Astonishing Facts....
Discussion
toastybase said:
Before the internet, the Pistonheads forum was held in Wokingham town hall every Thursday between 7–10pm.
Opinions were spoken through a letterbox with the members wearing blindfolds and the records written down and sent out by post.
What did Yipper call him/herself then ?Opinions were spoken through a letterbox with the members wearing blindfolds and the records written down and sent out by post.
gothatway said:
toastybase said:
Before the internet, the Pistonheads forum was held in Wokingham town hall every Thursday between 7–10pm.
Opinions were spoken through a letterbox with the members wearing blindfolds and the records written down and sent out by post.
What did Yipper call him/herself then ?Opinions were spoken through a letterbox with the members wearing blindfolds and the records written down and sent out by post.
Kermit power said:
yellowjack said:
Moonhawk said:
RizzoTheRat said:
It's quite common to commission from the ranks, although I doubt many get to WO1 before commissioning, and I'm not sure if they're ever a 2nd lieutenant these days.
That was kinda my point. If you commission from an NCO rank - would you start from the bottom of the commissioned ranks - or would you jump in at whatever the equivalent level was (e.g. Sergeant to Captain)There is an alternative route from lower ranks as a direct entrant to Sandhurst. Usually soldiers without degrees who show significant talent for leadership, advised to apply or picked out from the ranks. But these lads probably wouldn't get to SNCO, and almost certainly not to Warrant Officer before being recognised. There are a lot of rules/criteria on age/time served/time left on careers to meet as well.
Whilst I'm pretty sure we no longer have any Field Marshals, I'd be astonished if anyone could possibly hold every rank in the army these days. Too many hurdles, to many rules holding them back.
Most LE Officers don't end up directly commanding troops "in the field" either. Well not in the Royal Engineers, at least. They tend to be commissioned from the QMSI (Quartermaster Sergeant Instructor - or technical warrant officer) career stream, and usually go into support or instructional roles. Sometimes we'd have a Sandhurst officer as our Squadron OC, with an LE Officer as 2i/c, but that was unusual. But the LE officers often know their trades inside out, so they're given the responsibility of developing the new generation of soldiers (or overseeing the development of new equipment/tactics). That's why they get an LE Commission - to retain their knowledge beyond the point where they've served a full SNCO/WO career and would normally be shown the door with a pension.
As an aside, I cannot find a claim for Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson having held every rank in the army. Not even Wikipedia claims this for him. It does, however, state that he was the only man to have risen from the rank of Private to the rank of Filed Marshal. The highest non-commissioned rank I can see claimed for him was Troop Sergeant Major. Roughly equivalent to Colour Sergeant in today's terms, and certainly well short of the upper limits of the Warrant Officer Class 1 rank. It would be interesting to see the dates of promotion and a list of all the ranks he did hold, and how they fitted into the way the army was organised in the late 1800s, because I'm pretty sure there have been a lot of changes since then. Troop Sergeant Major, for instance, is a defunct rank now. It was briefly revived in 1938 (as Warrant Officer Class 3) to give command of a Troop to a non-commissioned rank. No-one was promoted to the rank beyond 1940, and most holders of the rank were commissioned as Lieutenants.
As an example of a direct entry candidate from lower down in the ranks, there was a female corporal in my sister's intake at Sandhurst. She was, by all accounts, an outstanding cadet, and probably went on to be an excellent officer, but the fact that she and her former company commander announced their engagement the minute after she'd uncovered her pips and formally become an officer herself might well suggest where some of the support for her to go to Sandhurst in the first place came from!
Less than two percent of the Hiroshima bomb's uranium actually detonated.
https://gizmodo.com/less-than-2-of-the-uranium-in-...
https://gizmodo.com/less-than-2-of-the-uranium-in-...
Frimley111R said:
Less than two percent of the Hiroshima bomb's uranium actually detonated.
https://gizmodo.com/less-than-2-of-the-uranium-in-...
Begs the question - is that what the designers expected, or were they expecting a bigger bang? A fifty times bigger bang?https://gizmodo.com/less-than-2-of-the-uranium-in-...
Suspect the former or the crew of the Enola Gay would not have been so gay.
Brother D said:
RizzoTheRat said:
Brother D said:
Johnspex said:
Brother D said:
In the hot section of her engine the metal blades/stators are operating in gas temperatures way above their melting point.
Pardon? To whose blades/stators are you referring?And highly proprietary ceramic coatings applied by physical vapour deposition.
My final year dissertation was on coatings used.
Rough overview here which is quite interesting
http://www.phase-trans.msm.cam.ac.uk/2003/Superall...
Halmyre said:
There was a programme on BBC2 about development of the Trent engine and they were very camera shy when it came to the design and manufacture of the turbine blades.
I think I watched that programme, was it about 3 years ago? Amazing the work that goes into the blades. Single crystal of metal, tested by hitting with a hammer and analysing the resonance.cuprabob said:
Ye Olde Yipper
As you mention it...'Ye' isn't really a word, at least not synonymous with 'the'. We used to have a character called a thorn, which in capital form looked like a 'Y' but with two vertical stems and in lowercase form looked like a subscript 'y'. The thorn was pronounced as 'th'.
'Ye' does exist as a plural form of 'thou'.
I'm a hoot at parties.
Rawwr said:
cuprabob said:
Ye Olde Yipper
As you mention it...'Ye' isn't really a word, at least not synonymous with 'the'. We used to have a character called a thorn, which in capital form looked like a 'Y' but with two vertical stems and in lowercase form looked like a subscript 'y'. The thorn was pronounced as 'th'.
'Ye' does exist as a plural form of 'thou'.
I'm a hoot at parties.
Ayahuasca said:
Silenced pistols do not make the gentle 'pffft' noise you hear in movies. They sound just like a gun going off, only a bit less loud.
Mostly true, I don't think any pistols make that weird 'cat sneeze' sound they make in films, certainly not the ones they usually show anyway. There's a pistol called a 'Welrod' - I believe it's origin and use is technically known as "shady as f
k". It's a British (go us!) WW2 era assassination pistol that's been used a recently as Desert Storm and the end of The Troubles. It's about as loud as a busy restaurant / train station.
It's even got a little recess at the end of the barrel to allow some of the gasses to escape which makes it more powerful when the end is pressed against something.
Nasty thing.
mickk said:
Fort Jefferson said:
More people in China speak English, than all the countries who speak it as a first language.
That sounds wong to me.If he means actual people, then he's talking rubbish.
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