Hi fdr, been a bit AWOL these last few days so apologies for not replying before. Thanks for the summary on the 2 guys ......................... don't think I'd disagree with anything you say there tho I'm no expert in such analyses. I tend to simplify it down (for my own benefit) to people being in one of 3 states "1 - Mad", "2 - Barking Mad" and "3 - A complete Fruit-loop". :8 On the "H 'n 'H Scale" the 2 guys you mention are .............. - erm, so as not upset the Mods I'll simply say 1 is "1" gusting "2" and the other is "3+"!!!!!!!! :ok:

Anyway, re this:- "Quote: Originally Posted by Hot 'n' High Sadly, the same thoughts were voiced re a certain perpetrator of a SMO............. https://www.pprune.org/images/smilies/yeees.gif", I think you misunderstood me. I was responding to a prior Post which suggested that "general ill-health" might mean DT does not see his term out in the WH. I was just making the observation that, at the start of the infamous "SMO", the same hopes re Vlad were aired as a being a swift solution to the Ukraine War. Of course, we all know where we are there..........

Hope that clears that up! Cheers, H 'n' H

Someone plug a US appliance into British mains power?

”What’s that smell?…… Is that smoke? …..Is that flame!?
”Fire! Fire! Fire! Help! Help! Help!”

Had a couple of dipsticks for making Tea in the middle of the night - discovered that a USA one would boil a cup of water in Kinshasa about 10 times faster than a Brit one…worked well until it went bang.

Around 50 years ago, I bought a 'Realistic 1000 Watt Foreign Travel Voltage Converter (273-1402A)' from RadioShack, to run a 1000W electric wok which I'd bought in the BX at Offutt. It works OK....ish, but I'm not convinced that the output really is 110v as it takes quite a while for the wok to heat up. I also tried it with a 110v coffee percolator - again it worked, but took an age for the coffee to be ready!

In most of the world electrical goods are built as 110/220V - 50/60Hz as standard.

It was only when I lived in the California and bought a reasonably expensive HiFi I noted the power block was just marked as 110V and phoned the service centre who sent me a 110/22V block free of charge.

They explained that with most of the world it was easier to just supply a dual voltage un it across markets, but the USA was a large enough market that the few cents difference added up and made it worthwhile producing a US specific supply.

You can buy cheap 220-110V voltage converters of course, but that doesn't get around the 50/60Hz problem.

Many years ago while 'travelling' with the RAF I became the proud owner of a dual voltage HF Radio - The Sony ICF 7600D. The only snag was that there was a switch on the adaptor where you had to select the input voltage. I had just spent some time in USA so the switch was in the 110V position. Next stop was Germany and I forgot to select 220V on the switch. It wasn't a spectacular overvoltage but neither the adaptor nor the radio never worked again! I tried the radio on batteries but no joy.

6 decimal places precision, but we don't know the accuracy. We probably care more about the latter.

6 decimal places is just a number chosen by whoever does the conversion - it could be 12 places but as boaclhryul states it's meaningless - and that's without getting into issues of geodesy (my life isn't long enough)

One of the most aggravating things in the data acquisition world is trying to convince requestors that you can't make a 5% measurement more accurate by sampling it with 14-bit resolution. (Yes, that actually happened.)

When my father first moved to Menorca, we found that some parts of the apartment were still on the old 127v system and the rest was on 230v. That was fun....NOT!

A friend of ours was so concerned about a stable power supply to his top end HiFi syatem that he bought a couple of autotransformers. These sampled the input voltage and a motorised device moved the secondary windings around the toroidal primary windings so that the output would be a constant 230v - at least, I think that's how it worked. But the Menorcan power grid had been improved by then and the input voltage was always rock steady anyway.

Huge thread drift

The Straight Stuff
What’s going on With Shipping in the Strait and Gulf
Week 8 Recap.

Don’t most power blocks put out DC? In which case the frequency of the input shouldn’t matter that much. I would think 110v at 50Hz would work

What say we accept a short circuit end to this jibber jabber about AC electrics and get back to the topic of the Thread.

Off topic posts are not electrifying reading.

Oo look, a squirrel!

Its all gone awfully quiet on Iran. Is this the new normal?

Trump may be cueing in that decapitation works better when you're ready to put boots on the ground and put your own folks in charge:pEast Asia might be inclined to allow tankers to etch a sketch through their various territorial waters so that they can get oil delivered;)​​​​​​​

Correct, it simply gives you better resolution.

Pakistan and India are missing a trick here - they could do a roaring trade if they took in Iranian oil at one of their storage sites then sold it on to other nations...

The logistics of doing that is pretty lousy. The Islamabad–Tehran–Istanbul (ITI) freight train service was moving towards being back in business last year. Iran is standard gauge, Pakistan is broad gauge as is India. A suezmax tanker replacement takes a number of large rail cars, and there are roughly 25 tankers a day each way. The rail system takes time to travel from the available ports in Iran, to Pakistan, and then if they are friendly at the border, on to India. That works for Iran, maybe, but they would be hard pressed to have the rail stock available to do that, the shipment is one way, return is empty, so the total number of rail cars is "rather a lot". If they started pooling resources today, it would take some time to make that work, and it would still be open to sanctions, and to interdiction. If someone wants to mess with the rice bowl of others, they can and will.

You're not thinking like a Pakistani or Indian businessmen. The idea is to ship the oil in ships along the coastline to the nearest coastal oil storage site, of which there must be a few, offload it into storage, then sell it on to whoever. You could even to do ship-to-ship transfers in a suitable harbour or anchorage. No trains required, and Uncle Sam would be hard-pressed to keep tabs on - let alone interdict - those involved.

Logistics is like the rocket equation, hard to avoid the math.

• Iranian freight trains run below 140 km/hr,
• Pakistan freight trains are 120 km/hr and below.

The distance from Bandar Abass to Karachi is no less than 2800 kms...
Trains gotta go there, and then gotta go back... and in between, they have to change gauge at Zahedan. Plan on 4-day round trip as a bare minimum.
To match say 25 x Suez Max floaters, that is around 1100 large oil tanker cars, per day, so that gives a need for around 4400 tanker cars to be able to move the daily bread and forgive all x-passes etc, and deliver unto caesar etc.

Each of the tracks is, like oil line pumping stations a fixed target. The trains are better, as the tracks can be repaired and relayed fairly quickly, although bridges and viaducts take longer, but replacing of rolling stock takes a bit of effort.

Being polite and putting Humpty Dumpty back to-g-eth-er again seems like a better plan, but it takes some good will on both sides, and there is a distinct lack of that emanating from the building beside the rubble of the east wing.



https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d301f304db.jpg

Quote:

---

Iran declares it's 'not bound' by UN Law of the Sea over the Strait of Hormuz

---

And if they were a party to it, I doubt that would change what they've been doing.

Salute!

Without a new thread, which might appear over at the Blast, I just saw a great address concerning the direction two allies, separated by a common language, should go as they meet the challenges both face.

I toast his majesty, King Charles III. Here, here...

Gums...

Thanks, Gums.

And this link is good to see regarding how the UK and US military are working closely together! :ok: A change to have some good news for once!

Pakistan opens up road trade routes into Iran amid Hormuz blockade
 

Not exactly aviation, but following on the "land route" discussion recently...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/...ormuz-blockade

"Pakistan has opened six overland transit routes for goods destined for Iran, formalising a road corridor through its territory as thousands of containers remain stranded at Karachi port because of the United States blockade of Iranian ports and ships trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. ..."

https://archive.is/20260429212348/ht...e-against-iran

US Seeks to Deploy Hypersonic Missile For the First Time Against Iran

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11991

The U.S. Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW): Dark Eagle

Axios: https://www.axios.com/2026/04/30/tru...iefing-centcom

If you are going to operationally test a weapon, may as well do it there.

Less paperwork. No environmental impact studies.

I have always found Perun's analysis of current military conflicts interesting and insightful. This is his latest "lessons learned" on the Iran war:

Well if Iran says they are not bound by. the law of the sea. That puts them back to the daze of sail….Territorial waters were then limited to 3 miles ( a max muzzle loading cannon shot.) …bit of a comedown from 12 miles.

See Sal’s “ What the Ship “ report.
He comments on Law of the Sea and Territorial Waters.

The comment about bunker fuel shortages is an interesting twist.

Iran is a signatory to UNCLOS, but has never ratified the treaty. The 2019 RQ-4A shootdown SE of the SoH was 8.3nm from Iranian land, which is within a "12-mile limit" which is not the distance that Iran is entitled to, being they are a signatory and ratified on the 1958 Geneva Convention, which is a 3-nautical mile territorial limit only. Seems you can have your falafel and your hummus too.

Iran promulgated a law, "Act on the Marine Areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Oman Sea", on May 2, 1993. The analysis done on the law was it is inconsistent with UNCLOS, and introduces additional restrictions on innocent passage that are not based on the 1958 GC. All up, seems there is a bit of wooly headed thinking going on downtown.

Can't say that after the attack by the Benny and Don show on the leadership of Iran, and sundry other high value targets, like a girls school (oops, how to win hearts and minds) that Iran didn't feel a bit aggrieved and turning off the spigot of the SoH seemed like a good idea, and was an expected outcome going back to the days that the last shah took up chemo offshore. Does seen that they can whinge within their own 3nm territorial waters, that is fair, if they want the 12nm limit they kind of need to put ink on a convention and follow the rules, and the 1993 Act of Marine Areas needs a bit of massaging to comply with UNCLOS. Their choice.

In the interim, on the assumption that convoys and point defence from rowdy stuff is unpalatable, then as much as it really pains me to say it, Kapt Kaos is not wrong with locking down the SoH, but giving a free pass to Vlads mates boats, and any other vessels seems to be inconsistent, which has its own consistency, after all 180 tweets with every one being contradictory of an evening and early hours suggests that consistency is only found in KFC batter.

India, China etc will be unhappy, and if y'all intend to do a rinse and repeat of the shootout at the OK coral, making friends with your friends might be a good starting point, rather than making friends with your historical and actual enemies. It may be that being a bit old fashioned today makes the view that a country that gives targeting information to another country that then attacks your assets and troops in the field on the basis of that information, is probably not one of your besties... remains a point of curiousness that the hawks in DC are quite happy with that state of affairs, and it does leave a question as to which side the troops think their lords and masters are actually on. Historically, (western front mutiny 1917 etc) it doesn't end well when the troops consider that their bosses are batting for the other team, or disinterested in their welfare. Given the budget of the VA, the food being provided to the sailors on their skimmers in the gulf, vs P1$$head Petes food bill for caviar and lobster tails which is sufficient to buy an F35 over a few months, they have a justifiable point of interest.

The USA has not ratified UNCLOS either - just sayin'. They signed it, in 1994, after concerns about Part XI were resolved, but have not ratified it.

The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, led by the USS Boxer (LHD-4) with the embarked 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) cleared the Malacca strait today heading for the Gulf.

That's about 7-10 days sailing depending what speed they make, and if they stop off at Diego Garcia to tipoff tanks and pick munitions and supplies.


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....de0b018437.png

We have discussed pipelines as alternate routes out of the Gulf here before but this article encompasses the current situation pretty comprehensively:

https://theconversation.com/what-alt...-hormuz-281805

However, the situation is more severe than the implied shortfall in deliveries:

1. Some 200 - 300 tankers have been taken out of the logistics supply route by dint of them being trapped in the Gulf.

2. Previously, Iranian tankers were not being blockaded as they now are. Quantity unknown.

3. Much of the product needed for Asia is now expected to come from N America. This will involve longer routes this taking up more tanker capacity.

4. Russian ability to supply is being slowly destroyed by Ukraine.

Freight rates are rising and there are reports of shortages of bunker fuel. National reserves are being consumed. As an example of the seriousness of the current situation there are reports of used VLCCs being sold at greater than new build costs.

Frankly, it's not looking good.

Glad to hear this. Friday 1st MAY 2026

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/ir...l-prices-may-1


That came in under the wire of the 60 day limit of the war powers act, well done. All done and dusted, back to normal, trade resumes through the straits I would assume. OPERATION EPIC FURY, one for the history books, and leading to PEACE IN OUR TIME.

Not so glad to hear this though, also Friday 1st MAY 2026, just a few hours later....




Well, there will be need for a new operation name I guess.

Stary tuned, we appear to have a Groundhog Day event developing, the 1: 60 rule being applied to global conflict, not just pilot navigation/geometry.

Salute!

If Iran doesn't renounce nuclear weapons, then the world must decide its position.
I don't think U.S. will accept any thing less. Power plants, yes, and U.S. will help.
That has been the U.S. position since day one, and I can't unnerstan why many don't recognize that is:
No nukes, but all the standard uranium and help they need for power plants and medical purposes. PERIOD!

Gums sends...

gums, that was the intent behind the 2015 deal...and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That would be so cool. Should I awaken you, or shall I let you keep dreaming? :}

Operation Epic FUBAR had built into it the small problem that Iran could try to 'wait it out' and see if they could make it to the 60 day finish line...which appears to have been a part of their strategy.
The next week's follow up to that latest War Powers conflict in Congress should be entertaining.

Meanwhile, someone is positioning the Marines to do something...thank you ORAC...the question is, what?

lars: thank you for your incisive commets as regards shipping.

Salute!
Not dreaming, Wolf, and two months ago I went back and read the 2015 thing(JCPOA) and a presentation by Obama. It makes for a good bed time fairy tale for your grand daughter. I recommend reading this. And recall that U.S. administration later delievered a zillion bucks cash to Iran by Kerry. Think it helped Iran procede in their efforts?

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/328996

Gums sends...