Posted by drewr 6/28/2025
If you live in the US, are you actively looking to leave?
Check back in a few more months.
US tech business gets tax free entry into our market. It uses our roads, our communications, our police and court system. All of this is to the detriment of our local business.
A huge amount of our defence spending goes directly to the US. We buy your planes even when we could make better ones ourselves. We have supported the US in nearly every colonial adventure since WW2.
Why do we allow ourselves to be milked like this? We are paying tribute to the US for being the ally of our colonial masters. Its time we stopped.
The UK was forced by the US to abandon TSR2, the best jet in the world, to get a cash bailout from the US, that it needed after all of the years fighting WW2 on its own...it spent all of its money buying material...from the USA. The UK invented lots of key military equipment, Radar, proximity fuses, nuclear bombs, jet engines, and gave them all to the US. It is about time the US paid us back, you leeches
The TSR-2 was abandoned due to cost overruns. The F-111 would have been cheaper...but even that was abandoned and eventually the Tornado came along...not a US aircraft.
The flow of military inventions flowed both ways during WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_technological_cooperati... Maybe if you hadn't had a coward as a leader in Chamberlain we wouldn't have had to bail you guys out (and lose ~250,000 Americans in Europe.)
Well done for skim reading Wikipedia. That is pretty much the excerpt from the top of the page shortened even more to take out key details.
Tsr2 was cancelled in 1965. Tornado entered service in the 1980s. Big gap to have no planes at all...
>The F-111 would have been cheaper
"It was decided to order an adapted version of the General Dynamics F-111 instead, but that decision was also later rescinded as costs and development times increased."
Filled in the gap for you
Tsr2 was cancelled due to American blackmail, neo-colonial bullying. A skim read of Wikipedia doesn't refute it
I’m now realizing I know hardly anything about GPS. Like it was made in the 50’s or something? Do we keep sending more GPS satellites into space? Or are there just the original handful?
Irrc the satellite signals not encrypted or whatever were randomized to be inaccurate on purpose. This is mitigated these days by using stuff like cell towers - we know exactly where they are. they pick the same signals out and send out corrections to the randomized data which increases accuracy.
There have been several iterations of satellites and systems.
In February 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite launched, with three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of 1978.Probably easiest for the OP just read the Wikipedia article.
There were off book non US reverse engineered Navstar recievers cobbled together on benches in the mid 80s being trialed as alternatives to LORAN use.
That's a little earlier than your statement of "late 80s".
It'd be documented in, say, Geoscience Australia metadata notes to air surveys of the era.
Of course that'd be a primary source and not wikipedia, nor a wikipedia secondary reference newspaper article.
If you're just concerned with the first satellite launch, ehhhh, sure. As a useable global system it was much later.
"The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems,[15] combining ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites, for use by the United States military, and became fully operational in 1993. Civilian use was allowed from the 1980s. "
Here's the current list, marked by launch date and Block:
Basically trying to deny accurate positioning tends to not help your own forces as much as it being trivial for them to call back to your giant logistics machine with accurate positioning.
Ironically best fit for replacement is Starlink constellation.
IMHO after seeing what Ukraine pulled off in Russia recently - un-jammable gnss is kinda dangerous until drones like Skydio trickle down to the masses.
Why not? ;(
tl;dw: AccuWeather, whos CEO donated to Trump's campaign.