I also like the Force Field for tanks(Link).

The only sad part is:

The MoD has now handed a contract to Lockheed Martin, the American company, to make a demonstration version of the British invention.

Prototypes of this custard have been fed to generations of British schoolchildren. It is heartening to learn that their sacrifice was not in vain

That's just cool. Reading the description of the device in the linked article, I have to wonder if it can be defeated--or at least reduced in effectiveness--by simply changing the payload of the RPGs from copper to a less conductive metal. I'm sure Q and his boys have already thought about this, of course, but science reporting always make me skeptical.

To be clear, by "device", I meant the tank forcefield in Tim Carpenter's comment, not the bulltproof custard.

This is why I lurk...

I have to wonder if it can be defeated--or at least reduced in effectiveness--by simply changing the payload of the RPGs from copper to a less conductive metal.

No doubt, but as any English schoolboy could tell you, the obvious counter-counter measure is to add bullet proof rhubarb to the bullet proof custard first...

For those who want to know more about the principles behind the vest, it's explained here.

Yes Tim, can we Brits finally make some money out of all the things we invented first for a bloody change?

Re the Churchill story. It's not exposing on Hampstead Heath. It's rogering a Guardsman in a park

The rest is the same though.....

Another (no doubt wildly apocryphal) story attributed to Churchill:

During the second world war, the Soviets approached the British with a rather strange request: for a substantial number of condoms, to be 50 centimetres long by 10 centimetres wide.

When this request was relayed to Churchill, he thought about it for a moment and then said "Make them! Make them, and have the boxes marked: Made in England, size: medium".

Simon Jester,

I'm guessing that the Russians wanted the big condoms to keep gun barrels dry in wet conditions.

In fact I refuse to consider any other hypothesis.

I would imagine that the "forcefield" would be equally effective against low conductivity materials, as their higher electrical resistance would mean that they would heat up more quickly and reach the temperatures at which they vaporise more quickly. I believe also that one of the interesting attributes of high voltage electricity ("several thousand volts") is that most materials become conductors to some extent or another. It would be very difficult to find a material which was both dense enough to be a decent penetrator in liquid form (which is how Monroe effect devices like the RPG operate) and a non conductor. I would suggest that the ideal method of defeating this device would be a high velocity, high melting point hard penetrator, eg a APDSFS shot. This is of course not what the device is designed to protect against in the first place.

Simon: surely you jest?:-)

Natalie: "This is my rifle, this is my gun..."

Natalie, they just wanted to put water in them, and throw them at the Germans! You have to take your laughs wherever you can in war, after all.

In his introduction to the Oxford Book of British Political Anecdotes, Paul Johnson reported (as an example of apocrypha) a story told by Sir Harold Nicholson. According to Nicholson, it was Sir Basil Thompson, head of Special Branch at Scotland Yard, till on New Year's Eve 1926 he was arrested for indecent exposure in Hyde Park.

Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to intervene by Thompson's friends. After quizzing them on the exact circumstances, he said "Sir Basil Thompson, a distinguished public servant, seventy years of age, exposing himself in Hyde Park in two degrees of frost - makes yer proud to be an Englishman!"

In fact Thompson retired from the Yard in 1921 at the age of sixty.