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Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?
- Thread starter Matt_The_RocketMan
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What kind of music are balloons afraid of?
Pop music.
Pop music.
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BS, NORAD tracks Santa Claus perfectly every year.
I hope after this POTUS doesn't order him shot down.
boatgeek
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That's obviously because NORAD is looking for things traveling at high Mach. Of course they'd pick up Santa!
On a somewhat more serious note, in one of the conflicts where one of our stealth planes was shot down, it turned out that the other side tuned their air defense system to look for "radar returns the size of birds" but moving at 500 knots. That's probably a gross oversimplification of the situation, so I'm open to fact checks.
dr wogz
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the Canadian side:
www.ctvnews.ca
Why wasn't the suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down over Canada?
Critics say the U.S. and Canada had ample time to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it drifted across North America. The alleged surveillance device initially approached North America near Alaska's Aleutian Islands on Jan 28. According to officials, it crossed into Canadian airspace...
Admittedly.
But there's a lot of reasons the government shouldn't allow the balloon to pass over the entire country, I only named a couple and one was indeed on the far end of the spectrum of problems. That doesn't negate my point about it being better to have shot it down than to assume it's benign and allow it to do whatever it was doing.
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boatgeek
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Serious question for the military aviation folks here. I had always thought of the Sidewinder as a heat-seeking missile, and a large balloon doesn't have an obvious source of lots of heat. Does the seeker head "take a picture" in the IR band and then seek the object in the picture? I'm sure it's not that simple in practice, but is that the general idea? I know that there's some features with the newer fighters that allow them to lock on by having the pilot just look at the target, too.
Ward Carroll's video says that the AIM9X can use the full spectrum, not just infrared.
That includes visible light.
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I'm not a military hardware expert, but from what I've read on other aviation-specific forums, the AIM-9X's thermal seeking capability is apparently very sensitive to differences in heat signature, not just overall, absolute heat. So in this case, the balloon, absorbing some radiative heat from the sun, as well any electronics on the payload, provide more than enough differential heat signature from the cold emptiness at 64,000ft to provide a lock.
dr wogz
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What about triggering / activating the warhead? I assume it is a proximity thing, not an actual "hit"..
(of course, that would be comical.. a missile repeatedly hitting & passing thru & arcing back for another pass thru said balloon, puncturing it a few dozen times..)
(of course, that would be comical.. a missile repeatedly hitting & passing thru & arcing back for another pass thru said balloon, puncturing it a few dozen times..)
This whole thing has been grossly " blown out of proportion", pun intended.
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Again, from what I read/understand, the warhead was not armed, and it was purely a kinetic hit. (This also appears to be confirmed from the various videos available). People have been speculating why they didn't use the gun (and there are plenty of viable reasons they didn't), but it seems like the Sidewinder was essentially used as one, large "bullet".
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dr wogz
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That is what I have also read. In the videos the missile passes through the lower portion of the balloon. There is no blast. They probably wanted to keep the payload as intact as possible.
Cannon fire has a much shorter effective range than a missile, and it disperses the farther out it travels. Carroll puts it as "Hitting the target with an arrow instead of a shotgun".
ThirstyBarbarian
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some are just inflating their egos..
Yeah, and a lot of them are full of hot air.
Matt_The_RocketMan
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The Balls of Steel these guys have for asking for their balloon back... as most people have pointed out... if it was an actual private or government ployed project, they would of contacted us as soon as it 1: entered our airspace with hours in advance clearance, and 2: they would contact our government in private that the project went astray...
Clearly from this whole "predicament" neither of these options were made giving that they did this on purpose.... from what they did to our aircraft in 2001 id say "finders keepers and looser weepers until proven innocent"... but as per they look pretty guilty in the public face and in the governments eyes...
They're crappin' in their pants cuz now we have the evidence that they were lying.
ThirstyBarbarian
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Hey, China. Hate to burst your bubble. But we are keeping your bursted bubble.
Navy released some photos.
Boy, you could make a ton of chutes from that.
Boy, you could make a ton of chutes from that.
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Don't they still have one of our planes they forced down on Hunain island back in the 90's or so?
Our officials say that China is not getting their balloon back.
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Their balloons back.....
Bravo52
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Contrary to popular belief, the "heaters" don't actually track on heat. It is the IR spectrum that the seeker uses to correlate and track an object.
Bravo52
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Contrary to popular belief, the "heaters" don't actually track on heat. It is the IR spectrum that the seeker uses to correlate and track an object.
EDIT: Ok, that was weird, not sure why it posted twice. Must be the residual effects of the Chinese Spy balloon flying overhead.
Bravo52
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That's ridiculous. You know that's ridiculous.
boatgeek
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It wasn't exactly forced down. Their fighter accidentally* ran into our EP-3 while harassing it and the EP-3 had to make an emergency landing on Chinese territory to avoid ditching in the drink. IIRC the crew destroyed/dumped all the truly sensitive stuff before landing, so all the CCP got was "this plane listens to these frequency bands." I would guess that the overall value of that was pretty low (of course they listen to those bands! Those are the ones everyone uses!) but I'm also not in the intel business.
* It's fair to ask if it was accidental, deliberate, or reckless endangerment. Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to.
NORAD head Van Herck says that they didn't know about the intrusions until notified by intel services. Pompeo headed intelligence services. Pompeo says there were no Chinese balloon intrusions on his watch. So either Van Herck is lying, Pompeo is lying, or Pompeo was sleeping at the wheel and didn't know what his own intel services were doing. That's not ridiculous, that's tragic.
H_Rocket
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Once again, Thirsty wins the internet!
An agreement was reached to dismantle the plane and it was flown out on an Antonov(!).
North Koreans still have the Pueblo that they illegally seized in international waters.
It's moored at a museum and is a propaganda tool.
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