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Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

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Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#91
I mean, cool and all. But I didnt have to do that to know where it was. I stood outside that hanger (with a B-2 inside) in 1989 at Northrop's 50th anniversary airshow.

If I can remember that, from 30+ years ago, I'm pretty sure the russians/chinese/whateverese also know.

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#93
post #36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trick happened for real with the HWNDU stunt back in 2017. 4channers found the flag based on the stars in the livestream, along with matching aircraft contrails to flight radar maps. https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q

remember when 4chan figured out the location of a terrorist training camp from one of their PR photos and called in a literal airstrike? I like how 4chan is sometimes described as weaponized autism. https://imgur.com/N7DwWP1?r

Remember when imgur was marketed as an imagehost that doesn't suck? Now i can't read 2/3 of the text because it's just a blurry mess if I'm not manually changing url parameters. I'm using Firefox on Android and I can't find another method to get the full image. Am I missing some button to show the full res image?

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#94

Related unrelated question : how come this is public? F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities. I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc. Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there eno…

I've read some things that suggest the B-21 may not offer radical new capabilities (over say, the B-2) but it will be way way cheaper to build and operate. There were only 21 B-2s ever built. The Air Force has already ordered 100 B-21s.

That number will shrink. There were supposed to be 100+ B2s and no B1Bs.

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#95
post #70

I feel like the entire thread should have led off with "This is in fact a publicly known hangar in Palmdale and this was known as public information as soon as the unveiling event occurred, and thus this is just an exercise to show how locating the spot could have been possible from just this photo as a technical demonstration." Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news'…

It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation. The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale. This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do. Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about…

Also all they do is cut it down to a wide band that covers 12 or so states, then compare against known bases (not shown) to narrow it down

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#96
post #70

I feel like the entire thread should have led off with "This is in fact a publicly known hangar in Palmdale and this was known as public information as soon as the unveiling event occurred, and thus this is just an exercise to show how locating the spot could have been possible from just this photo as a technical demonstration." Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news'…

It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation. The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale. This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do. Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about…

> It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.

Off topic, but it would be really cool if someone build a hobbyist astronavigationsystem using a something like a Raspberry Pi and a camera with a fisheye lens. Sort of an amateur https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/nortronics....

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#98
He seems to use the hour estimate of 1:30am being a time when very few satellites are likely overhead as a sort of confirming factor. (I guess because many satellites are sun-synchronous around noon, and the USAF would purposely time the photo to not expose the aircraft to observation).

But is that a very strong confirming factor? Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imagery? Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime?

Re: Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

#99

He seems to use the hour estimate of 1:30am being a time when very few satellites are likely overhead as a sort of confirming factor. (I guess because many satellites are sun-synchronous around noon, and the USAF would purposely time the photo to not expose the aircraft to observation). But is that a very strong confirming factor? Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imag…

Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime

Aren't airplanes built entirely in a hangar? Especially secret ones?

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