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It's fascinating getting a glimpse into modern tensions. It turns out that there was a guy that shot down like 8 MiG's back in the 40's, but they had to suppres

It's fascinating getting a glimpse into modern tensions. It turns out that there was a guy that shot down like 8 MiG's back in the 40's, but they had to suppress all knowledge of it so that it didn't escalate anything between US and Russia. Makes you wonder how often stuff like this happens and we just never hear about it. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/asia/korean-war-fighter-pilot-soviet-shootdown-intl-hnk-ml/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/asia/korean-war-fighter-pilot...

wvoch235 4y ago
This was my first thought as well. I'm kind of surprised the media is making such a big deal out of this. I would assume, considering how cheap it is to make a stratospheric balloon, it is either fairly common and the US has an equivalent program or its completely inferior to satellites. The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC
- nygardkillsquad 4y ago
  Wasn't one theory about Roswell that it was some kind of test balloon with crash test dummies? Something about testing for radiation in the upper atmosphere back before everyone and their brother knew how to make a gun style nuclear device? (Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)
- uoaei 4y ago
  > The technology is pretty mature Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature. Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.
jameshart 4y ago
> like 8 MiG's "four Soviet MiGs" (from the linked headline) > back in the 40's "On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2) > a guy "Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'. What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.
- carabiner 4y ago
  yeah 1940s lol... US and USSR were allies then. This is not Historian News.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    "From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent" That was 1946 and the start of the cold war
    - jameshart 4y ago
      And if the US had started shooting down MiGs in the next couple of years after that the cold war would not have remained cold very long.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    If you want to get particular, the Berlin Blockade/Airlift was in the 40s. The Cold War started in the late 40s.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Ok, I'll be more careful. The answer is "I just woke up."
  - 4y ago

wvoch235 4y ago

This was my first thought as well. I'm kind of surprised the media is making such a big deal out of this. I would assume, considering how cheap it is to make a stratospheric balloon, it is either fairly common and the US has an equivalent program or its completely inferior to satellites. The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC

nygardkillsquad 4y ago
Wasn't one theory about Roswell that it was some kind of test balloon with crash test dummies? Something about testing for radiation in the upper atmosphere back before everyone and their brother knew how to make a gun style nuclear device? (Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)
uoaei 4y ago
> The technology is pretty mature Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature. Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.

jameshart 4y ago

> like 8 MiG's "four Soviet MiGs" (from the linked headline) > back in the 40's "On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2) > a guy "Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'. What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.

carabiner 4y ago
yeah 1940s lol... US and USSR were allies then. This is not Historian News.
- iso1631 4y ago
  "From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent" That was 1946 and the start of the cold war
  - jameshart 4y ago
    And if the US had started shooting down MiGs in the next couple of years after that the cold war would not have remained cold very long.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  If you want to get particular, the Berlin Blockade/Airlift was in the 40s. The Cold War started in the late 40s.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
Ok, I'll be more careful. The answer is "I just woke up."
- 4y ago