Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?

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about the smallest Warhead so far is around 51 lb, but the whole bomb usually weighs about 800 or 900 pounds.
"Therefore each cubic foot of helium could lift 0.069 pounds. In order to lift 100 pounds (which would include the weight of your load, the balloon, and the helium) you would need 1449 cubic feet of helium. This would require a balloon with about a 15.5 foot diameter."
 
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Marc_G said:
Apparently the "school bus" is a new systeme internationale unit of length, equivalent to 90 feet. Just as the "Katie Couric" is about 2.5 pounds. ;-)

Anyway, I feel very confident that the splashdown area was extensively monitored during splashdown.
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This is key to why our current decision makers at the top neglected to take aggressive action. Never mind the analogy about possibilities of taking out civilians in Montana/Dakotas with pieces of hardware blown up by missles, which I suppose the Chinese will take heart if they misplace a few errant bombers, it was all about the kids. What about the children in those school buses?


Tongue in cheek.
All kinda mute now, the payload has been blown to bits.
Convenient..

Pat G
 
OverTheTop said:
Can't you guys just use metric instead of random lengths, like "school bus"? 🙃
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I wished I could help you out on the length problem, but I’m not real savvy on metric here on my ranch in Texas. Purty good at weights tho.
For instance, “that thar bull weighs a **** load”.
As in, a whole bunch.
Hope that helps..

Pat G
 
Pat Gordzelik said:
I wished I could help you out on the length problem, but I’m not real savvy on metric here on my ranch in Texas. Purty good at weights tho.
For instance, “that thar bull weighs a **** load”.
As in, a whole bunch.
Hope that helps..

Pat G
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Woops. Sorry. The Censor seems to have a problem with Texas units of measure.
Commies..
🤣🤣
 
it will take a month to find all the pieces, then bring it up and assemble it in a government Warehouse..... it's like a big jigsaw puzzle which will take 200 people to do and when we get done, we will have probably used up $1 billion dollars of the $828 billion that we're going to spend in defense this year
 
rcktnut said:
The F22 can hover and fly very slow. Seen it with my own eyes at the EAA AirVenture. They did a fly-by at 35 mph about 100 ft. off the ground. The balloon was evidently above the F22's operating range and had to shoot up at it. They probably could have used the 20mm gun if they had a straight on shot at it.
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Actually the missle was better than guns if you read the earlier story about a similar intercept, the continuos rod warhead in the missle would take big slashes out of the ballon, not poke little bitty holes in it that would take forever to deflate. Am I somewhat correct @Bravo52 ?
 
boatgeek said:
That makes sense. I saw another source that the F-22’s ceiling was 65K feet. I should have looked deeper. The USAF only lists “above 50K”. Assuming they aren’t holding back 15K of ceiling, then it’s clear the the gun isn’t an option. Thanks for fact-checking me.
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The F22 ceiling published ceiling is 65,000 feet. You can bet the actual ceiling is more than that. Several retired Air Force officers on Fox News said it would likely be shot down with canon fire before it was shot down. I am sure there is a reason that they used a Sidewinder, but is wasn't because the F22 couldn't get to 58,000 feet.
 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Gastonia Police Department is asking residents to not shoot at the Chinese spy balloon if it flies over North Carolina <a href="https://t.co/lD9VkI299M">pic.twitter.com/lD9VkI299M</a></p>&mdash; Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) <a href="">February 4, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
 
rharshberger said:
Actually the missle was better than guns if you read the earlier story about a similar intercept, the continuos rod warhead in the missle would take big slashes out of the ballon, not poke little bitty holes in it that would take forever to deflate. Am I somewhat correct @Bravo52 ?
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From what I've been hearing, the shot was an AIM-9X and that uses a "blast frag" type warhead. The frag would be much better for ensuring the balloon was hit since it has a much greater frag radius than a typical 20MM round the F-22 carries. Apparently the two ship that killed the balloon was "Frank 01" and "Frank 02" from Langley AFB in VA. The "Frank" call sign was in honor of Frank Luke, WWI ace known as the "Arizona Balloon Buster".
 
As an interesting side note, this is the first "Official" kill of the F-22. No one would have ever guessed in a thousand years the first F-22 kill would be on a balloon. Also interesting, and more importantly, the B-52 still has a higher air-to-air kill tally than the F-22 and F-35 fleets combined. The more you know...
 
Bravo52 said:
From what I've been hearing, the shot was an AIM-9X and that uses a "blast frag" type warhead. The frag would be much better for ensuring the balloon was hit since it has a much greater frag radius than a typical 20MM round the F-22 carries. Apparently the two ship that killed the balloon was "Frank 01" and "Frank 02" from Langley AFB in VA. The "Frank" call sign was in honor of Frank Luke, WWI ace known as the "Arizona Balloon Buster".
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Thank you, a blast frag warhead would definitely rip lots of holes in the ballon.
 
That balloon should have been shot down over Alaska before it reached the lower states. The Chinese already got their information by the time it was shot down. My brother in law said after the balloon was shot down just seconds later was a very loud boom that shook everything. People in his neighborhood came out of their houses not know what the explosion was. He sent me cool pictures of the jets releasing their rockets to take it down. I have to have him send them to me. Way to long to take it out. It’s funny how another one is flying around below the equator.
 

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