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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

#171

Post by whywhywouldyou »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #140

There's a few highly suspect details in the way the author got the 34-35 degree estimate. Maybe he was just really lucky and the errors cancelled out, but don't count on using his method to produce similar results. Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case. The horizon does…

I'm sure you're correct, as the whole thing reads like "look how smart I am".

1. Extraneous details about satellites not being overhead at night -- as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

3. Says at the end "(this data is all public now)". Making it sound like he made the data public through his top notch sleuthing. It should read "this data was all public a week prior to my analysis".

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

#172

Post by wutwutwutwut »

pash wrote: post #166

Northrop Grumman announced in September that they would unveil the B-21 at Palmdale this week [0]. The location was not a secret. 0. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/20/251965...

Twitter thread said the same thing, or am I missing something?

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

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

vba616 wrote: post #167
mgfist wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has retired planes decades ago that are superior to the best Russia has today, so no I doubt we really care about Russia's thoughts. China maybe.

Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?

> Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?

“Drones” covers a wide range of things, from a Tu-141 to a Shahed-136 to a improvised grenade-dropping quadcopter to the MQ-1/9/20 Predator/Reaper/Avenger series to tbe X-47B and the (maybe soon) unmanned operation capacity of the B-21.

Some capability sets are widely enough available to be seen as commodities, some are available on the export market, but from a narrow range of suppliers who provide them very selectively, and some represent unique capacities.

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

#175

Post by gateorade »

mberning wrote: post #83

I wonder how long this thing has existed. Or if it is even “current gen”. The existence of the f117 and b2 were not acknowledged for a long time.

The existence of the b2 was always acknowledged from early in its development, just like the b21 was. The primary purpose for strategic bombers like the b21 and the b2 is deterrence, and deterrence doesn’t really work if it isn’t known about. The f117 on the other hand was a tactical aircraft that was built in anticipation of a sudden need to precisely strike a very specific target no matter how well defended. For that purpose it needed to remain unacknowledged. It was also the first stealth aircraft and presented a larger leap from existing aircraft than the b-2 did at the time.

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

#176

Post by gateorade »

Guthur wrote: post #142

This is quite the boondoggle, not a lot of change out of billion dollars per aircraft, remember that as you work yourself to death. "Stealth" has such a limited life span of utility. Even in the 90s Serbian air defence managed to acquire and shoot down "stealth" aircraft. It required humint but that's part of a real theatre of war.

This is objectively false though. We could take a deep dive into the relevance of the Serbian shoot down but it’s kind of irrelevant.

The fact of the matter is, stealth technology means that an aircraft needs to be significantly closer to a radar for it to be detected compared to a normal aircraft. That also means it has to be closer still for a threat radar to develop a weapons quality track. Theres not really any known radar technology that can mitigate this, it’s basic physics. It’s much easier to see an object on radar that returns orders of magnitude more energy to the radar.

Stealth does not a limited utility. In fact it’s rapidly going to become an absolute bare minimum for any tactical aircraft.

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

#177

Post by timoteostewart »

samstave wrote: post #160
gmiller123456 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to speculate on what someone did or didn't know, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and just say he was really lucky. My main point was just don't expect similar results if you try it yourself.

Yeah, but when did he know it? (god i hope you get this joke)

What’s more, there’s an 18-minute gap on the tape!

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

#178

Post by anovikov »

In fact, knowing the moment photo was taken from EXIF, there was no need to "plot the line". They could point the exact location by using orientation of the stars - stellar time (assuming the horizon is level which, in the airfield, is a very very good assumption to make).

Procedure is as follows:

Right ascension of the culminating star ("celestial longitude", taken from the star catalog/star map, of any star which is right above the celestial pole/"Polar star"), is the stellar time.

Knowing date (from EXIF), you get local solar time (which is equal to the stellar time on the spring solstice day, then makes a 24 hour loop over the year).

Difference between local time found this way and UTC time (taken from EXIF), gives longitude, because the Earth is round.

If EXIF does not contain the time zone, that gives 3 points in the U.S., one for each time zone, but it must be super easy to pick one. But most probably, EXIF contains the time zone.

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

#179

Post by justsomehnguy »

thunderbird120 wrote: post #116
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I doubt it. The B-2 was cut because the cold war ended and because it was absurdly expensive to maintain thanks to its 1980s stealth tech. The radar-absorbent material used for the B-2 degraded very quickly and it's a large aircraft, so that means absolutely constant work to keep it functioning as intended. The B-2s are based out of Missouri and when they go on a mission they fly all the way to the other side of the…

> and no one to use them against

Oh, you can use them just as they were used - to do the things B-52, or hell, even B-29 could do. /snark

> being hunted by a bunch of nearly undetectable aircraft which can be anywhere at anytime and can each carry more than a dozen large anti-ship missiles

Now this is a question. My memory was rusty so I consulted Wikipedia and looks like there is not that many options.

SM6 is too weak and doesn't yet have AS capability, LRASM exists with a proper qualities (speed and payload) but is quite big even for B-1. And Tomahawk with no AS cap. and ... not fast.

So there is a question about "a dozen large anti-ship missiles" though it can be mitigated with a sheer numbers, which is probably the way it is designed.

> I wouldn't be surprised to see significantly more than 100 get built.

Depends on what would happen in tjhe world the next 10 years.

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

#180

Post by efreak »

bauruine wrote: post #93
chasd00 wrote: 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?

For imgur on Android, I use ImgurViewer[1], which can display images using apis from a bunch of different sites (imgur, Reddit, gfycat, etc) as well as anything that ends with a common image extension. It's a far superior interface, and ability to swipe it away makes it more seamless, like it's just part of the app you opened it from.

For the browsing in Firefox, there's multiple extensions you can use to add the referrer and get the image directly instead of a redirect (see [2], though I'm not sure if it works on mobile)

Alternatively, use Rimgo[3], an alternative frontend to imgur. This page also lists several ways to automate redirects from imgur domains.

[1] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ImgurViewer [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/referercontro... [3] https://codeberg.org/video-prize-ranch/rimgo

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