Originally Posted by
Windy Militant
In which case I hope they've a bloody big teapot and an awful lot of digestive biscuits.*
*One of the engineers working on either Blue Streak or Black arrow was interviewed about the project, he said something on the lines of when the Americans had a problem they threw money at it until they trampled it to death. We on the other hand went off to have a think about it over a cup of tea and plate of digestive biscuits!
For several years I worked on a NATO Working Group, and something that always came up, without fail, was that there was a massive difference in expenditure on R&D between the US and the UK, yet the UK managed to get a heck of a lot more value out of every pound spent. The biggest problem is that the UK is bloody awful at turning ideas into reality. The most impressive country I've seen at doing that is New Zealand, that's a small country that really does punch way above its weight in some areas of technology development.