The QEII class was designed to be configurable as either CATOBAR or STOVL. Indeed, the Prince of Wales was intended to be a CATOBAR layout but that was scrapped quite recently, and the ‘French version’ that never came to fruition was going to field the Rafale. I believe the pair are hypothetically convertible to…

I grew up in the Canadian Rockies and in high school I drove an old Windsor 5.0, and I couldn’t afford winter tires. I was one hell of an idiot at that age, let me tell you, but thankfully I never wrapped it around a tree.

Occasionally I still drive RWD vehicles in the winter (like my truck) but at least now I have…

I’ve spent a good bit of time living between the 50 and 60 degree latitudes, and I’m a huge advocate of even mandatory snow tires for the winter months in harsh in winter climates. However, living in these places, I’ve also experienced freak snowstorms in the middle of summer when you have all-seasons on your vehicle…

It was time to re-engine the B-52 fleet in 1970. Now I would practically term it an emergency.

Don’t quote me, but I believe it’s only the GM trucks with Allison 1000 transmissions that have a PTO option. So that’d only be diesel owners who ticked the extra box too. But the Duramax / Allison combo was still pretty common.

GM and FCA trucks (at least the HD models) have PTO provisions. As do Unimogs for those Europeans.

The location of the PTO is problematic, but nothing you couldn’t overcome with a little clever packaging. The main reason why nobody does it is that nobody wants to. Even if your final job requires a lot of shaft work, it’s way more versatile for most applications to use electrical power or hydraulics or pneumatics as…

The military is obliged to refuse unlawful orders. Pentagon lawyers went back and forth with the Executive on the issue of ‘enhanced interrogation’ for quite awhile before they gave up and gave the job to the CIA instead.

Fun fact: the white paper concluded that at the time of its writing (1957), Canada was the most technologically capable of potential fourth powers, but least politically likely. It had sufficient scientific experience (having participated in the Manhattan project and having had operational nuclear reactors since…

Like most questions, the answer here is ‘it’s complicated’. Many Russian and Chinese equivalents of American weapon systems are cheaper, as many have said in the comments, because of the technology in the product. When you look at systems of comparable sophistication, say from European defense companies, often the…

Its an engineering necessity of having rigid, 12.5 meter cars and a station with a tight track radius. Whereas the centre of the car has a 13" clearance, the ends are within an inch or two of touching. This is not in itself negligent. What was negligent was that the platform extenders did not have any safety mechanism…

I don’t think that’s true. From my understanding, the knob seeks a constant trailer angle relative to the tow vehicle. If you, stopped, set a knob position it will seek that trailer angle and maintain it, which would require a minimum of one steering correction.

In my home province (Canadia talk!) there were a handful of unmanned scales (little more than a seven-segment display on an extra-wide shoulder) scattered around specifically intended for non-commercial vehicles to check their weights. Pretty handy actually.

Germans call a truck slowly passing another truck “elephant racing”.

That is usually expressed as a fraction of your available credit though. $3,000 on a $10,000 limit is fine. $3000 on a $3500 limit will hurt you.

“Empty” is quite a relative term though, isn’t it? Rural Canada in the winter, I’m going to be viewing half a tank as empty, and a quarter tank tank as a critical emergency.

Seriously? If F-22s were that cheap to operate, they’d never leave the air.

There are some professors who make millions off of textbooks (Frank White’s Fluid Mechanics and James Stewart’s Calculus immediately come to mind), but this is usually only the case if a particular book has taken on a nation-wide following. White’s Fluid Mechanics is so ubiquitous that my grad office has copies in…

Canada does so at CFL games. All other major leagues in the US and Canada aside from the NFL and CFL are technically international though, so they all get a pass.

This will vary a lot by field, context, and where you are in your career. A lot of times if you’re publishing several works as part of a larger project, citing yourself is critical not to credit yourself, but to describe to the reader how the current paper is actually new and unique from the older ones. Alternatively,…