pigsty

Kids these days have no idea how to punctuate (especially not this sort of thing). I blame the parentheses.

It would have had higher recoil forces, though, if it had up to 70 calibres of barrel - maybe more than 1.5x as much. So then you have to upgrade the recoil system, reinforce the carriage, even possibly redesign the trail legs to stop the whole thing rocking backwards or buckling them. Ten tons could be a record that no other gun would have beaten; but it wouldn't have been handy, for all that.

It's also worth noting that if Invincible had carried any extra guns, they couldn't have been up on the flight deck like that. The mountings might have been mobile but, to be used on a ship at sea, they'd have needed bolting down; and placing them there would have made a good chunk of the deck unusable, even though it was all Harriers. Then there's the problem of supplying the ammunition. I don't know if she got any extra close-in armament - I suspect not, but she had two Phalanx fitted afterwards, so someone must have thought it a problem - but the more likely locations would be the foredeck and the island.

And, surely, the heaviest? The PaK 44 came in around ten tons - absolutely unuseable, and that's before you factor in the sheer length of the thing.

Oh yes. I remember footage on Spotlight of one pair being test-fired against the Great Mew Stone.

If that's on the way home, and looking at the colour, they're more than likely captured Argentine weapons. Something German and 20mm, perhaps?

That's the one. Though it wasn't called that the second time around. Someone must really have hated that aircraft.

That's not it. I'm not after a type of aircraft - it's a specific airframe.

Normally I don't dip into these threads, because the same things always come up - £80 for a kit compared with £8000 for a rail layout or £800 for a show and a night on the town, hourly rate, at least it's not cocaine. But one thing that's always been expensive is paint. I just paid £2.95 for a tin of Humbrol enamel. The guy in the shop (Sussex Model Centre, excellent place, no quarrel with them) told me I was lucky because it's €3.95 over the water. The UK price scales up over £210 a litre for very ordinary paint, in the chemical sense. A litre of Farrow & Ball emulsion is £23.60, and even Little Greene, who fancy themselves a bit, don't want more than £33 a litre. I get the differences - bigger range, broken down into much smaller batches, doubtless more. But that doesn't stop it being expensive. And yet we hardly ever mention it ... because we don't mind all that much?

Nick Hooper used enamels, alas, not acrylics, but here's what he says: To obtain the finish I wanted, I used gloss enamels, specifically Revell 32131 Fiery Red, Humbrol 22 White and Humbrol 14 French Blue – in an approximate ratio of 8 parts Red, 6 parts White and 1 part Blue. So I suppose if you can find equivalents in an acrylic range you're away. And I can warrant, that's a very good match. Interesting mention of Docker colours. Given the rather yuck shade of lilac, mauve, what have you, and the way the Docker Daimlers looked ... was there any connection?

Well, that's us told! Today's question: which civil aircraft was shot down twice?

Is it the BMW VI? Although I'm not sure about "oversized".

If you want to wait a day or so, I can ask Nick Hooper for you - he scratch-built the prize-winning one that was up at Telford a couple of years ago.

Interesting stuff. What's no.24?

They're all for cooling something or other - the afterburners, the avionics, all sorts of things. If you're planning to use them on something else it doesn't really matter what they did on the Lightning; all you need to think about is the job they'd be doing on yours. That would determine where they'd sit on the airframe and what would be downstream of them, and what size and shape you'd need. You'll probably also want to think about whether any need matching outlets as well. I'm intrigued ... what are you doing that needs extra inlets? Most aircraft that have new ones added need them because of different systems inside, and a lot of them are a custom shape that works in the airflow round that aircraft. They seem similar but they're often not identical.

My uncle was a very successful songwriter. He always said the key was to make sure his lyrics were suitable for all ages. In fact, if an innuendo crept in, he'd whip it out straight away.

12-year-old me would have found Harden pretty funny, too. As this started out with punctuation, quick QI question: what's the only place in the UK with an exclamation mark in its name?

That's because Turkey has recently taken to calling itself Turkiye in international relations as well as at home. Unusual for the Yanks actually to change their usage and get it right. I still occasionally hear one of them mentioning Qatar and it comes out more like Kuddr ... which I suppose isn't much worse than Catarrh.

I doubt it. The country we know as Tunisia is called Tooneesha over there.

Sorry - it's a bit of a gotcha. The spoilers were the P-61's main roll control surfaces, so if one side is up, the other side should always be down. For some reason kit instructions never mention this.

At the risk of taking this even more off-topic, the same applies to earth and mud. I still can't believe people get away with flogging "European Dust" as though the entire continent was made of the same stuff, when I live in a county that has five significant types of soil in a few hundred square miles and at least four colours of brick. And others asking "what does the dirt look like in France?" Coming back to the topic, it's one of the best and most informative I've seen - cracking stuff.

Is very nice. Although I see you've raised the spoilers on both wings ...

Personally I wouldn't recommend twisting your own, for two reasons. One, you have to be precise to make sure the twist is even all the way along. Everyone I've spoken with about it has had to stop, unwind, and start again, repeatedly. Two, you need a lot of strands to make a convincing cable, more than you may first realise. I saw one recently that was well done but looked only just hefty enough to pull the tracks back on after servicing, not to pull the tank itself. I love picture hanging wire, and it's so cheap it's much more attractive than DIY. I hadn't thought about annealing it - but of course the real thing can be pretty stiff, so you'd do that only if you needed to produce a tight coil or something, like the standard fit on a Pz Kpfw III.

Ooh, what a dilemma - do I tell him that should be "exercised" ... in a thread about misusing words ... ?

Type it out in Word or your preferred word processing function, use Insert symbol or equivalent to find the accented letter, then cut-and-paste it into your posting. For some reason the forum software will show accents faithfully that it won't let you type (unless I'm missing something). As for the actual gripe ... don't get me started. I have pages of this stuff that I try to teach people at work. I could write a book on it - but what's the point, someone already did and it's plainly had no pigging effect at all.