DD_Arthur

If only I knew my way around Kent and how to put up high res screenies...............................................

From last weeks tales of the unexpected;

Come and join us for a spot of CoD tomorrow and I'll talk you through it BA

Really? Thats' going to involve a great deal of rehearsing at short notice, isn't it?

I note one of the witnesses was a Dave Shatford - how apt!

Yes please Sir. Wednesday please Sir.

Can we still get the anatomically correct inflatable sheep?

Wow, thats really impressive Crash!

Bloody!! £12K? Well I can understand it in a way 'cause they'll only make two or three hundred anyway and they'll be bought by serious paparazzi who stand to make possibly hundreds of thousands for a picture of the Duchess of Cambridge in the buff - you know the sort of thing I mean but £700 for the case? Whats it made out of? Rhino horn?

@Jabo; I'm tempted, very tempted.................. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Canon-EF-75-300mm-75-300-F4-5-6-III-MK-3-for-500D-550D-600D-650D/161020045709?ssPageName=WDVW&rd=1&ih=006&category=3323&cmd=ViewItem

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c32_1367332518

Very interesting Swep Love this sort of stuff. Have a look here; http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/index.php This is just down the road from me, hidden in the rolling green of the Devon/Dorset border, Cannington viaduct; It's made from non-reinforced concrete poured into shuttering so it's not an easy thing to dismantle but it's been abandoned since the railway was shut around fifty years ago. I expect it'll collapse slowly into the shifting stream bed it's built across eventually. Infact the cost of this bridge was doubled during it's construction when one stormy night one of the pillars started to sink into the gravel bed. They had to bring in hundreds of bricklayers to give it a crutch.

I wouldn't mind one of these to go with my Provost and Swordfish.

How about a Swordfish? Plenty of room to take a few friends if they like standing and a picnic basket too. Short field operating capability, etc.

Lol, FT. You're probably right. I still wouldn't mind seeing a Sabre or a Sea-Vixen do a low pass at an intimate little place like Duxford one day. How about Old Warden? @Jabo and Blubear; are there any sixties jets doing the UK airshow circuit these days? I know very little about these things. I well remember a privately owned Thud at RIAT donkey's years ago. I always thought Harriers were the loudest jets flying and continued to believe this right up until the Thud pilot gave it the beans on takeoff at Fairford. If money were no object, I would'nt have a Spitty or a P51. I'd get a Hunting Provost.

@ Sweper; Yep, Bovington is very close. This whole area is the home to our Armoured Brigades live firing ranges too and, bizarrely, an old decommissioned nuclear power station! I think the name is due to the age of the coast and a certain film but this is the area where nearly two hundred years ago Mary Anning and her brother dug a fossillised Ichthyosaur out of these cliffs at a place called Lyme Regis and mankind were forced to consider that creation was a rather older and more complicated process than we had previously thought. You're quite right though. This is a very desirable retirement area. In fact the whole of the south coast of the UK is too these days. The further west you go the crazier our property prices become.

Sabre? Cor! Any chance of this appearing at Leg-ends in July?

Last Saturday was a beautiful, sunny spring day. At last. It was also my youngest son's eighth birthday. To celebrate we arranged to meet up with my eldest son who is at Southampton uni. We live at the western end of the Jurassic coast. Conveniently, the eastern end of this coast, at a place called Lulworth Cove is the halfway point 'twixt our home and sonny boy's luxury student residence. We meet in the carpark where we find another three thousand people have had the same idea. Fair enough, it really is the first sunny weekend of this year. Lulworth Cove itself. One of nature's miracles of physical geography. On the left, the most important people in my universe stand in front of a big lump of engraved limestone which in essence says "Yer 'ere". The village of Lulworth itself consists of a pub, several old fishermans cottages, several old fishermans cottages converted into crappy giftshops and the site of several old fishermans cottages that were levelled to build a truly horrible cafe/takeaway and the world's dustiest carpark. After a snoop around the cove we head west over a big hill. Looking back to where we came from. I like big hills. When you get to the top, there's always something interesting on the other side. That's Portland Bill and Weymouth in the distance. Portland harbour was an important naval base for over a century until very recently and the bay has swallowed more than it's fair share of Heinkels, Stukas and '109's. Taken from the same spot with full zoom on my spangly 600D. Yours truly, fat and fifty!! Aaarghhhh......... Judging by the expression on my face, one of my elder sons must have just asked to borrow some money! All rather dazzling and blue on this day. The real nugget of gold found on this walk lies just west of here and I merely have to rotate my bulk through one hundred and eighty degrees to find it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durdle_Door He's either playing pocket billiards or trousering the twenty quid I've just handed him. Finally, since the bank of Dad appears to be open, we return to The Lulworth Inn for some well earned grub.

Has anyone ever delved into the BBC archives? Not easy to find on their site these days but still stuffed full of gems!! http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5347.shtml Or if your of a certain age a spot of pure nostalgia from the summer of '76. http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml

Dear Doctor Toad, I'm fat, fifty and I don't think I can get it up anymore. Should I be worried? I can p.m. pictures of this condition if required. Do you have a magnifying glass?

So it came to pass; after ten days of weather induced boredom my wife finally lost her rag and threw us bodily out of the house. By the simple inducement of waving folding money in his face I pursuaded my eldest son to drive his littlest brother and I to RNAS Yeovilton. http://www.fleetairarm.com/ It's only an hours drive from our home or if you're a twenty one year old student it's only a half hour drive. Here he is making a relaxed but unsuccessful attempt on the British landspeed record down the length of the A303! Whilst my youngest waved happily through the rear window at our fellow road users receding in our wake I adopted the strategy of my late father whilst being chauffered by my mother; close one's eyes and keep pressing a large, imaginary brake pedal! 'Fraid I didn't risk my shiny new camera outside as it was still drizzling on arrival so we swept into the carpark, past the huge anchors besides the gates from long since scrapped aircraft carriers and ran up the steps to the entrance hall where we flashed a student card and my RM Association membership and were relieved of a (slightly) discounted entrance fee. Actually it's not a bad deal. By agreeing to convert our tickets into a charitable donation on which the museum can claim VAT back they offer you free admission for another twelve months from date of ticket. Straight into hall four, the "Leading Edge" exhibition. Sure enough, fifty years ago the British aviation industry was still at the leading edge. In front a gorgeous Hawker Hunter trainer whilst the little pointy blue thing behind is the BAC221 which was built to investigate high speed delta wing technology and actually held the world airspeed record for a short time in the mid-fifties. Behind that is the original Hawker P1127, the Harrier prototype. On the right and dominating hall four with it's all white colour scheme (just like certain kinds of Elephant) is Concorde 002, the second prototype to fly and a fine example of the 'plane which went a long way to destroying the British aircraft industry. Back in the mid-sixties, whilst the American taxpayer was fronting up for a war in S.E. Asia, building a great society and putting a man on the moon, over here Britain and France decided to shovel great wads of cash into an effort to put a man in a light weight business suit into a comfy chair next to Joan Collins whilst sipping a champagne cocktail at twice the speed of sound. Concorde 002 never carried fare paying passengers, it's narrow fuselage being crammed full of sophisticated measuring instruments so the boffins could work out where Elton John and Rod Stewart would sit when the bloody thing was eventually allowed to land at JFK. Concorde's cockpit shows it's late 'fifties heritage with a bewildering array of instruments and a certain similarity in layout and size to the flight deck of a Vulcan bomber. Tucked away behind Concord is the nose of a 1954 Vampire T22 trainer. No sign of the magnificent Westland Wyvern, a post war carrier Jabo with a contra-rotating prop which used to reside in this hall. It's place taken by an old Whirlwind chopper and a very shiny Sea Harrier as part of the museum's Falklands war exhibit. Nose cone of a Delta Dagger (Israeli made Mirage) apparently shot down by this very Harrier. There seems to have been some shuffling about of the Falklands exhibit since I was last here and most annoyingly the little Wasp helicopter - the very chopper that C/Sgt. Menghini of our aircorp flew through the night the mist and a snow storm to land on the side of Two Sisters mountain by the light of a green pencil torch during a battle - has gone. Par for the course I suppose as Sgt. Menghini's reward for his skill, determination and bravery in making four trips that night and saving the lives of over a dozen wounded Marines and Argentinian soldiers was zilch, zero, nuthin'. However, in the 'Family Learning Area' you can play the 'Falklands Conflict game'! Missed that one. Space is at a premium at Yeovilton so as a general rule of thumb, if it had wings that can be folded, then they're folded. Which is a pity. After visiting the IWM at Duxford and seeing what they've managed to cram into a similar amount of limited space I think the curator at Yeovilton would be well served by a visit to Cambridgshire. Some rather lovely scale models of aircraft carriers made by ship yard apprentices are also on display Also you can try your hand at the Vickers K-Gun game and try and bring down a BF110! Upstairs in this hall is a gallery of Fleet Air Arm related art. Skuas attacking the Konigsberg? a German pocket battleship in harbour in nineteen-forty. The actually sunk it with no losses either! Attacking the Bismark in Swordfish. Is it true that none of our Swordfish were lost during this attack as the Bismark's mechanical gun laying computers were not designed for aircraft that flew at less than 100mph and so all they're shot fell short? Dragging F4U's out of the monsoon mud out east. "Good show Ranjit! Now when you and Jumbo have finished here we've got some Spitfires we'd like you to bury too." "At once, Sahib!" I think I must have used my pictures per post quota so standby for part two!

I, er...........oops

Here you go, AP; http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=278&t=34103 SweetFX is a utility for enhancing all games using DirectX. A guy from the RoF forum wrote FlightFX as a more conveniant way of applying SweetFX to games. You can use FlightFX on anything using using DirectX and you can do it with sliders instead of altering lines in the config. I use it for RoF and CoD.