couple of Jet engines... with a man on top :-D

I only ever got to see lightingings fly when I was a little boy during the 80's :-( I can remember them being LOUD...

Haha!  My old chap actually designed bits of them way back when.  As an interceptor they were compromised, with an armament of two short range missiles (the MOD rejected a BAe bid to equip Lightnings with Sidewinders) and sometimes two 20 / 30mm cannons.  The range was pitifully short, but it was designed to make a standing runway start and engage Warsaw Pact fighters / bombers as they appeared over our skies, which is why the Germans wanted them.

Saudi versions were equipped with additional bombs, rockets etc and were a fairly impressive strike aircraft but the Lightning's party tricks were it's performance and manoeverability.  

Even in the 80's an F16 pilot was quoted as saying "I couldn't get a lock on, so I thought it's try to pull up alongside and bludgeon the son of a b#tch out of the sky" when taking on an experienced Lightning jockey.  

My only memory of flying Lightnings was seeing four in formation over my primary school.  They were certainly loud!

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Buccaneer is another great example of damned fine engineering, after a much needed power plant upgrade, it showed what it really was capable of in the gulf, again, like the Jaguar, it could take an awful lot of damage before it'd die. It was a superb bombing platform, increadible range and verisitility. Replaced by the more nimble, but shorter ranged Tornado GR1, which whilst a good aircraft in its own right, couldn't carry as much ordinance as the Buccaneer.

During Gulf War 1, the MOD had yet another botch job with their laser guided bombs.  The Tornado couldn't carry the laser designator pod and the Buccaneer couldn't carry laser guided bombs...  Solution?

Send in the Buccaneers first to illuminate the targets while the Tornados drop the bombs.  Two planes doing the job of one.  Brilliant!  Only in Britain folks...  

As for American Aircraft... Their kit is very advanced, and in a lot of cases fairly durable, but as frequent training excersises in Canada have shown, their kit hasn't got a patch on ours.

Hmmm...  American kit is superb, although a Lightning could keep an F15 honest in terms of performance and perhaps manoeverability, it's frankly nowhere when compared as a fighter.  The F14 is IMHO one of the finest aircraft ever to fly and looks damn cool to boot.  Shame it's about to leave service.  

The Tornado GR1 is perhaps the finest attack aircraft in service (the USAF did briefly consider buying it at one point), but no-one's ever going to say the F3 is as accomplished a fighter as an F15.  Or indeed an SU27....

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bloodline wrote:

Talking of which... HX558 got the lottery funding! :-D

That's brilliant news!  All that remains is for the CAA to grant airworthy status (which they're unlikely to do on such a large, high performance aircraft - but who knows!).

Although I was more a fan of the Victor, the Vulcan is an arresting sight.  

BTW, a company flies three ex-RAF Lightnings from Cape Town.  There are two 2 seaters and one single seat jet there and they take passengers on trips around the cape in the 2 seat planes.  They also operate Hunters and Buccaneers too.

Check the links:

http://www.incredible-adventures.com/capetown.html

http://www.kapstadt.de/jets/

:-D