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No, not impressive. The club is a radio hobby club and the balloon is a radio beacon balloon, which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open fre
by xrayarx 4y ago
No, not impressive. The club is a radio hobby club and the balloon is a radio beacon balloon, which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency, as do basically all balloons. Except for those from china, apparently.
If they really shot down that balloon, and not a Chinese one, they used a 500,000 rocket started by a 200mm plane to kill a $100 balloon. Spending so much on so little on the other hand is impressive.
- nirvgorilla 4y ago[flagged]
- flaviut 4y agoThere are folks from all around the world online, and many countries place their currency symbol after the amount.
- josephcsible 4y agoBut the post in question was giving an amount in US dollars, and the US isn't such a country.
- testTED 4y agoHabits die hard. Like thinking people in other countries are kids in your own country.
- newaccount74 4y agoProbably people from other countries where currency typically goes behind the number like 100€.
- AceyMan 4y agoHmm, I'm a grammar pedant and that one has never bothered me except in formal prose (real journalism, marketing copy, books). It's spoken that way ("one-hundred dollars") so it's actually kind of intuitive to write it that way, even if it's technically 'wrong.'
- nirvgorilla 4y agoOh really? Then why don't we say QUESTION MARK or PERIOD verbally for each sentence of you think the $ literally means "dollars?"
- cld8483 4y ago[dead]
- fragmede 4y agobecause we have other clues for that. A question is denoted by a raise in tone at the end of the sentence. A period is denoted by a pause.
- nirvgorilla 4y ago[flagged]
- cld8483 4y ago[dead]
- fredophile 4y agoIn English that's correct but this is a common mistake for ESL people.
- Jeremy1026 4y agoIt's entirely possible they aren't American. Remember, the internet is global.
- nirvgorilla 4y agoIn the 90s and early 2000s, people, even from other countries, typed it correctly on the internet. I have the EFnet IRC logs right now on my hard drive if you need proof. Hell I'm tempted to make a youtube video just to prove my point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 4y agoHere's a foreigner who made the mistake in the 1930's: https://www.britannica.com/event/Lindbergh-baby-kidnapping#/media/1/1666349/138422 https://www.britannica.com/event/Lindbergh-baby-kidnapping#/... I'm amused how mad you got about this. I wish my life was that luxurious that all I can be enraged about is where people put their dollar sign.
- InitialLastName 4y agoYes, nothing convinces people like an angry YouTube rant about how "kids these days" don't appreciate the bad old days of the internet.
- awad 4y agoAnd yet you still understood what they were saying. It's not that serious.
- mike_d 4y ago> which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency Usually once every hour or every other hour for a quick second long burst, otherwise they are powered down and just floating. Pico balloons can't carry more than a few grams and depend on solar panels to charge up a battery enough to transmit. Also air to air missiles are not magic. They don't have secret decoders for every imaginable protocol to lock on to targets (and assume they aren't lying about their location). They are either slaved from the planes radar, contain their own radar, or use heat signatures to lock on.
- dragontamer 4y agoYour overall point stands, but I can see where the original poster seems to be coming from. There are "anti-radiation missiles", which lock into transmitters to blow them up. IE: The AGM 88 "HARM" missile does this. But these are not used by air-superiority fighters like F22, but instead by "Wild Weasel" fighter jets against ground RADAR targets. ---------- I think the poster you responded to magically assumed that a AGM-88 would work against a balloon. But that is mistaken: the balloon isn't transmitting enough of a RADAR signature for something like HARM to lock into it.
- 7952 4y agoThose cost differences are striking. An adversary could launch thousands very cheaply. I wonder how militaries would react to so many potential targets.
- taylodl 4y agoIn the worst case, you would react by directly attacking the adversary that launched them. Hopefully by the time things had reached that level you would have had an opportunity to exhaust all diplomatic channels and could have found a more peaceful resolution.
- madaxe_again 4y agoWith technical escalation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon
- soylentcola 4y agoPerhaps not so well when everyone's a Captain Kirk.
- seymourhersh 4y agoThey said thousands, not 99.
- mrguyorama 4y agoInvestment would lean back towards gun based AA, like anti-air artillery since the objects are so high. Investments are already going back into that direction as cheap drones like the SHAHED are easily managed affordably by systems like Gepard. It's actually quite fun to see these systems revived.
- Ancapistani 4y agoI think laser-based weapons would be more likely, honestly. It should be possible to heat up a balloon enough to melt the envelope without an absurd power supply.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoSure there's a radio signal, but Sidewinders are heat seekers. While I can believe one went for the electronics package on the Chinese balloon these pico balloons shouldn't have anything more than a bit of solar heating. Detecting them is probably easy--note the balloon material appears shiny. Probably aluminized mylar, it will show up on radar.
- xrayarx 4y agoOf course the rockets are heat seeking. But someone has to give the order. They have sensors, they investigate. They report up the chain of command. I don't even want to know how many people were involved from the moment it was detected to the moment the order was given. 100? 1000? More? And no one bothered. And the US weather service alone starts around 60,000 to 100,000 balloons a year.
- cld8483 4y agoCan you explain why the chain of command has anything to do with whether or not it should be considered an impressive technical feet for a thermal-imaging missile to lock onto a balloon?
- mrguyorama 4y agoIt doesn't matter how you FIND an object if you can't target it. That's why articles crying that china can track the F22 and F35 are meaningless, because knowing something is in your sky and being able to direct a munition into it are very different things. Pilots who have practiced dogfighting the F35 have expressed surprise at just how close you can be and still be unable to get a good enough radar return from the targeting beam to actually shoot at it.
- lsllc 4y agoAs a taxpayer, I think the AF using a $100 (or was it $12) balloon for target practice is way better than say the $570K BQM-167 remote drone that they'd normally use! https://dronedj.com/2021/03/24/the-air-forces-training-drone-washed-up-on-a-florida-beach/ https://dronedj.com/2021/03/24/the-air-forces-training-drone...
- zikduruqe 4y agoAnd they usually have radar reflectors on them also. Such as - https://www.overlookhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/51wFtX-Yo6L._SL1000_.jpg https://www.overlookhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/5...
- mrguyorama 4y agoMissiles are not designed to lock onto voluntary transponders, for hopefully obvious reasons, meaning the AIM-9x in this instance has demonstrated either a very sensitive IR sensor, or a very sensitive radar setup.
- pengaru 4y agoI didn't say it was a good use of resources.