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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

#101
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same exact boat as you. FF Focus on Android and I can't read anything on that post. If you long click the image you see some url parameters, but when I tried to play with them they only made the image smaller and lower quality lol. What ever happened to imgur linking directly to the full size image?

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

#102
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same exact boat as you. FF Focus on Android and I can't read anything on that post. If you long click the image you see some url parameters, but when I tried to play with them they only made the image smaller and lower quality lol. What ever happened to imgur linking directly to the full size image?

[deleted]

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

#103

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…

I forget where, but there was a video I was watching that claimed the US was so far ahead in tech that instead of letting others know our capabilities we play with other countries by "accidentally" leaving things open to satellites which makes other countries trying to copy us go nuts trying to reverse engineer nonsense.

That comment was after mentioning how the "super sonic" plane built for the latest Top Gun was probably left out, on purpose, so it'd confuse adversaries on what the US is actually working on.

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

#104
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

- Open imgur page

- Desktop mode

- Change the TLD back to ".com"

- tap image with finger

Sounds simple, but I figured it out only after running into 3 or 4 other dead ends. For example, desktop mode needs to be in place for forcing the TLD to stick on my phone.

Fantastic.

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

#105

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…

Historically, yes, they’ve scheduled outdoor activity to avoid satellite overflight, if we’re not misled by books.

Maybe it’s not a strong factor here, because it was a few days before public announcement anyway. But you’d expect them to follow the same protocol or at least pick a more convenient time than 1:30am if they were not.

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

#106
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same exact boat as you. FF Focus on Android and I can't read anything on that post. If you long click the image you see some url parameters, but when I tried to play with them they only made the image smaller and lower quality lol. What ever happened to imgur linking directly to the full size image?

Add a 0 to maxwidth (6400) and you can read it.

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

#108

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…

The most important benefit of the public announcement is that showing successfully completed projects like this helps the defense industry with recruitment and encourages more students to become aeronautical and mechanical engineers.

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

#109
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…

I hadn’t realized that much of the public doesn’t know Edwards. Then again, I’m a SoCal native with a father who was an aerospace engineer…

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

#110

With the casual change from "34-35 degrees" to "lets draw a line at 34 degrees" followed by the "and this is where the press release was" I got the vibe that this was parallel construction. Still some good sleuthing, don't get me wrong, but still.

Also goes to show you the danger of tunnel vision. If they flew one to some air base outside DC for the roll out the author would be shooting from the hip and who knows what facility he'd have zero'd in on. Sure it might have been the same one because "the same facility as the B2" is an easy just-so story but you don't really know with any certainty.

It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.
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