411–420 of 1001 posts
I feel like the balloon takedown was seriously mishandled. Imo it should have been shot down right after it crossed our borders and before it started move over populated areas. That way there would be no surveillance and you could examine the payload. Now that it’s in the water, you may not even find it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels. There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping…
especially compared to satellites It is a lot easier to take pictures and collect data at 60,000 ft (balloon) than from a satellite in low earth orbit, which is closer to 6,000,000 ft.
https://geo-matching.com/content/new-approach-to-use-ground-...
Outside the atmosphere you would not be able to do it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically the ballon isn't moving itself in anyway at all, it instead is depending on the wind. As the atmospheric pressure lowers the maximum speed of the wind can increase greatly. For example the speed of the jet stream commonly exceeds 275 miles per hour. It looks like the strongest jet winds were closer to canada, had the jet been in the US it could have made it across the country in a day.
There was mention by the Chinese that is had some motive power of its own, or at least strongly implied when their PR said some the thing like “limited maneuvering capability”. That seems to indicate that it had some. It would a bit surprising if a payload the size of 2-3 school buses wasn’t outfitted with a reasonable amount of controllability, at least some control surfaces even if they inexplicably excluded even m…
A reserve of buoyant gas and/or some weights to drop
This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.
This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.
How can you know that?
Acknowledged and unacknowledged kills are counted separately, and it's OK to call it the first kill in the sense of acknowledged kills.
(That's my understanding anyway)
I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
China is not simply rolled out as a boogeyman. Apart from any of their ambitions, at minimum the worlds reliance on them for various resources and manufacturing capacity almost exclusively has, in the last 2.5 years, been revealed as an extreme flaw and risk to global economic stability when that resource and manufacturing pipeline is disrupted. That is, at a bare minimum, a serious problem that will take years to so…
History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
> politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' I know you're deliberately wording this to avoid a partisan angle, but I genuinely think that it's hurting your point here. There is no "contest" at play here. There are no "both sides". All this rhetoric is coming from one side of the aisle. And I agree it's bad, and hurtful, and quite frankly probably doing more to help the Chinese position on the wor…
This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.
This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.
How can you know that?