Well equally where's your data? you've produce a shopping list of maintenence issues most of which are thngs that need to be done as part of routine servicing. I've accepted from the start that servicing costs are likely to be cheaper with EVs and have even been impressed that Nissan at least is not stiffing their customers completely.

Looking at the AA top 10 breakdown list, top of the list is a flat battery, then lost keys, there are three "mechanical" items in that list, the alternator, the starter motor and the clutch cable.

Misfuelling I'll accept as a ICE only fault (unless there are different incompatible charging systems for EVs) but that's not a mechanical issue. spark plugs...again is not mech. HT cables...again not mechanical, The equivalent RAC list is more of the same although they explicitly list electric cars running out of power.

Based on those lists I'd say the biggest factor in the reliability of any vehicle is the owner either doing dumb things or not servicing the vehicle properly.

Over time I've seen the electronics, sorry the electrical bits move from the bottom of the dash towards the centre console and be replaced with electronics. the current cars issues were with the CD/SATNAV/Media unit, which also did things like run the parking sensors, store country settings (everything that still worked reverted to French) This did make the replacement fairly easy (it only took me about 15 minutes to get it out), but the unit cost £1300 to replace new and you needed to go to someone who had the dealer software to encode the VIN into the unit otherwise you were driving round with it going BEEEEP every 30 seconds or so. Yes, less labour charges but having all that electronics in one unit that had to be replaced was eyewateringly expensive. The previous ticktock problem was a previous generation of the same unit but the mechanics of the cd player and the electronics were in different places. I'd expected it to be a solenoid (that's what it was in my dads old astra) and for it to take 10 muinutes and cost ~£10, not two days.

googling, nissan list service charges PETROL FROM £199 / DIESEL FROM £219 / ELECTRIC VEHICLE FROM £149 so cheaper than a petrol, assuming they're all getting serviced at the same interval.

I meant to say tyres, brakes, wheel alignment are normally wear and tear and I can't imagine they're significantly different on EVs. Brakes in particular seem to be an issue in Scotland because of the buildup of crud from the winter weather. with the bike I used to have a second set of calipers because it was easier to service them off the bike and just swap the caliper when the pads started sticking, I don't ride in winter these days.

I didn't skip engine tune up, in 30 years of driving/riding I've never had one. Never asked for one, never had one suggested, never been charged for one.
My first car got scrapped at 400,000 miles, mainly because sorting out the suspension was going to cost more than it was worth. The only work I've ever had done on engines is timing belt changes on cars and valve clearance checks on bikes, Both of which are again scheduled maintenance. Most cars have either been sold on at 200,000 miles plus or more than 6 years old and I've also run near scrappers as second cars at times,

Oil/oil filter changed
Wiper blades replacement
Replace air filter
Antifreeze added

all of the above are scheduled maintenence.
tyres, brakes, wheel alignment
I've never had a car or biked tuned, they've all had ECUs and I've been driving 30 odd years.
The claim was about about reliability, i.e. break downs not maintenence costs(*) My bet would be that the breakdown services get called out to far more electrical issues these days than they do mechanical.

(*) I'll concede that, ignoring the battery, service costs should be lower for EVs equally I'm willing to bet that the servicing costs for EV's will miraculously work out to be about the same as ICE cars, at the main dealers at least)

The last time I had a car actually break down on me was over 10 years ago (timing belt broke on a fiat panda, took about an hour to repair, cost about £20). My motorbike has had 4 recalls in the last 6 years all for electrical items, the throttle sensor position indicator has failed twice (notionally £800 a time) and the ECU has failed twice (notionally another £600 a time). The last two cars we've had have had major electronics items fail. In one case the car stopped making the "ticktock" sound when the indicators were in use and something major had to be replaced which took two days and involved removing the whole dashboard (dunno how much it cost thankfully it was still 1 week inside the warranty). The DVD/media player/satnav/convert to miles box went on the current one and it cost £120 to diagnose and we were quoted £1500 to replace it. Not having moving parts doesn't guarantee greater reliability and you know what happens when you assume.

Did they use the ususal ruse of having the First officer affecting a Peter Sellers Indian voice on the radio and pretending to be a cruise ship or did they come up with something new?

Can you give an example of this? all through the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, WWII, the cold war and the Falklands ship sizes for classes have generally gone up during or as a result of lessons learned during the war ( e.g. batch 2 and 3 type 42s vs HMS Sheffield) and then gone down again because of cost issues during the peace, or at least perceived cost, generally steel and air is much cheaper than people and systems on modern vessels so there is an argument for building them bigger than you actually need so you have space to expand into.

What tends to happen is that having built a ship, if you take it to war people hang all kinds of new stuff on it all of which need consubambles, spares and new bodies to work the kit. You end up with a ship that's crowded and if you're not careful top heavy. The classic example being your 1930 RN destroyer which in the course of WWII was likely to get RADAR, more AA guns, SONAR, more AA guns, degaussing equipment, more AA guns, HDFD, more AA guns, hedgehog, you can never have enough AA guns, squid...generally post WWII ships got bigger.
The largest ships in most fleets today are bigger than their predecessors.

I doubt that they'd have any objections as such (well I suspect Spain will be cagey) but there will have to be negotiations over the UK's opt-outs (the Euro, Schengen, etc) and the UK's rebate. I can't see the EU countries pushing the Euro issue that much but the rebate is currently an issue and I suspect the Schengen opt-out will require some quid pro quos.

It depends on the leader. In N.I. the british army had a policy of leaving one IRA leader alone because his signals security was so bad. if they're have arrested or killed him they'd have lost a huge intelligence lead as whoever replaced him would probably be more competent. At one point this got to the stage that one of them was shagging his wife to keep her quiet as she was threatening to leave him and this was affecting his "work". This isn't new, the OSS produced a manual on sabotage in WWII which included advice for agents in french industries to try and get incompetent managers promoted in order to reduce efficiency.

You will damage your eyesight...don't do, it opticians make enough as it is.

No I mean the RAF pilots flying the Sea Harriers with 800 and 801 Squadron. specifically Flt Lts Barton, Leeming and Morgan who were mentioned in the post I replied to.

The 21s were never meant to be much more than a short term buy for the RN and had little space for additional equipment, that said they lasted from 1974 up to 1994 and were regarded quite favourably by the crew, though the very basic missile fit was always an issue after the 1980s

The batch 1 type 42 were very much built down to a cost and Sheffields commissioning Captain (one Sandy Woodward) had a list of complaints which were almost the main points of difference between the batch 1s and later ships.

Thankfully the lunatic idea of having them coal fired didn't get much further than a D.K.Brown sketch of a 4 funneled type 42

I meant the RAF pilots not the GR3s

And you were doing so well up to this point... Sheffield wasn't an Aluminium ship, not even aluminium superstructure http://www.hazegray.org/faq/smn6.htm#F7
As the link above states none of the RN ships sunk in the Falklands were sunk because of burning aluminium.

In Sheffields case they lost the firefighting ring main more or less immediately and they abandoned when the heat conducted by the steel hull was causing secondary fires in other parts of the ship

At one point in 100 days Woodward describes how he has to find out if the entrance to Falkland sound has been mined or not. Not having minesweepers his only choice is to choose one of the cheap and cheerful type 21's and see if it gets blown up or not. The ships Captain, Christopher Craig, knowing exactly what was (specifically not) being asked of him pointedly asked Woodward if he wanted him "to zigzag about a bit" to make sure the channel was clear. It was and Alacrity survived. I think Woodward described this action as being very brave and worthy of the highest awards for gallantry, but strangely only if it all had gone wrong.