Dom Hyde (PenCott camo)

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@totti99city @LOS_Fisher @FT Google is your friend.

@LOS_Fisher @FT Can somebody sensible help me out here, is GCAP some version of the F-35 or is this Tempest, just re marketed for the international marketplace, so as to not having to rely on the United States (currently/post Trump, etc)?.

EXC: UK is preparing a multibillion-pound boost - expected to be around £6bn - for GCAP joint stealth jet project Japan’s defence minister Shinjirō Koizumi was unusually blunt about the issue in talks with Yvette Cooper during her recent visit to Japan, @FT told Japan is concerned that a planned visit to the UK by Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi next month is at risk of cancellation given the uncertainties around Starmer’s leadership, acc to official Jitters have been growing in Japan about UK’s commitment to GCAP, which this multi-year funding will aim to quell w/ @sylviapfeifer and @Urbandirt ft.com/content/7c9cfe…

@BillyLoman23 @AllForProgress_ They haven’t put a person on the moon, doesn’t mean they can’t. They plan to do it by 2030. You obviously haven’t followed their space program. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_s…

@HydeDefinition @AllForProgress_ No they won't. Can't even put a person on the moon or even do what Artemis just did.

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth. It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine. The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport. The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it. The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press. It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close. Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver. The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since. What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast. The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site. The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize. The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths). The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election. I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny. The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history. The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago. I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through. A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade. The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

Russian military is using camouflage nets that apparently disguise their vehicles as a pile of bricks and garbage. t.me/onf_front/13606

@TheReconCast I love that they’re wearing scrubs over their uniforms. I wonder if they have those hair nets in under their helmets?

German SEK operators inside a hospital, securing the floor while a mafia boss is being treated for gunshot wounds. The man on the bed is a target. The men around him aren’t his bodyguards. They’re the state’s insurance policy that nobody finishes what the first shooter started. SEK, Spezialeinsatzkommando, is the state level tactical unit inside German police forces. Hostage rescue, high risk arrests, fugitive takedowns, and exactly this. Standing post in a sterile corridor with full kit while a surgeon works on a man with a price on his head. The hit on a wounded mob figure in his hospital bed is one of the oldest plays in organized crime. SEK exists so the play doesn’t work.

@SOE_Spirit @SeaSpitfires I think that’s the one. The end of the muzzle has possibly been unscrewed/replaced, hence the hexagonal appearance

@SeaSpitfires Is it a Krupp 75mm like this one or similar version Stephen, I can see the odd L shaped handle in your image and the flat head of the cone under the barrel? greatwarforum.org/topic/85279-kr…

Artillery peeps, any idea what this piece is in a German bunker on Walcheren? It has some similarities to a Ehrhardt 7.5 cm Model 1901, but I can't find a definite match. The men are 2 Troop, 4 Commando who captured and used the gun during Operation Infatuate I.

How are those sanctions meant to work, again?

@JesslovesMJK @Arteymas_ You’re not wrong. Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks for Doctor Who, saw a similar performance by (I believe) the Georgian State Dancers prior to 1963 & was fascinated by their non-human gliding movements.

@Arteymas_ They kind of look like Daleks.

La danza folclórica circasiana es una de las expresiones culturales más distintivas, elegantes y rigurosas de la región del Cáucaso Norte. Para el pueblo circasiano (o adigué), el baile no es un mero espectáculo folclórico, sino una forma de memoria corporal y un estricto código de etiqueta social (Xabze) que preserva su identidad frente a la historia y la diáspora. Los hombres bailan completamente de puntillas sobre botas de cuero blando (sin refuerzo de yeso ni madera, a diferencia del ballet). Este paso veloz simula que el bailarín flota o desafía la gravedad, reflejando el control absoluto del cuerpo. Las mujeres se mueven con pasos extremadamente cortos y sutiles. El efecto visual es que se deslizan suavemente por el suelo, manteniendo la cabeza y el torso completamente inmóviles, mientras mueven los brazos de forma tersa, asemejándose a alas de cisne o mariposa.

@FennellJW I know Aerospace have been looking to move from the airport site in order to bring costs down. They’d looked at Cranfield at one point but don’t seem to have found the magic combo of location and rent.

@HydeDefinition Aerospace will surely stay at Cambridge, but vehicles makes more sense in Merthyr.

Interesting, and perhaps suggesting that GDLS's time is over?

Let’s call it what it is. Appeasement. Despite being attacked by Russia the UN still hopes appeasement will spare it from further strikes 🙄

@jmscaronte These special gentlemen are not as American as some people might assume…

Newd money…

@PreeceRobert @CR940 @thinkdefence New build Spartan hulls, too, IIRC.

@CR940 @thinkdefence 100% and look how fast Scimitar II was turned around for Iraq on Spartan hulls. But we have often chased perfect at the expense of effective and timely.

Pictured: Alvis Streaker, based on the CVR(T), a lightweight tracked load carrier. Do we need something like this now, a modern day universal carrier?

@Windyweaver It’s going to be something really nerdy like the box of M2 ammo when there isn’t one mounted, or the wrong tread pattern on the spare wheel, isn’t it? 😆

@HydeDefinition No but good guess

A most excellent museum at La Roche en Ardenne, interesting piece of Sherman outside with lots of strike marks on it (not spang that's the most stupid word ever which does not describe bullet or shrapnel strike) 10 points to anyone who can spot the mistake on the jeep!

@TheBarrenNorth @edwardstrngr65 @ArmyCGS We would need new helicopters before then.

@HydeDefinition @edwardstrngr65 @ArmyCGS Give it ten years....

No surprises. If there is any sector that looks as if new Mil-Tech will overtake it then it is Hels. @ArmyCGS was ahead of the curve modernising UKSF Gp. This rings true…

@TheBarrenNorth @edwardstrngr65 @ArmyCGS LOL. You think those weapons are real? This not a James Bond film 😆

@HydeDefinition @edwardstrngr65 @ArmyCGS x.com/China768768768…

We do have a broken defence procurement, but it’s as much the fault of service chiefs insisting on boutique high spec kit & kicking decisions down the road as it is on government (since the 1990s) diverting cash to other priorities. Creating jobs & maintaining sovereign capability is strategically wise, however.

We have such a broken defence procurement system. Labour forcing a jobs program on the MOD over desired capability.

@thinkdefence And £200k is frankly peanuts.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is an essential expense. A bit annoying that it got to here, and i get the criticism about priorities, but service personnel need to feel valued, else they will vote with their feet.