History, Politics And Current Affairs

Agree with everyone here. Looks like what is now the Maritime Integration & Support Centre (MISC) at Portsdown Hill. Along the ridge line from Royal Armouries Fort Nelson museum, you can see it when you walk up from Portchester if you go on the train. It has an Artisan radar set now as well. The...

So like I'm sure many members here also do I often listen to podcasts when travelling for work or in the background whilst doing tasks. I have tended towards military history but have since the 2022 and Ukraine going into full scale conflict military politics and defence economics have become more i...

Isaacman has a track record of saying that SLS is a waste of money but now he is administrator he can't cancel it due to how NASA funding is structured by Congress. Realistically I can't see Boeing every getting to the point that NASA thinks they are reliable enough. Blue Origin with some kind of Bl...

So Babcock are not offering a Type 31 based design (Arrowhead 140 in Babcock terms) but instead are offering the smaller Arrowhead 120 in a joint bid with Saab in which they will be the minor partner. So not sure if they have won or lost this: - Positive is that it is effectively a bid by SAAB who a...

I'm not sure MICA VL would give the extra density of missiles they were after once you figure in the hot launch systems required. The VLS on the Gowind class are pretty much the same size as 16 cells of Sylver whereas the aim here seems to be 24 cold launch cells. Interesting point about ownership o...

This might be very UK centric so apologies to other members. Yesterday it was announced the complex man once thought off as a myth and used to scare misbehaving children on trains throughout the northwest of England and definitely so in Liverpool has passed away. https://rollingout.com/2025/08/27/li...

I think the interesting thing might be what the Australians and other militaries (if any, I can't think of anyone else apart from small purchases for special forces) who have adopted P320 variants do. A few anecdotal reports of police departments dumping P320s onto the second hand market in order to...

There must be a good few years spent at an English boarding school behind that given the casually posh accent, right? It's that weird mix of Received Pronunciation and generic home counties that says boarding school or Oxbridge (less likely though most people will not lost an accent at that age wit...

With the lead time for construction of ships being so long now*, starting towards the customisation of a Type 31 variant ordering and introduction to service would probably put the oldest Iver Huitfeldt over 20 years old by the time it left service anyway. * For the RN, RCN and RAN at least the Mari...

Interesting development. I can see the attraction of a smaller hull for more confined waters along with better air defence capability. The main criticism of the "Type 31" design I have is that in the UK specified version it is very under armed and not particularly great in terms of sensors...

I thought the major problem the RAN has had in doing the design modifications from the baseline Type 26 was the weight of the CEAFAR arrays? The additional topweight was described as the biggest challenge in an interview that was done with BAE at one point. A topweight challenge that the Constellati...

Wires or conduit? I can't imagine a modern system would use cables from the 80s (I would think it'd be based on modern Ethernet or fiber optic stuff), so I'd think it would be less the actual wiring as being able to actually replace it. Probably something nasty used as wire insulation or fire/smoke...

Not exactly a surprise. I really don't understand how the requirements were published without more specification as to the armour levels and modularity required to control weight. It's competitor was frankly a better fit for the role and would have been when adopted then cancelled as the M8 in the 1...

This led me down a further line of thinking -- have we been carefully misdirected over the decades as to just how much low altitude bombing would *actually* be done in the 1960s? I'm not sure we are ever going to have the full answer when the aircraft as opposed to space plane based component of SA...

A couple of things in the report really stood out to me: 1) How does a navy command or personnel management system allow the captain and executive officer of a vessel to be not qualified to command it, "platform qualified", for an extended amount of time after taking up post? The same coul...

In terms of the army it is probably a fair description. Essentially we don't have any artillery capability outside of towed 105mm light gun, GMLRS and Exactor both which we don't have a huge stock off. Apparently the introduction of Archer to cover the AS90 given to Ukraine is taking longer than exp...

With the Starlink setup why wouldn't they take the fairly elementary measure and turn off SSID broadcast. Then it wouldn't have been visible to other peoples devices on the ship unless they used a scanner (app or physical) to find it. If you are going to due stupid things with technology at least tr...

So they are aerospace company walts then?

Guess what? Boeing is also flubbing up the uprated SLS 1B. Its the SLS but with a more powerful second stage(the EUS) and since its taller, it has to have its own launch tower built. I really don't want to give Boeing any wriggle room here but a lot of the decision to move the production line and t...

So I wonder how much Space X will charge NASA for jumping the queue for a Falcon 9 / Dragon? I know they technically don't have one available for a while due to the adaptions for the space walk flight blocking the docking mechanism but enough money or convincing could see it happen. I do think it mi...