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I was curious about part of the description given by the pilots who shot down the object off the coast of Alaska. It was described as being at about 40000' alti
by doodlebugging 4y ago
I was curious about part of the description given by the pilots who shot down the object off the coast of Alaska. It was described as being at about 40000' altitude (12192 m) and moving about 40 mph (64 kph) with no visible means of propulsion.
To me, that implies that it was drifting in the wind at that altitude since it had no visible means of propulsion.
I took a look at Ventusky (ventusky.com) to try to get an idea of the wind speed at that altitude so that I could know whether 40 mph (64 kph) made any sense.
Ventusky gives wind information at various altitudes though I have no idea how accurate the information may be. I checked the available altitudes for one close to 40000 feet and found a listing for 12000 m (39370 feet). That's close enough for the girls we go with as the old-timers always said.
For several days before the reported shoot-down (use the day selector at the bottom of the screen to see data for each day and the slider for time of day) the reported wind speeds were in the range of 20-35 mph (32-56 kph). As they say, close enough for the girls we go with especially when you consider the likely observational error associated with estimations made from a moving jet.
The first reported sighting of that object was over Nome, Alaska and it was tracked across Alaska until the shoot-down just off the north coast in the Prudhoe Bay area or just east of it.
Backtracking along the jet stream into China, the most likely source for the object, I decided that there was probably a balloon launch facility in north-eastern China, possibly near Harbin since a launch in that city will carry an object along that general route. It was just a guess and someone in one of those twitter threads actually found a balloon launch facility to the southwest of Harbin, near Hohhot that is a much better candidate for the origination point of these objects.
Anyway. It was fun looking at all this stuff but to me, these last two cylindrical things are balloons. The question about whether the balloons serve some intelligence gathering function for the Chinese will likely be answered in the coming days.
- w4ffl35 4y agothe chinese have been spying on us navy ships for a long time with drones. the public is just becoming aware because there was a big ufo awareness campaign that ran online for a few years and now we are shooting down their spy crafts.
- doodlebugging 4y agoYeah. I have been following those reports on The Drive for a long time. It is the most plausible explanation for the events reported by Naval personnel. It still doesn't change the fact that the objects shot down in the last couple of days are probably just balloons or other lighter-than-air crafts. It will be interesting to see how much information the DoD releases.
- sph 4y agoAlso would explain why the majority of these modern sightings is in American airspace.
- doodlebugging 4y agoExactly. If you are planning challenging your adversary at some future point then it pays to know how they might use their resources to respond and whether those resources are vulnerable to any of your existing assets. China has been making noise about attacking Taiwan and the US has a pact to defend Taiwan. We know that China does not have the capability to carry out this attack right now but there is no way that they would do it without understanding how to defend against US naval and air assets.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- winddude 4y agoMaybe penetration testing, testing response times. Could even be trying to monitor various network traffic and communications signals in relation to activities around responses. Lots of possibilities, it's hard not to speculate.
- doodlebugging 4y agoThis is true. I could certainly see the utility of a platform like this for passive signals intelligence.
- int0x2e 4y agoSpecifically, this could be amazing to map out non-public comms, radar and AA systems. This could provide the sort of information you'd want for a future military conflict. I hope I'm completely wrong about this.
- doodlebugging 4y agoYou are probably not wrong about this since we know China wants to take Taiwan at some point in the future. It makes sense that they would map out any vulnerabilities of potential adversaries who might be involved in defending Taiwan since the battle for Taiwan will not be easy.
- ecf 4y agoChina invades Taiwan and the entire free world beats it into submission, no contest whatsoever. Straight up steamroll. That’s why China wants to triple their Nuclear stockpile in less than 10 years. They know they don’t stand a chance otherwise. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/11/29/pentagon-china-nuclear-stockpile-00071101 https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/11/29/pentagon-china-...
- doodlebugging 4y agoThere is some truth to this. We don't want to have to find out though since this will go nuclear as soon as military operations start to affect mainland China. They will launch first and then hope for the best. They know they will only have one shot at it. There will be no time for the "free world" to meet and decide how to respond since it will be every man for himself at that point. There will be no true winners. When the dust settles, most of the world's population, including everyone north of the equator, will be dealing with the fallout of something that did not have to happen. If anything of American society remains then they will find themselves needing to manage their own affairs with no central government or services to fall back on. Other adversaries may try to land forces here to sweep across the nation while we are down. It will be up to us to stop them and to restore some local semblance of law and order so that we can all organize a strong defense. China doesn't have the industrial ability to build a navy strong enough to counter the US Navy so they have to carry out these intelligence operations in order to identify any exploitable weaknesses in communications infrastructure, military capabilities, etc. They have the manpower that they can call on to conduct a large scale invasion of Taiwan but they have no way at the moment to transport them to the island in large enough numbers to hold a beachhead. They are rapidly expanding their landing craft fleet though and their "civilian" navy is large. We need to arm Taiwan to the point where it is obvious that any attempt to float an invasion fleet across the straights will be a disaster. We also need to maintain regular patrols through the South China Sea including past all of the recently fortified islands claimed and manned by China so that we have the assets in position to mount a credible defense and to deny China the opportunity to prevent reinforcements or to blockade the island. We have gamed this many times over the years but all things considered, we wasted the opportunity to prevent it entirely. Had we taken economic steps to prevent the growth of China's economy and the strong dependence of the west on cheap Chinese products by bringing industries back onshore in the US and Europe then we could have moderated their growth in a more controlled fashion instead of dumping cash into their economy that effectively set us up as the financiers of our own destruction. Today, we are looking at the near certainty, unless Xinping is replaced, of a war with China after several decades of allowing them to make up a huge technological deficit by stealing intellectual property on a huge scale so they could turn it against us. We can always strike first. That would make us the asshole though so it is better that we exhaust every other option before pushing those other buttons while we scramble to produce things we developed years ago but put on the back burner since there was no pressing need for them against less capable adversaries. Like the Russians, China can throw millions of men at any adversary and many of those men know, because of the One Child policy, that there is a demographic situation where they will never marry or have families. The next 10 years will be quite interesting.
- westhom 4y ago“ Another official from the Department of Defense told the New York Times that the object broke into pieces when it hit the frozen sea” - Guardian article on the Alaska downing How could a balloon break into pieces? Doesn’t it need to be made of flexible material? Edit: WSJ is now reporting unnamed sources confirmed Alaska was a metallic balloon w suspended payload.
- Arch485 4y agoThe balloon typically suspends hardware that serves the actual function; it was likely that hardware that broke into pieces on the ice.
- westhom 4y agoRight, but what makes it confusing it this is the one they were calling object, so not confirmation of being a balloon or suspending a payload.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoYou are being exceedingly pedantic in interpreting their wording.
- winddude 4y agoLighter than air aircraft. Could have been some light weight composite.
- doodlebugging 4y agoIt will be interesting to see what they release about the objects and their construction and potential functions.
- doodlebugging 4y agoPerhaps at the temperatures in that area the material used to construct the balloon becomes brittle enough to shatter. I didn't look at temperature data from that altitude to see whether common materials would lose flexibility.
- pohuing 4y agoNot very fun fact: Japan tried to use the jet stream to bomb America via incendiary balloon. It was largely unsuccessful of course, but still a creative way of bridging the Pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb?wprov=sfla1
- UberFly 4y agoSadly only success was killing a church group out on a Sunday school picnic.
- scruple 4y agoI went down a shallow rabbit hole about this event. The man who survived the Fu-Go Balloon Bomb event in Oregon, Reverend Artchie Mitchell, went on to be captured, as a Christian missionary, by the Viet Cong in 1962 and he was never seen again. Given enough time lightning strikes the same spot more than once, I guess.
- dirtyid 4y agoWhich was censored until after war because the idea that CONUS is vunerable to JP attacks is itself significant. Media spasms around PRC balloons reflect that. Except with current capabilities, it won't be 9000 primitive balloons with single digit % arrival rates and ineffective incendiary payloads but 100,000s of modern balloons with high chance of arrival and potential to deliver guided bombs. Possibly sufficient to satuate CONUS defenses and loiter around to hit strategic targets of opportunity. The unspoken narrative behind PRC sending cheap balloons over CONUS is PRC sending thousands of cheap bombs over CONUS. The conniption over PRC hypersonics was also over US homeland vunerability, but the balloons IMO represent a new type of vunerability both in scale and economics of defense.
- anon7725 4y agoSending 100,000 armed balloons towards a nuclear-armed adversary doesn’t sound like 10d chess strategic thinking.