willedoo

A second Chinese J-20 stealth prototype has taken flight, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/china-new-stealth-fighter/

Haven't seen any video of the event surface as yet. 3 Squadron has some photos up on their site of the centenary, 2 and 3 Squadron Association sites: http://www.3fsquadronassociation.com/ http://www.twosqnassoc.co.uk/ Cheers, Willie.

The RAF C-130 pilot involved in the rescue of oil workers in Libya has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2012/05/13/saaf-reject-wins-top-honour-in-royal-air-force

It's better than 'Blue Hills'.

Yes, bas, I'd imagine the gap in capital outlay between solar & mains power in rural areas would be starting to shrink a bit. My own setup, on a twenty acre block, is 3 phase power, overhead for 100 metres, then underground for another 300 metres via 4 x 35mm cables. At the end of that, I can join 3x30metre 15 amp leads and still push a 3mm welding rod, so it's good power. Total outlay was $5000, but that was 20 years ago. I wouldn't like to be guessing what it would cost now. A mate down the road set up a full solar system about the same time, he's never been connected to the grid. I'd only be guessing at his costs over the years, with back up diesel generators, batteries, maintenance & repairs & bills from the sparky to troubleshoot. It would probably be about twice what mains power has cost me (including power bills) over the same period of time. It's a lot of ongoing work to maintain an independant system, he's spent a lot of his life constantly tinkering & fixing it, but he really likes the idea of being independant of the grid. I suppose it's become a hobby of sorts, you would never do it just singly for the purpose of saving money. If I took into account what my grid connection would cost today, the gap would be narrowed quite a bit. I'd estimate that when we both hit our late 60's, we'd be even on costs, but he's had the satisfaction of providing his own power all those years. I'm only talking about running a household, here. A farm is a different situation. Power useage for a beef cattle grazing property, or dryland farming is not much more than a small hobby farm / residential rural block. A bit extra for workshop use, welding etc, but not much. Irrigation farms & dairy farms have an entirely different power useage again & wouldn't be real easy to do on alternative power. I guess with a hobby farm, solar can be a lifestyle choice as part of it.

Looks like they've gone with the Spartan. I thought the reason they were originally leaning towards it was because of US operation of it as well, but the US military has dropped it: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/australia-to-buy-aircraft-the-us-rejected/story-e6frfku0-1226352411129 Cheers, Willie.

Development of a new acetylene / ammonia fuelled rocket engine: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20120505/173241862.html Cheers, Willie.

Let me know how you go, siz. Just going by some of the fixed wing flights I've had up there over the years, I'd be happy if they just bought me a new pair of pants.

Reminds me of the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke. He was a bit of predictor of possible future events and one of his last before he died was that we'll introduce measures to combat global warming and by the end of this century, we'll have to start burning fossil fuels to warm the planet up again. He's been right and wrong about equal amounts during his life, so who knows. Back to ethanol, just a question. Is the pro ethanol case concerned mainly with: a. Lower emmissions b. Sustainability or c. Both of the above, and if so, which is the major criteria of the two. Solar panels; Nerb made this point earlier, ' My point was that Solar panels are solid state devices. No maintenance required. They either work or dont.' I suppose the biggest challenge with solar is always going to be battery technology. Seems to be what what's holding it back, and is one of the major on-going costs for an individual to have a total independant of the grid solar set-up. Needs a lot more research and funding there. The dreaded carbon tax: Read a bit more of the newspaper article on this Bloomberg report into Australia's scheme. It will be interesting to read the actual report when it becomes available to the public. The way I understand it, there's a fixed price period of $23/tonne, a bit more than twice the European price, operating from this July until 2015 when a floating cap and trade scheme comes into place. There will be a floor price of $15/tonne from 2015 until 2018, when it will enter a free market ( the way I interpret it, please correct me if that's not right). The concerns of the report are that the price will fall to the floor of $15 in 2015 and fall further in 2019, if the price floor is not extended. When the scheme floats in 2018, it is expected to be closely linked to the international price because under it's rules, companies will have the option of meeting half their emmissions obligations by importing permits from overseas schemes. Without boring everyone with all the details of the report, they basically say the low expected price will encourage companies to stay the way they are and not embrace change. They predict domestic carbon prices can't be maintained without extending the floor price or greater limitation of the use of internatinal permits. The Australian price rises if the import limit is below 40%, 15% imports =$19.60 and cutting imports to 5% lifts the price to $31.50. As per a previous post, they estimate $35/tonne is needed to drive a change from coal to gas. I'm not sure how to interpret all that, but it sounds like the current model will need a few adjustments in the future. One risk might be that if the rest of the world doesn't step up to the plate, we might be left with a very costly exercise that doesn't deliver what it intended. Or more simply that we don't get out of it what we put in to it. One issue is these imports of foreign permits. Australian companies will be able to provide the majority of their abatement responsibilities by buying credits from overseas, rather than doing something real in this country. From a global perspective, buying foreign permits still means someone in the world earned those credits in the first place, so that amount of carbon is still locked up. And maybe that's not so bad. It would be nice to reduce Australia's footprint, but in reality, we produce about 1% of the world's carbon, so having our companies just buy their way out of it is probably a better contribution than a lot of other countries are making. Just one last point - farmers, particularly those who crow sugarcane, wheat , barley or any other crops of the grass species. I've mentioned this before somewhere else on this forum. In recent years, scientists have found that grass crops like bamboo, cane and grain crops ( or even pasture grass) develop nodules in their root system, each about the size of a grain of sand. These nodules lock up carbon from the atmosphere for about seventy years. The good news is that they're rock hard and conventional cultivation will not crack them open and release the carbon. You can plough as much as you like, without any detrimental effect to the carbon storing ability. Cane farmers, traditionally demonized by the green movement, are now copping a pat on the back. It's been estimated that for every tonne of carbon they produce, they lock up three (for seventy years). I don't know of any other industry anywhere in the world that can achieve those results for the environment. The point I'm trying to make is that farmers are sequesting two out of three tonnes of carbon. But I havent heard any talk of them being issued with carbon credits by the Australian Government. If Australia was fair dinkum about all this, their carbon estimates would be done like any other industry, and they would be issued with credits that they could sell for $23/tonne to the big companies. So I think the Government is getting a bit of a freebie there at the farmers expense. I can understand why some people are very sceptical of this scheme, it doesn't sound like it was very well thought out. Perhaps we should have delayed it to enable a bit more researching to try and get it right.

Welcome, Simon, & great websites. I've definitely bookmarked those two. Cheers, Willie.

This thread sure has produced some different opinions and interesting theories. A news item in todays Australian newspaper mentioned a draft research report on carbon pricing which might be interesting reading when it's made public. Bearing in mind as was already discussed in this thread, there can sometimes be a bias depending on who did the report and who it was commissioned for. This applies to both pros and cons, both have been caught out trying to mislead the public at times, so there's no moral high ground to be won here here, only facts to be presented. The article described the report as saying that the price could crash to $4/tonne by 2020 once the fixed $23/tonne period gives way in 2015 to a floating cap trading scheme. Another section of the research suggested that a price of $35/tonne would be needed to force a switch from coal to gas. The point was made that our scheme, under it's present links to the international market, which is forcast to remain low, will not end up with a high enough price to support renewable energy project development. I havent read the report, so I'm not saying yes or no to it, just making an observation here. So maybe the situaion is that Australia can ride around on a white horse waving a big sword on carbon trading, but unless the rest of the world climbs on, the scheme may have a lot of trouble delivering the intended outcome. There's always two elements of this debate. The first is the science, whether it works, whether it might work with more research and funding, and whether it's economically viable taking into account economy of scale and other factors. In the long term, this will always be a big issue, as one day the world will need an alternative, it might be in fifty years or a hundred, but the time will come. The other element is the present day politics, which is the tricky bit. By politics, I mean the global energy/dollar politics which run the world, not the politics of individual nations tinkering with trading schemes. Oil and energy is the world's biggest economy and corporations have become used to making money and having the ear of any governments that matter. When it comes to energy, money=politics=money, they're inseparable. Alternative energy will only become mainstream when it's all worked out that the same people will have the same money and power as when they dealt with hydrocarbons. The worlds most powerful nation can't let it's currency crash at any cost, and as it is propped up by international oil trading, it must be able to safely transition to a scheme whereby, in a future world of alternative energy, that energy continues to be traded exclusively in US dollars. Without going into how it all started, amost all of the worlds oil is traded in US dollars. Not many countries are self sufficient in oil, so most have to import it. To do that, they have to buy US treasury bonds and currency to pay for it, and the resulting global demand for the dollar keeps the value of it up. If we don't buy that currency, we can't buy the oil. It's worked for more than forty years; they didn't call Nixon 'Tricky Dickie' for nothing. And you don't give up a gig like that without a fight . So where this leaves the future of sustainable energy is anyones guess, but it can't be helping things.

It's good to see people discuss these issues in a mature fashion, putting forward logical arguments for & against. I'm yet to come across a one sided coin. Personally, I like to hear both sides of the story as nothing is simple with these issues. Having spent most of my working life in the oil & gas industry doesn't necessarily mean I like the stuff. I'd love to see clean, green energy replace hydrocarbons one day & there is a lot of good arguments for their merit. The big problem is money and volume & economy of scale. At present we use 85-90 million barrels of oil a day (a barrel is around 160 litres) & that's not including gas. So the big challenge is, how do we replace that, given that humans are not prepared to forgo their modern lifestyle ( electricity & transport ). At the present time, it would be a mammoth task to replace one or two percent of oil useage with alternatives (just a guess). Every bit helps, but we really need some sort of new technology that we don't have now. The big problem with oil is not lack of reserves, but the fact that we've got most of the easy stuff already. The future there means drilling in deeper ocean & more remote locations, where the economy of scale means higher cost. It's hard to know how it will be in 50 or 60 years. It would be good to be able to replace oil as a fuel, but that presents other problems. Oil will always be needed to manufacture tyres, plastic, fertilizer, road surfaces etc unless new technology is developed. At the moment plastics & oil based products are affordable because the overall demand for oil makes production of these offshoots viable. But that changes when you take fuel out of the equation. If Shell, BP etc have to produce smaller volumes just for the manufacture of the necessary by products, the cost of those would be enormous. Hopefully the industrial chemists will invent something new one day. The other problem, the biggest one, is money, or what some refer to as the petrodollar. The theories of alternative energy are great, but these are only some of the hurdles to overcome. At the moment, it's real David & Goliath stuff. Hopefully the future will be better. Cheers, Willie.

I hope this one never got off the ground. [ATTACH=full]1203[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1204[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1205[/ATTACH] Cheers, Willie.

Video claims to be the first Hummingbird flown in Russia. That S-52 is a funny little helicopter, reminds me of the Karmov's. S-52 [ATTACH=full]1202[/ATTACH] Cheers, Willie. [ATTACH]18192[/ATTACH]

If I can resist it, you can, Siz. Be strong. (and that's coming straight from a Google addict ) Cheers, Willie.

A link to some interesting photos & narrative on the early vtol tailsitter X planes. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/06/history-of-tailsitters.html (scroll down past the advertising) Cheers, Willie.

Short news article with a couple of photos of 3 Fighter Squadron, RAF, centenary tail art. The centenary is being celebrated on the same weekend as 2 Squadron, May 12/13. http://www.key.aero/view_news.asp?ID=5080&thisSection=military Cheers, Willie.

Reminds me of some trips to work in a 206 that I'd rather forget. Cheers, Willie.

Good bit of detective work, Darren, another one solved. After reading your link on the Anne Beadell Highway, I found the original post photo on Wikipedia with the co-ordinates. Unfortunately the resolution on Google Earth is not good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Beadell_Highway [ATTACH=full]1199[/ATTACH] Cheers, Willie. [ATTACH]18190[/ATTACH]

That would have been a great sight, have never seen a formation of Tiger Moths. We had the two T6 Texans fly over just before the start of the service, one trailing smoke. A nice touch. Saw them a couple of weeks ago flying in formation for quite a long time, they came straight over the top of the house & didn't have a camera. Oh well, next year maybe. Cheers, Willie.

Got to it the same way as siz, thanks Dexter. My version of flash is out of date, probably why it doesn't play automatically. Great collection of photos, thanks for posting them. Cheers, Willie.

The real time rendering of the story is a nice touch & what a great tribute during the Anzac day period. Cheers, Willie.

There's a photo of the mock up Mustang here, not a very good resolution: http://theaussieaviator.net/threads/outback-mustang.33006/ Cheers, Willie.

Great stuff, thanks, Spin, a lot of rare photos there. Just love that old colour. Cheers, Willie.

Likewise. Riveting story, sixties, thanks. Cheers, Willie.