441–450 of 1001 posts
How does a surveillance balloon get the collected data back to where it is analyzed and used? I suspect the data is relayed by satellite (unless there are collection sites within the US). Which Chinese satellites are able to cover the US?
Im pretty impressed that it made it all the way across the continent in a couple days, i had no idea high altitude balloons could move that fast.
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From your point of view, I can see how China is bad and the USA is good. But ask someone whose country got invaded by the USA or whose bloody dictator got supported by the USA. Over here in Latinamerica we still remember the horrible things that the USA did. It seems to me (but I could have a false perception) that China is a horrible bully in their corner of the world (nine dash line and, of course their will to inv…
That's what they did to Tibet for example and they absolutely are an extreme ongoing threat to Taiwan
China doesn’t want US military bases on their side of the Himalayas. It remained an autonomous region until a bunch of clowns proposed putting US military assets there.
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Wouldn’t you expect video to surface of f-22s in action?
Ukraine launches a few rockets and a stealth f-22 off the coast can guide it in.
Something like this seems plausible here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62500560
There are some alternative theories (small drones painting targets), but imo it’s just as plausible a stealth plane 50 miles away gave a missile some coordinates
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Do you really believe the USAF and rest of the military and 3 letter agencies had not already intercepted/jammed/hacked the comms link? By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.
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If anything I think the USA needs to double its military spending and increase the size of its navy and international dominance.
North America is safe and will continue, even if the whole world burns or even ICBMs are deployed towards the major cities.
I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses. I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story. But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion? I ask simply becaus…
The ballon was at 60k feet and eye witnesses said it had the same apparent size in the sky as passenger jets flying nearby at 30k feet.
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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…