HARDCORK? Did you lose focus in the middle of writing that tortured acronym?

That next-to-last letter should be a C, unless my algorithm is way off... :-)

Thumbs up because you don't offer an more appropriate alternative :-D

Hmm , it would probably cost them one tenth of that by funding a certain program at the University of Queensland , who even when working on less then a cent in the dollar paid to their rivals are still lots of Mach ahead of the nearest US equivalent so as to speak !

You need to have an enemy to justify all the money spent on the military toybox.

The cold war was neat: a sophiisticated enemy with nukes and supersonic aircraft etc. They'd launched Spuntik and were proven to be technologically advanced. Lots of opportunity for the lab-coaters to spend up to advance military technology.

The modern enemy is portrayed as an unsophisticated camel-fiddling ay-rab so it is very hard to justify development of hypersonic aircraft to combat that lot.

9/11 must have been very frustrating for the military. They had aircraft carriers etc that could destroy any military force, yet had nothing to stop a few punks with box-cutters.

Isn't University of Queensland an oxymoron?

Bet that'll piss the grunts off! "Of course it's perfectly safe for you lot. We just wouldn't want to risk any of our highly trained pilots in the thing"

Maybe they could auction of tickets for the 1st flight or have a raffle or something.

I'll get a couple of tickets for the mother in law

Take off from a runway and "do a barrel roll at Mach 6"

That just takes a rifled barrel. Surely making it *NOT* do a barrel roll at Mach 6 after takeoff is the real challenge?

You folks absolutely crack me up! I've abandoned daily newspapers for The Register. It's much more fun and interesting. Who needs antidepressants?

...usually haul themselves home within that time frame anyway since they live within that staggering radius of Kangaroo Valley !!