FOD
Yes, that particular bit of moronitude was a classic, but I thought it was Stella Creasy (another social worker type) who was struggling with that.
Piltdown
One of the nice things about QEC is that the size and capacity built into the original design means that we don't have to start again - far from it. In fact, all those wittering about the ship being too large (and therefore allegedly too expensive) should actually be thinking about how that one piece of risk-reduction (partly because the required sortie rate demanded a large ship anyway) has removed the highest risk bit from the programme (F35B). There's a major difference between cost driven by ship size and cost driven by programme slip/risk, which is where most of the escalation has occurred. Most of the programme slip/risk escalation has occurred because of fallacious assumptions about the size of the ships driving the cost.
Last edited by Not_a_boffin; 29th Nov 2011 at 11:39.
Reason: Moment of clarity