371–380 of 864 posts
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I wonder if hydrogen would be a better choice. It's an application where the device is unlikely to endanger anybody if it catches on fire.
hindenburg disaster comes to mind
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Where can I enter? I want a cyber truck
https://moby.finance/app/competition Funnily enough I just launched this competition about 2 hours ago so nobody has entered yet. To get a free entry you need to get 5 likes on a post.
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It’s not theory, it’s actually military practice. Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone. Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
It would be an air to air missile like a sidewinder which still costs $400k. Just scrambling a couple jets would cost tens of thousands on top of that I’m sure.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though https://www.inverse.com/article/33711-military-flyover-costs...
Edit: Good points @elif and sandworm101, thank you!
I'm trying to think of anything valuable you can learn from a balloon flyover that isn't already public domain, and I'm coming up blank. Anyone have any examples?
If you knew that secret you'd understand what to look for in order to unveil the next secret.
There was a fun theory on UFOs I saw recently. The general premise is this: U.S. adversaries realized they couldn't compete with the U.S. on spending. So they got creative and loaded the equivalent of Pringles cans up with a bunch of sensors, hooked them up to either a balloons or relatively cheap unmanned aircraft, and sent them through U.S. airspace to collect intelligence. They'd occasionally get caught (perhaps o…
It’s not theory, it’s actually military practice. Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone. Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
And the cost of the plane is also complex. This pilot/aircraft renewed some quals on this flight, reducing training needs. The aircraft was likely going flying that day anyway. So the net cost of the operation was likely minimal.
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Agreed, but the "previous balloon" part may be unnecessary. User dTal is on the same train of thought as I was regarding the "not maneuverable" part. What other type of object exists which can fly and yet does not have the ability to maneuver?
ICBM Airplane on autopilot with dead/sleeping pilot Control surface problem (e.g. 737 elevator jackscrew excursion scenario) (Just thinking out loud/adding ideas, not contradicting).
Probably not a great sign of things to come.
I'd say it feels like a return to the era of cold war tensions but I wouldn't know, I was born around when the Berlin Wall fell. What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
Information and and disinformation travels so much faster and so much more thoroughly these days that it’s hard to compare.
For example, in the 80s, I couldn’t even tell you what Russia looked like through photographs. there was just very little available information.
There was a big gray outline of the Soviet union on my high school history class wall, and that was about it. I had seen a few pictures of the Kremlin …the onion domes and what not. And maybe I had seen one photo of Brezhnev shown every so often on the news, but that was about it.
It’s amazing how much things have changed as far as the wealth of information is concerned.
So I’m not really answering your question, but the sheer magnitude of the lack of information … let’s say about four decades ago… is something that I really don’t see pointed out much so I thought you might find it interesting.
So in the 80s, the Soviet union was worrisome for the most part. But mostly it was just the blackest of black boxes to me.
Edits: sorry… numerous typos…typing on treadmill.
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It would be an air to air missile like a sidewinder which still costs $400k. Just scrambling a couple jets would cost tens of thousands on top of that I’m sure.
More than tens of thousands of dollars, military aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate and maintain. Beyond the obvious fuel costs, every hour of flight time is followed up by N hours of service. If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1). The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1). One example from the arti…
So we finally have our explanation for all the strange attempts to resurrect UFO interest in the last years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970609 You could fly a flashing cow in this times and nobody would stop looking down at their phones.
Could you spell out the "explanation"? I'm not quite picking up whatever subtext you're putting down.
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Those UFOs were lens flares. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs Turns out we like to spend gobs of money even when we're just chasing our shadow.
why does every debunking focus on the footage and ignore the fact the objects were also confirmed on radar? Do they just assume the Navy is filled with morons who decided to report this through the chain of command based on nothing but footage and didn't consider a lens flare?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-nav...