581–590 of 864 posts
Cheap balloon vs expensive missile, seems a good way to bankrupt us by sending continuous balloons.
They shot down a couple of balloons using whatever they had. If balloons were a common target, they'd design something more suitable. Maybe a monkey throwing darts.
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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
Balloons and airships aren't easily downed by gunfire- the holes create slow leaks that can take days or weeks to deflate the balloon. Fighter jets' guns are mostly an air-to-ground weapon these days.
I've seen this claim often, but I'm still finding it hard to picture. I realize it's not going to "pop like a balloon", but days or weeks seems incredibly long. The weight of the payload causes at least some pressure on at least the top of the balloon, right?
Is the issue just the size of the hole versus total volume? Or maybe it's that the bouyancy increases as it starts to descend? Do you have a link that would make this clearer? I searched a little, but what I found were just assertions of fact.
I did find the 1998 story of the failed Canadian attempt to shoot down a balloon with fighter jets firing bullets (https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb). This makes me inclined to believe the conclusion, but it's still not intuitive to me.
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> How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. ...probably around zero dollars. It would be different if it was above say active war zone but in this case it is almost as far from potential warzone as possible so probably absolutely nothing.
So the US flew all those U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union for fun, and the Soviet Union shot one down in 1960 just to prove that they could? I agree that a ballon over Alaska is unlikely to gain much intelligence, but with the right equipment at the right place you can get a lot of useful insights into your enemy's capabilities even at peacetime.
There's a school of thought that says the US won the cold war by convincing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the arms race. Now I don't necessarily think that fully explains things, but I do think there's a lot more politics to a "spy" device than the actual photographs, especially outside the context of a hot war.
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This was supposedly done during the US bombing of yugoslavia... open microwaves transmit pulsed radiation, automatic systems think it's a radar and bomb the site.
What automatic systems are out there bombing such things?
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It's like Israel's "Iron Dome" interceptors. $50,000 each to take out what amounts to a $50 Estes model rocket.
That analog for a $50 Estes rocket can blow a family apart into little pieces. The discipline is sound - protect your citizens from external threats, no matter the cost. That's the purpose of government and by extension, its military.
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This was supposedly done during the US bombing of yugoslavia... open microwaves transmit pulsed radiation, automatic systems think it's a radar and bomb the site.
What automatic systems are out there bombing such things?
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Geologists were able to reduce the search area for the origin of these balloons using the mineral composition of sand in the sand bags. The airforce then bombed hydrogen generating facilities nearby the suspected launch sites. Section offense and defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Did we have operatives taking sand samples or was that some over-exuberant librarian who got to say "I told you so" to their bosses?
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This was supposedly done during the US bombing of yugoslavia... open microwaves transmit pulsed radiation, automatic systems think it's a radar and bomb the site.
What automatic systems are out there bombing such things?
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.
The director of national intelligence explicitly said in a Congressional hearing last may that they want to destigmatize UAP sightings so that pilots will actually report them when they happen. It hasn't really been a big mystery why some people in the government have been trying to change the attitude around UFOs recently - that's why they use the term UAP instead, less cultural baggage
These are the same clowns that have claimed to have extant physical samples of extraterrestrial materials, but only offered them to independent examination once, which didn't go well supporting their claims, and have paraded an endless number of excuses since while doubling down on claims it offers incontrovertible proof.
There's no big mystery here, these are relatively unsophisticated conspiracy nuts that got above average traction. That's it.