Re: Trident missile test fails for second time in a row

We likely got the end of line Walmart rejects for our "independent" nuclear deterrent. To lose one Trident missile on a test launch is unfortunate but to lose two in a row looks like carelessness.

I wonder what proportion of them will actually work as designed...

Luckily, it didn't hit our aircraft carrier.

You mean the ornamental target ones with almost no aircraft on? It looks quite impressive at sea and has an odd profile.

State of the art can also mean edge of unreliability. ISTR our Type 45 destroyers engines sound like a bag of spanners and will overheat if used in the tropics (apart from that "minor defect" they are excellent).

Being plunged into total darkness because the designers never imagined that they would deploy to warm tropical seas. You couldn't make it up!

The original use case was to confront the Warsaw Pact in the North Atlantic.

Joe Gwinn

They've got no legitimate business in "warm tropical seas" anyway. No legitimate business anywhere near Ukraine, either.

Does anyone know why the Royal Navy keeps re-cycling the *same old names* for their vessels over and over and over and over again? How many Arc Royals have there been? How many HMS Vengeances?? The list just goes on and on and on and on. How about some more modern names like - I don't know - HMS Lee Mack or HMS Elton John?

None that I know of.

Hopefully nobody's do

Hah, yes it would be fitting punishment for the world's "leaders" if after going and pushing all the buttons they find out they've been sitting on a bunch of duds all this time.

Then they'd only have _us_ to worry about while sitting in their bunkers.."Hey remember that time you tried to destroy the world? We'd like to talk to you about that..."

Hope they got a lot of supplies stored because it sounds like a classic The Cask of Amontillado situation for them at that point.

Alright smart arse. *Ark Royal*s then. A typo. Big f****ng deal. I really thought better of you. What a fool I was.

Cursitor Doom has always been a fool. It's hard to get him to recognise this indisputable fact. His persistent passion for the most improbable conspiracy theories suggests that there may be some underlying psychopathology, but while that may partially explain the foolishness, he's still addicted to fatuous nonsense.

Yeah, they had us reading that charming stuff in 7th-8th grade in the US (12-13 y/o) 30 years ago. but meanwhile we've got citizens walking around in 2024 saying a story with gays in it is going to cause too much psychological harm to children.

But hey sure just give us a story about a guy murdering a guy by walling him up in a dungeon and call it "classic literature" yeah that's fine for kids to read. that's cool.

Bill Sloman: Usenet's Voice of Reason.

Well, you should have been instructed to read *English* literature rather than some silly American nonsense. It was Thomas Hardy when I was at school (rather a long time ago).

<snip>

Trollope is rather better on moral questions. Thomas Love Peacock is more fun. Hardy wasn't much more interesting than Barbara Cartland.

Jane Austen is infinitely better than either of them. John Larkin likes her, but that's not her fault.

At secondary school I got stuck with

which was pure Australian nationalism, or silly Australian nonsense if you prefer. Edgar Allan Poe was American, and the impulse to get Americans to read his novels is unedifying American nationalism of a similar sort.

You astonish me, Bill! Have you actually read any Trollope? His writing's dripping with anti-Semitism. I'd have thought as a Jewish man you would have found him repulsive. As far as Barbara Cartland is concerned, there is simply no comparison with Hardy; not remotely. Have you actually *read* any fiction at all??

Sounds awful. I'd have thought if they must inflict Australian "literature" on school children they'd have been better of with Nevil Shute. He was still garbage, but at least more suitable for kids. Or should I say, a bit less unsuitable.

Cursitor Doom thinks he is being satirical.

Since I'm not Jewish - Sloman is a west country name and shows up a lot in Taunton, and my great-grandfather sailed out of Bristol around 1850 - I can be excused for not noticing. England as a whole was pretty anti-semitic at the time, which didn't stop Disraeli from doing well. And I have read quite a lot of Trollope. He sold into the same market as Charles Dickens and is less sentimental

It was pretty bad. I was reading much better books than that when I got stuck with that at secondary school.

Nevil Shute Norway was British. He did emigrate to Australia after the WW2 and died there, but he never became an Australian citizen, and he was never seen as an Australian novelist, and his books weren't seen as literature. A cut above Barbara Cartland, but still commercial.