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0 pointsgerdesj10mo ago0 comments

Well that is rather obvious. I doubt PHP has RTOS type guarantees built in.

Funny you should mention stabilizer control (I don't think that is an aeronautic term). I recently visited the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight hanger at RAF Conningsby. It turns out that the Hurricane and Spitfire had unusual (by today's standards but normal for the times) ways of applying trim to control surfaces.

One of them - you glue a piece of string on top of an aileron and on the other you smack it with a hammer to bend it (that must be the Spitfire) and then you test it out and keep fettling until the job is done.

Well, that's roll sorted out, I'm not sure what trim for the other two axes (pitch, yaw) involves. Probably knicker elastic.

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mschuster9110mo ago

> Well that is rather obvious. I doubt PHP has RTOS type guarantees built in.

It's not multithreaded by default (as long as you're not running it in an environment like Apache), no async stuff going on, so the major roadblocks for real-time guarantees are already out of the picture.

The things I would be worried about is garbage collection and array handling. The former should be able to be configured (or in the worst case, rewritten) in a way that provides upper bounds on performance, people have already managed to do that for Java, the latter should be manageable by enforcing boundaries in the user code (e.g. disallow stuff like $foo[]='bar' that dynamically extends the length of an array).

somat10mo ago

Nothing special about that, here is the factory set trim tab on the p-47.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxWKOHPPNlM&t=298

gerdesjOP10mo ago

Beautiful aircraft there, very shiny.

We didn't have time to polish ours like that what with the enemy shooting at them all the time. Oh and most of them were made of wood and wishes! The Hurricane was a bit of a crossover from WWI to WW2, yet rather a lot of Brits and Poles (int al) flew them against the Luftwaffe, who had rather more modern ME109s etc. It must have been a bit of a pain to see your enemy deploy a cannon when you only have a .303.

There is absolutely no doubt that if the US hadn't rocked up, we would have been ... well I'm not sure what Europe might mean nowadays if things had been different.

Possibly, our most lethal aircraft was the Mosquito. It was made of wood and twin enginned. So it was light and very, very fast and could pack a real punch - a quad cannon or lots of machine guns in the nose and carry bombs too. Parts were made in furniture factories and garden sheds - it was totally mad and rather hard to target manufacturing.

I think that the Nazi regime gave two kills for downing a Mosquito because it was considered a bit of a handful.

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