4 ms·

With the casual change from "34-35 degrees" to "lets draw a line at 34 degrees" followed by the "and this is where the press release was" I got the vibe that th

With the casual change from "34-35 degrees" to "lets draw a line at 34 degrees" followed by the "and this is where the press release was" I got the vibe that this was parallel construction. Still some good sleuthing, don't get me wrong, but still.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
Also goes to show you the danger of tunnel vision. If they flew one to some air base outside DC for the roll out the author would be shooting from the hip and who knows what facility he'd have zero'd in on. Sure it might have been the same one because "the same facility as the B2" is an easy just-so story but you don't really know with any certainty.
- fourthark 4y ago
  It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Do they’re trying to scare Russian with an airplane that can only be taxied around? I wonder if it’s made out of proper material and not just some clay concept
    - mgfist 4y ago
      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.
      - vba616 4y ago
        Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?
        nradov 4y ago
        No. There are no drones which can reliably penetrate a modern integrated air defense system and strike a hardened target with large bunker buster bombs. The B-21 is supposed to be able to operate as a drone (optionally manned) but in a conflict with a near-peer adversary which can degrade the satellite communications necessary for remote piloting there will need to be humans in the cockpit.
        vba616 4y ago
        >and strike a hardened target !!! That's the point! There are a hell of a lot of "unhardened" targets and using a full scale aircraft as a drone is missing the point about cost. I mean, there's not just the news from Ukraine, but also this: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-investigation-thursday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-... ...and it looks like a classic case of "disruptive technology" syndrome, where the incumbents dismiss the upstart as inadequate for their sophisticated customers - justifiably as far as it goes - until all of a sudden the tsunami arrives because the new tech has been iterating until it can address the high end. I read the original book defining the phenomenon in my university library around the time it came out, and it's interesting how describing the problem manifestly hasn't created a solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > 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.
    - throwaway1492 4y ago
      Russia military is a pitiful shell of the former Soviet glory. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have effectively demilitarized them. They squandered their inheritance of Soviet equipment like an 18 year old in Vegas. Their nuclear force is a giant question mark. Their three legs of the nuclear triad are quite shaky. In the event of a MAD exchange; Their boomers won’t get a missile off due to the fast attacks that keep them targeted at all times. Their bombers and cruise missiles have been depleted and their facilities are so insecure Ukraine is able to hit them with drones from the 70s. Maybe their ICBMs work, but given their culture of graft and corruption even that is doubtful. They are a joke.
      - nradov 4y ago
        You're mostly correct, but Russian SSBNs spend much of their time in their own territorial waters. NATO SSNs seldom venture in there as it's just too risky. The boomers can even launch SLBMs when tied up at the pier in Severomorsk if they have to. And they are conducting successful test launches again. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-successfully-fires-ballistic-missile-defence-ministry-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-s... Even if only 10% of Russia's strategic nuclear weapons work correctly that can still make for a really bad day.
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        Speaking of ICBM's, I'm sure they use more sophisticated targeting now, but in the early days they'd astrogate for any necessary mid-course corrections. (Cannot remember if I saw this procedure on a film narrated by von Braun himself, but I doubt it; I think I saw him in a Disney)
        nradov 4y ago
        ICBMs still use a mix of stellar and inertial navigation. They can't rely on satellite navigation because in a major conflict those may be destroyed or jammed. Some modern ICBMs might also have some limited terminal guidance capacity but there's not much public information on that subject.
johnmcelhone 4y ago
You're right, it wasn't too difficult to guess the location without the stars. The base did happen to be right in-between the 34 and 35 degree lines (34.6 lat), and you can estimate pretty well with only one line
- cossatot 4y ago
  Little Rock AFB is a few tens of km north (34.9 deg lat) for what it's worth. There may be some others as well. The chances of getting a picture of the stars that clear in Arkansas is way lower than in the Mojave however...
  - pigbearpig 4y ago
    Considering Little Rock is a C130 airlift base it's pretty easy to rule that out without looking at stars.
lilyball 4y ago
"let's draw a line at 34 degrees" makes for a nice display, but presumably the actual filtering for matching bases spanned 34–35 degrees.
lambdasquirrel 4y ago
I don't know if I entirely buy the line on "34-35 degrees off the horizon." Unless we knew the focal length of the lens it was taken with, and which camera it was taken from, you don't actually know that. A wide-angle lens is going to have a much larger field of view than, say, a 100mm macro. And different camera systems have different angle of view for the same focal length.
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  both the focal length and the field of view are irrelevant, you know the angles between the stars so you can infer everything.
- vilhelm_s 4y ago
  You know what the angle between the stars in the constellation are, you don't need to know the field of view of the camera.
  - mvnuweucxqokii 4y ago
    I think what you're suggesting is that because we know the angle between a pair of stars, we can use that to infer the angle to the horizon by measuring the distance between each in pixels. I don't think it's a safe assumption that there is a linear relationship between the angles. Like, two pairs of objects in the image, in which the angles subtended by each pair relative to the viewer are the same in real life, may not be separated by the same number of pixels in image space depending on the lens used. Furthermore, this could be thrown off by even a small hill or mountain obscuring the astronomical horizon.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    If you were doing this professionally you would, because lenses introduce distortions of various kinds - typically barrel or pincushion depending on the focal length and/or the lens. So any view of the sky is an approximation, and will introduce subtle errors that make it harder to pin down an exact location. They probably won't be huge areas, but this would be a harder problem if the time and longitude had to be exact with no existing guesses.
cjensen 4y ago
You're right. Vandenberg, Kirtland, Canon, Altus, and Little Rock are all matches for the latitude and there is no text explaining them away. Even the "it must be California because Northrup" is both (a) debatable and (b) doesn't exclude Vandenberg.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

Also goes to show you the danger of tunnel vision. If they flew one to some air base outside DC for the roll out the author would be shooting from the hip and who knows what facility he'd have zero'd in on. Sure it might have been the same one because "the same facility as the B2" is an easy just-so story but you don't really know with any certainty.

fourthark 4y ago
It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Do they’re trying to scare Russian with an airplane that can only be taxied around? I wonder if it’s made out of proper material and not just some clay concept
  - mgfist 4y ago
    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.
    - vba616 4y ago
      Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?
      - nradov 4y ago
        No. There are no drones which can reliably penetrate a modern integrated air defense system and strike a hardened target with large bunker buster bombs. The B-21 is supposed to be able to operate as a drone (optionally manned) but in a conflict with a near-peer adversary which can degrade the satellite communications necessary for remote piloting there will need to be humans in the cockpit.
        vba616 4y ago
        >and strike a hardened target !!! That's the point! There are a hell of a lot of "unhardened" targets and using a full scale aircraft as a drone is missing the point about cost. I mean, there's not just the news from Ukraine, but also this: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-investigation-thursday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-... ...and it looks like a classic case of "disruptive technology" syndrome, where the incumbents dismiss the upstart as inadequate for their sophisticated customers - justifiably as far as it goes - until all of a sudden the tsunami arrives because the new tech has been iterating until it can address the high end. I read the original book defining the phenomenon in my university library around the time it came out, and it's interesting how describing the problem manifestly hasn't created a solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > 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.
  - throwaway1492 4y ago
    Russia military is a pitiful shell of the former Soviet glory. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have effectively demilitarized them. They squandered their inheritance of Soviet equipment like an 18 year old in Vegas. Their nuclear force is a giant question mark. Their three legs of the nuclear triad are quite shaky. In the event of a MAD exchange; Their boomers won’t get a missile off due to the fast attacks that keep them targeted at all times. Their bombers and cruise missiles have been depleted and their facilities are so insecure Ukraine is able to hit them with drones from the 70s. Maybe their ICBMs work, but given their culture of graft and corruption even that is doubtful. They are a joke.
    - nradov 4y ago
      You're mostly correct, but Russian SSBNs spend much of their time in their own territorial waters. NATO SSNs seldom venture in there as it's just too risky. The boomers can even launch SLBMs when tied up at the pier in Severomorsk if they have to. And they are conducting successful test launches again. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-successfully-fires-ballistic-missile-defence-ministry-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-s... Even if only 10% of Russia's strategic nuclear weapons work correctly that can still make for a really bad day.
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      Speaking of ICBM's, I'm sure they use more sophisticated targeting now, but in the early days they'd astrogate for any necessary mid-course corrections. (Cannot remember if I saw this procedure on a film narrated by von Braun himself, but I doubt it; I think I saw him in a Disney)
      - nradov 4y ago
        ICBMs still use a mix of stellar and inertial navigation. They can't rely on satellite navigation because in a major conflict those may be destroyed or jammed. Some modern ICBMs might also have some limited terminal guidance capacity but there's not much public information on that subject.

johnmcelhone 4y ago

You're right, it wasn't too difficult to guess the location without the stars. The base did happen to be right in-between the 34 and 35 degree lines (34.6 lat), and you can estimate pretty well with only one line

cossatot 4y ago
Little Rock AFB is a few tens of km north (34.9 deg lat) for what it's worth. There may be some others as well. The chances of getting a picture of the stars that clear in Arkansas is way lower than in the Mojave however...
- pigbearpig 4y ago
  Considering Little Rock is a C130 airlift base it's pretty easy to rule that out without looking at stars.

lilyball 4y ago

"let's draw a line at 34 degrees" makes for a nice display, but presumably the actual filtering for matching bases spanned 34–35 degrees.

lambdasquirrel 4y ago

I don't know if I entirely buy the line on "34-35 degrees off the horizon." Unless we knew the focal length of the lens it was taken with, and which camera it was taken from, you don't actually know that. A wide-angle lens is going to have a much larger field of view than, say, a 100mm macro. And different camera systems have different angle of view for the same focal length.

4gotunameagain 4y ago
both the focal length and the field of view are irrelevant, you know the angles between the stars so you can infer everything.
vilhelm_s 4y ago
You know what the angle between the stars in the constellation are, you don't need to know the field of view of the camera.
- mvnuweucxqokii 4y ago
  I think what you're suggesting is that because we know the angle between a pair of stars, we can use that to infer the angle to the horizon by measuring the distance between each in pixels. I don't think it's a safe assumption that there is a linear relationship between the angles. Like, two pairs of objects in the image, in which the angles subtended by each pair relative to the viewer are the same in real life, may not be separated by the same number of pixels in image space depending on the lens used. Furthermore, this could be thrown off by even a small hill or mountain obscuring the astronomical horizon.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  If you were doing this professionally you would, because lenses introduce distortions of various kinds - typically barrel or pincushion depending on the focal length and/or the lens. So any view of the sky is an approximation, and will introduce subtle errors that make it harder to pin down an exact location. They probably won't be huge areas, but this would be a harder problem if the time and longitude had to be exact with no existing guesses.

cjensen 4y ago

You're right. Vandenberg, Kirtland, Canon, Altus, and Little Rock are all matches for the latitude and there is no text explaining them away. Even the "it must be California because Northrup" is both (a) debatable and (b) doesn't exclude Vandenberg.