Chris Weir 💙 🇪🇺🇬🇧 🇺🇦 You were warned.

Sick of the algorithm manipulation, excessive advertising and don't want to support Musk and his hell platform any longer. I am remaining on here for the time being, but will probably not post or comment. (Certainly very infrequently). I am now on 🔵 sky. Chrisweir5.bsky.social

@muse This all seems rather reminiscent of Hawkwind.

Signal incoming... Calibrating sensors... syncing detected signal... muse.mu/1420mhz ...

@Aviation_Intel I don't believe anything said by the Trump administration on topics like this. It may be true, but "wolf" has been cried far too often.

And to my followers etc.

Take all reporting and messaging out of admin with huge grain of salt on any of this. Fingers crossed but they have played the media extremely well through this whole thing.

@BLSFixtures @DavidRRoss_ @GBRailfreight @GOSHCharity What is the wide bodied coach, with the drop light windows, in the middle? Refurbished inter city EMU coach?

Thank you to @DavidRRoss_ for the Huntly pause giving the opportunity for this fantastic photo! @GBRailfreight @GOSHCharity Never to be seen again?!….

@GarrochS @Tarka_Man @duncansr6 I used one back in the 1980s up near Braemar. It was a SWB series 3 land rover! We sat in the back with the mail bags.

@Tarka_Man @duncansr6 What was a post bus? Is it literally as it sounds, a post van that takes passengers?

The loss of the integrated Scottish Post Bus services was not only a major inconvenience to the locals but also to tourism. The Post Bus waits for services North and South to cross at Achnasheen in August 1977

@Gordon_3417 I remember my first visit to I think Waterloo (?) hearing that sound and wondering what a class 20 was doing there.

Magic.

@TNTJohn1717 @Johnnypapa64 @PaulaBRoyce1 Far more truth in this picture than the fairy stories you preach.

I’m supposed to believe this man climbed to the top of Blackpool Tower dressed like he was heading to Sunday dinner, no harness, no real work gear, standing on a toothpick over the city, apparently “painting” something that already looks finished? At some point you have to admit some of these old photos look less like history and more like somebody said, “Make me a dramatic industrial image, 1900s style, highly realistic, no safety standards, extra suspicious.”

Painting the top of Blackpool Tower with no harness.

@AllForProgress_ @Captain_Deltic The old joke in the Defence Industry is that the system gets delivered when the weight of the paperwork exceeds that of the system. Things have only got worse over the years I worked in industry dealing with the MOD.

@AllForProgress_ @Captain_Deltic When lives are on the line, the paperwork gets thrown out of the window. I know for a fact that similar rapid procurement happened when the Falklands Task Force sailed. There were civilian field service personnel on board, upgrading systems.

On the 10th of April this year, the Ministry of Defence quietly announced that it was placing a substantial order for Skyhammer, a British-designed and British-manufactured air-defence interceptor system, with a small Cambridge company called Cambridge Aerospace. The first deliveries are taking place this month. May 2026. Less than five weeks from announcement to delivery, which, by the standards of British defence procurement, is approximately the difference between the full span of known geological time and...a tea break. The press release went out, according to specialist industry reporters, almost without any general media coverage. The major papers have run nothing of substance on the matter. The BBC ran, I think, a brief defence-segment item. The newspaper of record on this story has been the UK Defence Journal, a specialist publication run on a budget that would not cover the catering at one of MoD Abbey Wood's procurement strategy all-day do-nothing workshops. For most of the British public, the first they will hear of Skyhammer will be when one of them shoots down something in a future news report that the British public also did not know was coming. The Skyhammer itself is the kind of British engineering the country is producing more of than it probably realises, one of the slim but potent lights in the pelmet of dark tidings that seems to have us covered over. The interceptor is designed primarily for the drone-and-cruise-missile threat profile that has dominated every Western air-defence conversation since the opening of the war in Ukraine. The cost per intercept, on what is publicly known, is in the range of low five-figure pounds against incoming threats that frequently cost six or seven figures to manufacture and launch, which is the cost ratio that any proper air-defence economist will tell you is the only ratio that matters in the long term. For the sake of comparison, the American Patriot system, the standard Western interceptor, sits in the seven-figure-per-shot bracket against threats that cost a few thousand dollars to assemble. The economics, on Skyhammer, are an order of magnitude more favourable. The more interesting part of the story, however, is that the Ministry of Defence has shown what it is actually capable of when it puts its mind to being something other than completely useless. Five weeks from announcement to delivery is truly, deeply without precedent in the recent history of British def. The standard British def procurement runs in two-decade cycles: the Type 26 frigate, the Tempest, the Ajax, the Watchkeeper, the Wedgetail, the F-35B operational integration, the Sea Ceptor refits, all routinely measured in the time it takes a child to grow into a parent. They're delivered late and long after they've ceased to be state-of-the-art items. Skyhammer was procured at a tempo more recognisable from the period in the early 1940s when the country was building Spitfires, six a day, in a converted bus depot in Castle Bromwich, because our lives and the lives of all yet unborn on these isles depended on that pace. The institutional muscle is, evidently, still in the building. It's just generally being kept in the cupboard. The Skyhammer programme is, in this respect, the most interesting, and probably the best, MoD news of the year. It accidentally proved something the procurement profession has spent decades obscuring: that British defence procurement runs at speed when the political will exists, and at glacial pace when it does not. Now we all know that, likelihood being, the Skyhammer story is the counterfactual. For the next x years the rest of the story will show off the regression to the mean. But even though the wrong people are contesting the highest power in the land - even though the wrong team won at Wembley this afternoon - let's be optimistic; let's presume that someone with clout, and a well-earned-for-once feeling of satisfaction in their job, at the MoD is reading this. And let's let them know that, for all of Britain's sake, we need much, much, more of the same.

@ThrillaRilla369 Some will disagree, but the quintessential 6 Classic Van Der Graaf Generator albums: The Least we can do is Wave to Each Other H to He Who am the Only One Pawn Hearts Godbluff Still Life World Record. Not a single bad track on any of them. Some are less good than others of course

An album that has no bad songs on it and can be listened all the way through. I’ll go first: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon 🌑

@brexit_sham @BBCNews @ZackPolanski It was on News at 10:15 last night.

Farage bought for £5M for delivering the catastrophic Brexit scam. Meanwhile, deathly silence from @BBCNews. They are however using their news banner to inform us of @ZackPolanski not voting in the local elections.

@stephen37292ML While it is a great picture, well composed, I really don't like the excessively saturated colours and the weird effect. It seems to be based on a photograph, but highly processed, possibly by AI.

Great pic of an ERF coming off a continental ferry

@fleetstreetfox @SamCoatesSky Usual utter bullshit from Farage. He should have declared it, but chose to try and hide it instead.

As @SamCoatesSky was telling me last night, if the standards commissioner investigates and finds it should have been delayed, there’s the risk of a recall petition and a by-election in Clacton. He’s very, very worried and defensive.

@railnigel As a former Fireman, still second man and shunter I rely on this for my safety. Some drivers are more obviously conscientious than others. I make a point of making sure the driver knows what I am doing.

Clear understanding sums it up. As a GCR driver I didn’t leave the cab window -ever - until I saw the fireman or shunter re emerge. And you never touched any of the controls whilst someone was under, either.

@eriqbre @verge Let me translate: "rabid leftist"= just to the left of Genghis Khan.

@verge His worst enemy are rabid leftists pretending to be journalists

Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk theverge.com/tech/921022/el…

@patrickvkelly @TansuYegen @garrettdonnelly That's nothing compared to Leeds Bradford!

@TansuYegen @garrettdonnelly The runway looks a bit hilly. How does the pilot take off without the backside of the plane catching one of those wrinkles in the runway? How does s/he maintain steady acceleration?

At Birmingham Airport, Emirates' huge Airbus A380-800 lines up behind an Aer Lingus A320-200 ✈️

@meandclaire @Parody_PM There is a Twatt in both Orkney and Shetland.

@Parody_PM That’s in Orkney a not sure how you seen it in Shetland

Enjoyed my visit to Shetland today, where I was absolutely thrilled to see they’d already named a place after me.

@Osinttechnical As far as I can tell, an Israeli "Peace Prize" is a bullet or bomb.

Israel is considering awarding Trump an "Israel Peace Prize" during his next visit -Ynet

@GarethDennis Really not Gareth. The C130s used (and destroyed )are specifically intended for rescue operations.

So the "airmen rescue" gibberish is absolutely a cover for a failed US ground operation, right? It makes zero sense as currently being presented/reported.

@realcrazyvaclav @michade1 @LizWebsterSBF @danwootton But, but, but GB "News" isn't a news channel, or so they keep telling @Ofcom.

@michade1 @LizWebsterSBF @danwootton Latest figures, GB news leading the way in 7th place

🤡 You really couldn’t make it up. GB News losing money… and now asking for public funding. After years of attacking BBC and public service broadcasting, GB News now wants taxpayer support. So it’s “state bad”… until they need it.

@michade1 @LizWebsterSBF @danwootton Pitifully small broadcaster, far from meeting Public Service Broadcaster requirements. Reform UK Ltd. propaganda channel.

@LizWebsterSBF @danwootton Poor take. As the number 1 broadcaster, it surely deserves a slice of the public purse set aside for broadcasting!