Stalins Organ

Got any actual evidence for any of those specific claims? And what % of efforts do they represent?

Plenty of Celts in Italy - the far north area of the country (north of the Rubicon) was called "Cisalpine Gaul" and had been occupied by Gauls from before 400BC. If you can't find any Celtic or Scandinavian symbology on the 'net then your google-fu is astonishingly weak!!

It raises no worthwhile technical issues at all - it is is dismissive without evidence, and is just plain wrong about the real time video issue (for those not bothered to read the article it says that detailed pics are only stored on board and only low res ones are sent due to bandwidth issues....which possibly says something about the state of Russian UAVs...)

The "peacekeeping" forces in Sth Ossetia were originally Russian, Georgian & Ossetian under the terms of a ceasefire from 1992 according to Wiki.

JK - all I had to go on was your description of a harried woman's memory - all you need to do is google "churches 90miles west of moscow" and work from there!! :/

Um...yeah...well that would be because they were still under construction you ..you...you....grr...forum rules prohibit me.... Of course Lithuania is NOT typical - it was only occupied in June of 1940 - 9 months after the eastern areas of Poland. I don't know what hte timeline was for construction of the line, but every other fortified area had at least a couple of dozen bunkers completed by Barbarossa - Lithuania was the only area where there were none. Of the "line" as a whole (of course it was not a line at all....) there were 575 operational bunkers of about 800 built, with 4900 more still under construction. which is a considerable investment in defences, and not "a joke" at all.....and you'd have realised that if you'd even bothered to read all the wiki article rather than cherry picking 1 minor point without regard to possible reasons why it might have been the case!! But hey - don't let the facts get in the way of your carefully constructed and willfully ignorant conspiracy theory....if you did then it would fail on both points after all, and we can't have that!!

If you could research how to destroy the Panama Canal as a student I can't see why you are unable to research this!!

How about Sergiyev_Posad? It's 90km rather than miles, but has the Trinity St. Sergius monastery, which is apparently a pretty amazing place

If it's supposed to show somethign rational in Suvarov's position it fails miserably. the quote from Koivisto: is quite breathtaking in its simplistic duplicity - the Soviets were still BUILDING defensive positions when the war broke out!

The story of the UK blockade runners to Sweden is interesting - Gay Vikings?? I gues the name was less of a problem back then!! :D:D

NYT? Clearly a left wing conspiracy to libel (or is it slander??) good honest netizens!! you should never believe anything in the NYT - haven't we all learned that??!! Sheesh.....

Hopefully the 2 ships that do get built will not be as dangerous as these things....

How is his premature quotation my problem??!!

sounds like a bit of a disconnect betwen the design team and reality?? Redwolf the "Ballistic anti-ship missile" is probably this: But if it converts to a cruise missile (however improbable that may sound) then what is it about the cruise-missile phase that makes it un-interceptable??

Jeez if that's the worst you can say about him of then he should be on the elite panel and be the main ref not just an assistant ...given some of the howlers the big boys have perpetrated lately!! I don't think there was any great "getting the better of the refereeing" in either game personally (apart from that blind bastard and the penalty try!) - the AB's played like a provincial "B" team in the 1st one and the Wallies played well...the AB's stepped up to where they should be in the 2nd one...the Wallies didn't shift - they played just as well IMO, but that wasn't enough so they got overtaken and left in the dust!

OK - some brit carriers - Indomitable - hit by 2 bombs during Peedestal in August 42, repaired in the US until Feb 43. Hit by a Kamikaze in 45 with no great effect. Spent 3 years being refitted in late 40's but a fire warped the hull in 1950 & she was unrepairable. Illustrious - hit by 8 bombs January 1941, returned to service May 1942 - there was a bit of travel and work up time, but out of service for 16 months, lost centre shaft & reduced to 22-23 kts. Took 2 kamikaze hits in 1945 without too much obvious effect, but as with Indomitable hull deformation meant she was a writeof. Formidable - hit by 2 x 1000kg bombs in May 1942 in the Med, out of action 6 months, hit by 1 kamikaze in 1945 that sent a splinter down through several decks penetrating steam lines and a fuel tank causing a major fire & destroyed 11 a/c. Fire was bought under control and dent in deck repaired with concrete - able to operate a/c 6.5 hrs later. Took another kamikaze hit later on which had no effect. Wiki says that the earlier bomb hits had left her "permanently mained" - other sites repeat this (or are repeated by wiki) with no further explaination. Was considered uneconomic to repair after war & was placed in reserve 1947 & never reactivated. Victorious took 2 Kamikaze hits in 1945 with no effect due to armoured fligth deck. Indefatigable tok 1 kamikaze hit but was able to operate again after 5 hours. Adn I think that's it for the armoured deck carriers and bomb/kamikaze hits. Several were lsot to U-boats of course. So overall - in the context of warfighting the armoured deck certainly seems to have helped with survival from kamikazes, but had no benefit vs AP bombs. The cost was smaller carriers with smaller airgroups and unrepairable damage when they were penetrated, which was pretty much all eth time by any AP bomb hit since hte deck armour was not strong enough and could not be strong enough to stop really heavy bombs then in use. the damage from such bomb hits was often unrepairable leading to seriously degraded performance and/or early retirement as unrepairable - the reason for this being that the armoured flight deck was part of the hull box, so any deformation of it affected the structural integrity of the ship as a whole. As for the Japanese carriers - there's a page here that describes the problems associated with their hangar design quite well I think.

Yep well you can't call what you don't see, and if he didn't see eth nubmers what do you expect him to do?

We fixed up the score thing about the AB's having fewer points - 58-44 aggregate over the 2 games. You should blame the coach for the rest of it The Fijian's not ready? Why's that then? Because he wasn't pinging only the AB's?

They fixed that up tonight tho.

Thanks - I should probably look at the detail of the RN carriers too.......but it's time for breakfast and to stay ahead of my kids on Runescape...

And yet only 1 US carrier was ever sunk by flight deck hits (USS Princeton, an aunarmoured light carrier, as were RN light carriers) . And of course the trouble with the british system was that even if the carrier could be repaired & fly off that particular day, it sometimes becamse effectively useless - either due to unrepairable damage as with Illustrious, or with their small airgroups the losses they suffered made them even more marginal. Probably one of the reasons US carriers would often return to the US was because they could - they had masive repair facilities at Puget Sound on hte west coast, and they had a lot of carriers.....so if a couple needed to head off for repair then after 1943 it wasn't too much of a problem! Looking through Wiki for carriers that took flight deck hits: Yorktown took a hit at Corral sea that penetrated several decks and killed 66 men, but was able to repair herself sufficiently to continue with operations pretty much immediately. Structural repairs were carried out in 2 days at Pearl Harbour. At Midway she took 3 flight deck hits, but was able to repair and conduct flight ops with her remaining a/c against the Kate torpedo bombers that hit her with 2 torpedoes (and then was still able to be taken under tow until finally sunk by 2 more torpedoes from a Japanese submarine but that's anotehr story...). Saratoga took 6 bomb hits on 21 Feb 1945, was still able to recover her a/c (but not launch - her forward flight deck was wrecked), and took 2 1/2 months to fully repair. Hornet took 5 bombs and a Val that followed its bomb, but was only rendered hors de combat by 3 torpedoes delivered by Kates....(and then then took 9 US torpedoes and 400 5" gun shells, finally being sunck by 3 more Japanese torpedoes!!) Essex took a kamikaze hit among planes fueling on her flight deck, but was back in action 20 days later. Intrepid took 2 kamikaze hits in December 1944 and was out of action for 20 days, then took 1 more in april 45 and was flying again 3 hours later (in comparison it took 6 hours to repair Formidable's armoured flight deck by concreting in the dent) Franklin took a bomb on the outboard edge of he deck elevator that didn't affect air ops, took a kamikaze on her flight deck that required about 9 weeks repair. After that she took 2 flight deck hits that left her dead in the water 50 miles off the Japanese coast, was taken in tow but eventually was able to steam at 14 kts - she arrived back in the US on 28 April & I don't know how long repairs took but she was opened to the public on Navy Day (Oct 27) ticonderoga took 35 days to repair 2 kamikaze hits Feb-april 45 (there's a damage report for these here) Randolph took a kamikaze hit on its aft flight deck that left a hole - she was at anchor so they repaired it before setting sail several days later - the photo on her wiki page shows she could probably have continued flight ops if required. Bunker hill took a pounding on 11 May - 2 kamikazes struck her with 2 bombs (one of which passed straight through without exploding) and then themselves within 30 seconds, setting fire to fully fuelled aircraft on deck and in the hangar - many pilots died in their cockpits on deck. she returned to the US for repairs and was serviceable again by "september" of 45. Wasp received a bomb hit in March of 1945, but stayed in action off Japan for several more days before returning to the US for repairs, and was back in action in july "after a brief sojurn at Pearl Harbour"

Quite right - it is part of New Netherland

nope - this combination usually resulted in the internal fires or other damage twisting the whole box girder structure of the hull, resulting in the ships becoming useless even if not destroyed. eg Formidable was rendered scrap by a corsair's guns that went off on board after the war, raked the hangar deck with 20mm shells and turned it into a furnace. Indeed even minor hits could do so - such as the kamikaze hit that she famously "shrugged off" in 1945 which resulted in an unrepairable warp to the hull. Her sister ships also suffered irrepairable hull warpage from otherweise repairable hits - Illustrious from German bombs in the Med in 1941, susequently being limited to 22 kts and her centreline shaft being permanently unusable, and Indomitable, which suffered bomb hits in 1941 that fortuitously did no warp her hull and was refitted to "as new" condition 1948-50, but then had a internal fire that did warp her hull - she was repaired with concrete and towed into place for Queen Elizabeth's coronation review in 1953, returned to the "unmaintained reserve" in October of that year and scrapped in 1955. the only "up" side of the British system was that they carried fewer a/c so hangar deck fires were not "otherwise" as damaging - ie they didn't tend to sink the ship...but then gthey didn't tend to sink US carriers eitehr, and the British ships were still writeoffs anyway! plus with fewer a/c they were arguably less of a target priority for the Japs than the US carriers were! So the Brits really got nothing from their design philosophy at all - it's a whitewash to teh Yanks on this particular score - depending on your game the yanks get some high score, the brits get 0, or an innings defeat.....

Which god willing is that? Pfffttt...what passes for "the far left" in the USA is just to the right of Genghis Khan in the rest of the world! For someone who espouses free speech, individual rights, capitalism, despises socialism and all that, you indulge in an awful lot of condemning other people for expressing their views on the same differently. And don't give me any of that "I may disagree with what you say but I'll fight to let you say it" stuff - you clearly prove above that you have no such redeeming conscience!

No. I don't.