391–400 of 864 posts
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If we don't know what it is, we don't know it's not a pringles can.
You never know what a pringles can or can't do.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...
Part of me thinks they wanted to shoot down the first balloon, but the president was kind of incapacitated and unable to give the order. That's the only thing I can think of for why they didn't shoot the first one down when it was over Alaska, but they shoot this one down when it is
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…
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That video helps explain one property one of the UFO videos (the rotation) but doesn't explain the rest. Doesn't explain the Tic Tac videos. It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well. While some of the videos have explanation, I would kindly encourage you to look at this with more curiosity.
> It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well. The lens flare was caused by the camera looking at the ass end of another jet. The radar saw the other jet. For even one of these videos to have a mundane explanation that should have been obvious to the Navy upon investigation, I think that discredits the lot. Either the Navy couldn't figure it out themselves (which seems highly improbable), or for some…
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
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>Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid at least in the US, I don't think anyone is really interested in covid anymore enough to require any distraction. Maybe that argument makes sense in China.
What? Many want fauci, the pfizer ceo, etc arrested. People want answers to how covid started, the lockdowns, masks, etc. Everyone here is over covid as a pandemic, but that doesn't mean we don't have questions that we want answered.
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What keeps a cannon from working? That would already reduce the costs by a lot, and from the visual identification it seems that 40,000 feet is well within the flight ceiling of fighter jets
Cannons are very short range. The fighter would have to approach the balloon at a high closure rate, creating some risk of a mid-air collision. With a missile, the pilot can shoot from several miles out and never has to fly directly at the target. So, it's much safer.
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?
So can geosynchronous satellites, but they're much further away from earth.
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The shootdowns did not involve using airplane guns/cannons. Those are less accurate, especially at the engagement range (the aircraft were at 40,000 ft., IIRC, and shooting at 60,000 ft. balloons), and would have likely damaged the payload. The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified. However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanc…
Yeah but none of those things are cheap. A cannon is.
Even if the ceiling of the F-22 is substantially higher than 40,000 ft. (which I think is plausible), and is close enough to effectively engage these balloons, then I doubt that the Air Force would choose to make the tradeoff of disclosing the F-22’s performance capabilities to adversaries in order to save the cost of an AIM-9; the F-22’s performance is a secret and classified.
If we were faced with defending against a large number of high-flying objects then the reasoning might be different.
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.