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Another balloon object shot down over Alaska


JesusSweatDuck

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20 minutes ago, Foosters said:

I'm all for the simulation introducing alien contact and us Bruckheimering them out of the sky at first sight.

Beats what they've been giving us the last half decade or so.

6 months from now, Ukrainian piloting an F16:  dammit if I only had 2 more sidewinders I could end this war right now!

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I'm all for the simulation introducing alien contact and us Bruckheimering them out of the sky at first sight.


Imagine traveling light years to establish friendly contact with an alien species and then they shoot you out of the sky without even realizing what you are and what you had to accomplish to get there.

We must look insane to them.

Don’t visit Earth. Its inhabitants are crazy and hostile.
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8 hours ago, Telegraph_it said:

Damn filters. 
 

 

 

Well yeah.  If you don’t have any filtering in place on radar, especially long range OTH stuff, it’ll be a cluttered mess where you end up seeing nothing useful…birds, spurious returns, the ionosphere, etc.  Fighter pilots use that to their advantage in a BVR dogfight, lookup ‘notching’. 
 

Rogoway is a pretty good source and has had a lot of great scoops on TheWarzone.  What I think he’s leaving out here is just how much more manpower likely has to be dedicated to watching radar scopes, in peacetime, to identify/track/investigate returns that are not part of the traditional aircraft/ICBM threat vector. 
 

Of course the same people who were bitching about not shooting down the first balloon are now bitching about the costs of shooting down balloons…so who knows.  It’s not only F22 flight hours and AIM9x, but tankers and maintenance just to get them there.  
 

Curious where this all leads.  

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19 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Of course the same people who were bitching about not shooting down the first balloon are now bitching about the costs of shooting down balloons…so who knows.  

It's almost like there's a large chunk of people in the general discourse (not really in this thread though thankfully) that aren't participating in good faith and will complain about whatever they've been told to complain about lol

 

It is pretty funny that for all the trillions we've sunk into air defense, that we're playing Bloons tower defense IRL lol

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So are we all in agreement that the entire "we didn't want to down the balloon due to the risk of people on the ground" was BS? Seemed spurious to me at the start as there is hardly anyone in the Montana/Wyoming, western Nebraska region. Figured they just wanted to study it before popping it.

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6 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

So are we all in agreement that the entire "we didn't want to down the balloon due to the risk of people on the ground" was BS? Seemed spurious to me at the start as there is hardly anyone in the Montana/Wyoming, western Nebraska region. Figured they just wanted to study it before popping it.

Haven't they said both of those reasons? 

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1 minute ago, Dahobbs said:

Haven't they said both of those reasons? 

I never heard them say they wanted to study it and that's why they let it fly. I heard them say they didn't want to risk people/property on the ground. 

I'd understand that over the eastern half of the country, but not in Montana, etc.

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4 minutes ago, Mother mopar said:
5 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:
This is all Lockheed seeding balloons to keep the F-22 contracts coming. For some $100 Mylar balloon, they get $100 billion in contracts. It's basic business. 

Too bad the assembly line shut down over a decade ago and the last jet rolled off in 2011.

Just all the more obvious then... 

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52 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

So are we all in agreement that the entire "we didn't want to down the balloon due to the risk of people on the ground" was BS? Seemed spurious to me at the start as there is hardly anyone in the Montana/Wyoming, western Nebraska region. Figured they just wanted to study it before popping it.

Three objects have been shot down over US territorial waters. One shot down over the virtually uninhabited Yukon territory of Canada with its population density of 0.2 persons per square mile. It's a territory whose land area is somewhere between Texas and California with a total population of 44,000 people. Plus, that was Canada's call to shoot it down over their own land.

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49 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

I never heard them say they wanted to study it and that's why they let it fly. I heard them say they didn't want to risk people/property on the ground. 

I'd understand that over the eastern half of the country, but not in Montana, etc.

They said the first ballon was at a high enough altitude that it wasn’t worth the risk of shooting down because there was basically zero risk in letting it do it’s thing. They did briefly mention that they were using the opportunity to study the balloon.

The last few have been in the same zone that commercial air traffic flies so it’s a pretty different situation that warrants a risk analysis. That being said, I think the admin is kind of forced to shoot anything down now that everyone is watching.

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1 hour ago, Herbie Hancock said:

Or, our government isn’t as smart as everyone thinks and the day the first one made the news was the same day they found out about it, and now they’re actually looking for them.

Our government is only as smart as our people.

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49 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

Why are they using missiles instead of the 20mm gun to takeout balloons? Unless they’re not balloons.

Guns actually don't work well on balloons like this. It isn't like they pop and go down. Instead, they get tattered but keep floating. And, given that these are low speed objects, getting within gun range doesn't leave much maneuver room, meaning your expensive fighter could be taken down by the balloon or debis from it. 

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2 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Guns actually don't work well on balloons like this. It isn't like they pop and go down. Instead, they get tattered but keep floating. And, given that these are low speed objects, getting within gun range doesn't leave much maneuver room, meaning your expensive fighter could be taken down by the balloon or debis from it. 

You sure know a lot about balloons…🤨

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On 2/12/2023 at 6:39 AM, wild_turkey said:

 


Imagine traveling light years to establish friendly contact with an alien species and then they shoot you out of the sky without even realizing what you are and what you had to accomplish to get there.

We must look insane to them.

Don’t visit Earth. Its inhabitants are crazy and hostile.

 

On our earth, at least— first contact between entirely different cultures and/or species almost always ends up really badly for at least one of the parties involved. We haven’t evolved that much.

So the Sentinel Islander strategy of just straight up murdering anything that’s on your turf is not a terrible one. It’s worked out for them and for us. 

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8 hours ago, GoPokes83 said:

Is there no way to capture them without letting them fall 40-60 thousand feet?

I heard one brilliant weapons system analyst who "does his own research" say if the excuse of "studying the balloon" over Montana was valid, instead of shooting the thing down like this guy wanted immediately;  They could have used the jet's drag parachute to "scoop" the balloon and fly it down to be dropped safely and picked up by military/intel personnel.  I'm trying to picture what this guy was picturing in his mind but it makes my head hurt.  

Also, how many air-to-air missiles does our Air Force have?  I bet not as many balloons as exist in the world.  

I do like the "shoot first" mentality on these last three.  We can always claim the balloon was trying to grab our missiles first so we had to fire.  Self defense.

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