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[Robsoie]

This all served to reminds me that Nena's song is 40 years old.
Wow, how fast years are flying by...

[Starver]

Wow, how fast years are flying by...

...and how slowly the balloons are.

(Not sure everyone, possibly even most people, understood my own Nena reference, upthread. But I apologise for possibly trying to be smart-funny with it, anyway.)

[Lord Shonus]

Aren't weather/spy balloons pretty hard to detect with the equipment that's good at detecting everything else? Low emissions, low speed, operate high above normal operating altitude for drones or vehicles. Anything tailored to plug detection or destruction issues caused by balloons would probably be fairly useless otherwise wouldn't it?

They're pretty easy to pick up, but their flight paths and radar return strength is in the range where most radar sets filter them out - most stuff in that return range is something that doesn't pose a hazard, and can be a distraction from things that do. Per the DOD, that's why we're hearing about so many all of a sudden - after the first one, they turned the filters off.

[Dostoevsky]

Can we use overly excitable American posters as ammunition, last time I seen someone so excited about BALLONS was when i was eleven.

I just find the whole thing hilarious (including how the evening news is more or less taking this tone without irony), apologies for the all-caps.

[EuchreJack]

Die Balloons!

[King Zultan]

OH GOD BALLOONMAGEDDON HAS STARTED, WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO!?


I must find and equip a Pickelhaube for protection.

[jipehog]

I find many things coming out of the USA like that, but after five pages of that you guys start to sound like the left wing version of Rush Limbaugh

[Lord Shonus]

You only think that because you apparently haven't heard much from the Left versions of Rush Limbaugh.Who are increasingly horseshoing to the point that they're hard to distinguish from Limbaugh in a funny hat.

[jipehog]

maybe, they all sound to me like someone over excited about melons

Anyway, is there any way to calculate windspeed at various altitudes from distance, or does one have to relay on wind patterns from previous measurements?


Edit:

I am unclear if Google's high attitude BalLOONs had engines, but they seem to mainly rely on altitude control for navigation, and balloons in their swarm stayed a float for up to half a year at time. Has this been improved upon?

[Frumple]

You only think that because you apparently haven't heard much from the Left versions of Rush Limbaugh.Who are increasingly horseshoing to the point that they're hard to distinguish from Limbaugh in a funny hat.

I mean, more than that, if they aren't being intentionally disingenuous, they haven't heard Limbaugh actually speak for any length of time. There's been precious little in this thread that approaches the nonsense far right talk radio perpetuates, and none of what did was left-wing to any degree worth mention.

[Starver]

Die Balloons!

Nein. Ist "Der Ballon"... 

Anyway, is there any way to calculate windspeed at various altitudes from distance, or does one have to relay on wind patterns from previous measurements?


Edit:

I am unclear if Google's high attitude BalLOONs had engines, but they seem to mainly rely on altitude control for navigation, and balloons in their swarm stayed a float for up to half a year at time. Has this been improved upon?

There's a general corpus of knowledge about both trends and (as things change) likely conditions at any given time. Nicely callibrated with the 'dumb' balloons, and how they've tracked themselves. The 60k feet level of the 'original' balloon is apparently rather sedate, wind-wise compared to the 30-40k ft altitude of the rather more volatile and changable polar jet-streams. And we've hear mention of propellors identified (by observation, and possibly by recovered wreckage) that could be enough for station-keeping (altitude control might be by active inflation/deflation, and/or perhaps vertical propulsion) to loiter, or take advantage of the right conveyor-belt of air to get elsewhere (eventually!).

I don't think it's much of a dark art. Even if it's not entirely a concrete science yet, capable of definitive and fully-scheduled flight-plans. (For China to have "lost control" of their devices would require a communication blackout between home-base and their craft, or a failure of the active platform systems, and I get the impression that data has been observed flowing freely, and a non-passive behaviour in key ways that would be hard to accomplish whilst under only problematic operation.

Without a specific (classified-level) insight into what the US actually thinks they have found out (or the Chinese know for definite), even assuming a wide range of reality-to-announcement distortions one can probably assume it's a sufficiently competent attempt to at least try the technology out, followed by the necessary (knee-jerk?) countermeasures being rolled out under the sudden public scrutiny that also happened.

[jipehog]

According to this 20km (~60k feet) seem to be the sweet spot if your aim is to maintain position. Also at such altitude solar panels would be more efficient and wouldn't be abstracted by clouds.

That along with some sort of propulsion system on top of passive guidance seem like the make of very cheap geostationary balloon satellites. Also  I am thinking that if one operates several balloons in a mesh, it would be possible to use whichever balloon has the most energy stored to check windspeed measurements at different altitudes for best positioning of the whole group improving efficiency further.

It would be interesting to see if there is economic model for that

and yeah it feels like there is a lot of knee-jerking to headlines in politically polarized USA that not particularly interesting to me.

[EuchreJack]

and yeah it feels like there is a lot of knee-jerking to headlines in politically polarized USA that not particularly interesting to me.

...actually, Americans agree much more on this Balloon Crisis then anything else.

[jipehog]

removed wrong thread.

[Dostoevsky]

Another day, another balloon/object/whatever. This time over Michigan, near Lake Huron.

This does seem more and more like DOD "turning off the filter" per Shonus's earlier quote of an official, and finding there's a lot of stuff up there. Civilian, corporate, North Korea, alien, who knows? Hopefully before too long they'll start giving more description to the second object taken down a few days ago.

Perhaps they're unmanned because it's alien machine AIs coming to enforce laws against the abuse of pupal AIs.