kiseca

Best: 1) Def Leppard's Hysteria concert at Wembley Arena, maybe 5 years ago? They didn't sound like a bunch of retirement age grandads at all. They were active, lively, and Elliot's voice was in top form. I can't imagine they'd have sounded any better back in the 1980s. 2) Bon Jovi put on a top, pro show at Ellis Park in the early 1990s too. I've never been a big fan of them but full credit to them, they made sure the audience got a top class performance for their money. 3) Within Temptation at Wembley Arena. Some time in the 2010s. Very moving live performance, the band were super tight and the vocals were soul stirring. I thought they really did translate well to a live performance. Worst performances: 1) Whitesnake at Wembley Arena, maybe 2015. The sound was awful. David Coverdale's voice was shot. And the only reason I realised it was Tommy Aldridge on drums is because he played just about the exact same drum solo that he did in 1981/2 on Ozzy Osbourne's live album "Tribute", just after Ozzy says "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Tommy Aldridge on drums." 2) The Cranberries, north Johannesburg in the late 1990s. I think the venue was called the Mnet arena or something. The performance wasn't really bad, it was just... tepid. Dolores choked the notes on her guitar riff in Zombie, too. Impressive to see two Parker Flys on stage at the same time, though. 3) Lenny Kravitz, Ellis Park. Late 1990s. I walked out at what felt like 30 minutes into a saxophone solo. Earlier on, The Cult had rocked the place. So the concert on the whole wasn't bad, just Lenny.

The photos are fantastic and thank you for sharing them. The topic's title had me seaching my brain for jokes about how much faster jets in grease would be.

I still really like My Bag, but had never heard anything else from Lloyd Cole apart from Perfect Skin. My Bag is on one of my playlists and after it popped up a few months back I searched on Youtube for Lloyd Cole and watched some of his live stuff. Very laid back delivery.

Those smooth, asymmetrical Gallentian ships 😄. You're a lot more experience than I am then! I started in late 2007, got involved with the two racing organisations that were operating around those years. One group did frigste racing across low sec systems - had to visit each system and retrieve a bookmark from a secure can. The bookmark gave the next waypoint. The other group anchored a bunch of secure cans in an arrangement that formed a circuit, all in a single system. We'd race around the cans in T1 ships. Took a break around 2010 / 2011 and tried to get back in around 2020 but I didn't have a good enough computer. Then they started Eve Anywhere and I got back in with that, played for about 6 months, also joined the Excel beta testing but didn't finish it as they canned Anywhere and that was me screwed. I'd tried Geforce Now but I got too many issues on that too. So, now waiting for an Eve computer, which may take a while because Gran Turismo 7 with VR looks very good so my entertainment fund may well go to a Playstation and goggles instead 😆

Yeah, sorry, I wrote and posted my reply, then re-read your post and only then saw that you had already addressed the quality of the transparent fuselage. I didn't do a great job of reading your post the first time around 😅 As for skillset, I look at nearly all the builds on here and think "I can't do that" but every time I try something different, it works out fine. Well, usually... if you want to do it with the open side, I'd say go ahead, go one step at a time and it will very likely turn out very nicely. If you don't think you're ready for it, no harm in leaving it in the stash until a few more kits get your confidence in. I got back into modelling to build just one kit. It's still in my stash, I don't have the confidence to take it on yet. I think TV / film is a great area to specialise in though it is relatively limited in what is available for comventional kits. There is a huge 3D modelled and vacformed market though. I'd love to make a few models of game spaceships from Elite Dangerous or Eve Online. When my application to the SAAF failed, my flying passion went on to the microchip, basically.

I considered using the transparent fuselage halves and leaving an unpainted "hole" to show Dom's station. I didn't do it but I think it's possible. The reasons I didn't do it: 1) The structure of Dom's station has three interior walls and an interior roof. I'd have to leave one of the walls out, or chop most of it away, and that would leave the rest of the structure unstable so that would need to be braced somehow. 2) I was doing a lot of sanding work around the area just behind the door to alter the detail, and I felt it would be easy enough to make my work smooth enough to hide under paint, but any sanding marks I left on a section I wanted to keep clear would need a lot of careful polishing to make presentable and I thought it was an opportunity for me to screw it up. 3) the transparent parts themselves aren't that smooth, so it would either be like looking at Dom through a frosted bathroom window, or lots of careful polishing of the fuselage side (and not a flat section, either...) would be needed to give a view of Dom that is clear and reasonably undistorted. I don't think lighting the area would make him clearer, but it's easy to test. For me, each or those points were potentially model breaking if I got them wrong. I could create an issue that I couldn't live with, and couldn't fix. At my skill level I chose not to take that risk. You might consider it worthwhile or lower risk. The light I got from Small Scale Lights was perfect for me. Simple to install and it's still working fine now. One thing I'd say is I view Dom's station from the front - through the front windscreens and the door windows. There's an interior wall behind String that forms the partial front wall of Dom's room. It was easy to mount my light behind that wall so that Dom was illuminated and not in shadow from my frontal viewing angle, yet the bulb is completely hidden from view. The bulb is also inside Dom's room, which is completely enclosed in the fuselage, so for me it was easy to prevent light leakage. It might be harder to hide the light itself if illuminating Dom for a side view through the fuselage side. I can't think of anything to put it behind unless you do something clever with the fuselage paintwork. Also light leakage might need more work to control. It's a great kit, I hope I get to see your build on BM at some point!

I am certainly biased to music from my generational youth. I think it can stretch a few years before that, depending on what your parents listened to. I'm an '80s teenager so most of my favourite and classic albums come from then. I was very into synth bands but from my older brother I picked up a lot of slightly earlier rock and hard rock, and from my dad I got the Moody Blues and The Byrds. At some point I discovered The Doors (People are Strange got played on the radio one night and I was hooked). By the time I was 20 rap and hip hop were getting popular and it already felt next generation to me. I never got into it. Anything I enjoy from the '90s on to today was old fashioned even when it was new. It is becoming rarer and rarer that I discover good, modern, rock albums now. I come across the occasional artist or band that I pick up on but that becomes increasingly rare too. There's nothing wrong with modern music. It just doesn't sound like the stuff that I grew up and formed bonds with. I'm sure my parents felt the same about my music. My daughter though listens to a lot of '80s stuff as well as modern stuff, which surprises me a bit.

I'd also add Radiohead's OK Computer, which they say is not a concept album, but maybe has the cheat that it sounds, or flows, very much like a concept album and so it's hard to describe any individual track on it as filler. Or perhaps the counterpoint is that the whole concept album could be described as filler EDIT: Oh, oh, and as compilations are on the board, I'd add This Is The Moody Blues!

Oh yeah, Automatic for the People is a good shout! I remember my brother one day, having discovered a liking for REM quite late in the day (well after Monster) asked me which album he should buy. This was still back in the day when if you wanted music you had to go and buy it, you didn't have the band's whole catalogue sitting waiting on Spotify. Automatic for the People wasn't my favourite REM album, or at least it didn't have my favourite REM songs, but that's the one I recommended as the album he had the most chance of enjoying because every track is good, and accessible.

Def Leppard's Hysteria was designed to be all killer no filler. The question which kicked off the album's concept was "What if instead of writing a hit song for an album, we write every song as a hit song?" Personally I think they did very well. Others I'd add from same era and similar genres are Guns n Roses - Appetite for Destruction Metallica - Master of Puppets. I'd add Depeche Mode too, with Some Great Reward as a personal favourite and Violator as a more generally accepted option. Simple Minds - Once Upon a Time: To me every track is a stadium anthem. And Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

It wasn't great. Jeremy Clarkson's piece on that same year was more accurate and more entertaining. Can't say I thought much of the recent movies about Ferruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari either. I hope they keep making these but I also hope the quality of the writing improves. A lot. They are getting decent actors.

Huh, it's blue! I always thought it was black Every day's a school day. Very nice build, one of Formula 1's better looking colour schemes in my opinion. Jodi Sheckter was recently interviewed by Ben Collins (The Second Stig) when he put all his racing cars up for auction. I don't know why he's selling them. This Wolf was featured (and I still didn't realise it was dark blue 😂)

Pioneers indeed! I do wonder how many of them were disappointed in their later years to see how little progress had been made in human space exploration after all they had risked and sacrificed to open the space age. Back in the 1970s they must have been thinking we'd have an occupied moon base and that humans would have visited Mars by now.

That looks superb! I particularly like the first shots where it's flaring and about to touch down. Beautiful build and a great idea! I don't think I've seen an in-flight presentation of that moment before.

Nobody has said that nor suggested that. The question that was posed when the "riddled with holes and returned" survivors was brought out is whether that aircraft would still have made it back if its attacker was armed with cannons instead of machine guns. Of course it would be equally reasonable to ask if any of those that were shot down would have actually made it home had their attackers been armed with cannons instead of machine guns. Anyway, apologies, I don't want to engage in a prolonged internet discussion on this, I just feel that survivor bias is not at play in this instance. If you disagree still, fair play to you and please have a virtual beer on me. It's not important either way.

No, the point is whether an aircraft could survive being hit by a full compliment of .303 bullets (evidenced by those that did return), but could not survive being hit by a full compliment of cannon shells. We already know that plenty of aircraft were shot down by .303 bullets.

I wouldn't dismiss that as survivor bias unless we were also talking about all those aircraft that came home riddled with .50 and cannon shell holes. If you can empty all eight guns into a bomber and it still flies home and fights again another day, then your guns have been ineffective on that occasion. If such occasions are common, you probably need a harder hitting weapon. That's the point being made. Sure, aircraft survived cannon and 50 cal hits too, but riddled with them? Not so much. Ultimately it boils down to how effective your weapon is at 1) knocking down the opposing aircraft when you get hits, 2) getting enough hits on target, 3) carrying enough ammo to, on average, knock down the largest percentage of aircraft. You might need half your .303 ammo to shoot one bomber down, but that gives you enough to shoot down two. You might hit with 50% of your .303 rounds but only 30% of your cannon rounds. You might only need two or three cannon round hits (in biographies it often seems one was often enough) to disable your opponent, but that, combined with the lower hit rate and reduced number of rounds you can carry because they are larger and heavier, might mean you can only carry enough ammo for 1.5 kills on average. In that hypothetical case, your airforce would get more kills with machine guns than cannon. I believe the reality was the other way around though. Overall, cannons (and 50 cal) were more effective despite their disadvantages, because the harder punch more than compensated. Nothing to do with survivor bias, which is when you say something like, as a kid I rode in the load bed of a pickup truck and didn't die, therefore it wasn't dangerous. None of the kids who did die while riding in the load beds of pickups are in any condition to rebuke that statement. On the other hand, if you notice that your aircraft often return riddled with .303 sized holes, but rarely return riddled with cannon holes, it is reasonable to entertain and research the idea that the ones that meet cannon fire are less likely to survive the encounter.

I'm not sure if he's regarded as a great general so much as a famous one. None of the leaders in WW2 seemed to stand out as brilliant in the way that, say, Julius Caesar, Alexander The Great or Subutai do. Churchill for instance had a patchy record up until WW2, but for that conflict he was the right person at the right time. Rommel, as mentioned above, is revered but, again as mentioned, made a few bad decisions. Maybe much of that is with the info we have available now to judge their decisons vs. The info they had available at the time they were making them, which would have excluded the benefit of hindsight to even when it comes to recognising the significance of things they did know at the time. For leaders earlier in history, we have less info and tend to know more the outcome and the basics. Was Patton great? I dunno. Considering how things turned out, I guess we can only say with any conviction that he was good enough. Could anyone else available at the time have done a better job given his command? How would we ever know? Let the people that served with him and that served for him judge his worth.

When I had a missing piece in my Tornado box I emailed Revell. They sent the missing piece to me (it was a part of a sprue). The email address was on the instructions, if I recall. They didn't charge me for the replacement bits.

Red wine. Amarone for me unless I'm on a budget in which case I'll go for a shiraz, or if I'm on a really tight budget, a merlot seems most reliable. Sometimes I prefer a cognac. Remy Martin VSOP or a Hennessy VS. I haven't developed a taste for the XOs yet, thank goodness. I'm not much of a beer drinker. When I was I preferred Becks. Now I prefer a ginger beer like Crabbies or Ginger Beard. If I'm mixing, I enjoy Malibu and lemonade or Kahlua and milk. Used to be a fan of schnapps until I overdid it one night. Nowadays if I want something a bit sweeter than a cognac I'll have a Southern Comfort.

Also correct. Now waiting for a third eagle eyed person to spot the bottle of red wine also just about visible 😁 Very impressed and unsurprised that a group of guitar players would also know their liquor bottles 😄

It is indeed. I can't think of any other bottle that fits better with a rock and roll wannabe's rig, actually.

Here's the guitar stash. From left to right, Epiphone PR 350VS 6 string acoustic, Epiphone Les Paul Studio Gothic, Cort Earth 70/12E 12 string electro-acoustic, customised OLP 5 string bass (a Musicman copy), Korean made Squire Stratocaster. The Squire and Epiphone acoustic have both been with me since the 1990s. And the pedal stash....missing from this picture is an ancient Zoom GFX 707 multi effects pedal. The amp / speaker combo is a Marshall Valvestate VS65R. Almost as old as the Strat and Epiphone.. A bottle of liquid talent is visible bottom left. And a close up of the customised OLP. This is a rescued bass. The body looked crap and had cracks in the varnish so was sanded down and given a black paintjob with metalflake in earth tones on top, and finished in a clear varnish. All the electrics were replaced and while I was at it, got a custom wound pickup for it too. While replacing the electrics, I changed the configuration from the original two volumes and one tone knob to a single volume knob, single tone, and the third knob is just used as a push / pull button to split the coils.

Yeah it would be lovely to see one of those in the air in the UK (just because that's where I am so I'd have a good chance to see it)

Early Spitfire gets my vote, with classic eliptical wings, high back and original rounded rudder. A mk 9 for me is the best, with the twin radiators and 4 blade prop, though I think the shorter nose of a mk 1 or 2 is nicer. Unpopular opinion, but I've never found the Hunter attractive. I just find the proportions odd looking. From that era I thought the Sabre was more attractive (and the Sabre and F100 Super Sabre are the only two jets with a nose intake I'll say that about. Actually, maybe the F-8 too but that's kind of a chin intake). For the rest, I have a few all time favourites that I love the look of to join the Spitfire. In no particular order: P-51D MiG-3 Hawker Tempest Starfighter Mirage F.1 (Another vote for the one wearing too many dresses😅) F-16, best in XL form IMO. And lastly I think the Tornado ADV (F.2 or F.3) is a gorgeous aircraft too. Personally I find the MiG-29 prettier than the Sukhoi 27 family, I think the larger aircraft looks a bit sprawled out in comparison, but for that style of aircraft, with the two engines slung under the fuselage and the lifting body in the middle, is the Tomcat. I think the F-15 is a beautiful aircraft too, looks right from any angle. Just for some reason, it's never in my top list. I don't know if it's just a bit too clinical looking, it doesn't have a kind of style, or character, whereas all of the others do. Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, etc. But for the original question, Spitfire gets my vote.