Cold War against China?

the hea said:
Is it really that easy to shoot down a baloon at these heights? From what I've read it's travelling at about 100,000 feet, thats well above the flight ceiling of any US fighter so those should be out of the question. It will have a minimal IR signature so missiles with IR seekers will probably be out of the question too. When it comes to radar guided missiles I think they are designed so that the object they are locking on to needs to move at a different speed relative to it's surrounding, this is to sepparete the echo from different types of clutter, this baloon is travelling with the wind and I'm not sure any radar guided missiles would even lock on to it.
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Closer to 60K per a few sources, within the service ceiling of a Raptor. Read that a radar guided missile might be best due to how big the fecker is (width of three commercial buses), a gun run being the second best.
 
Simbo said:
It’s mad how much people are freaking out over it
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Americans are very unforgiving when it comes to trespassing.

From a more historical perspective alone, I say Americans have a right to be mad when they have seen their own U-2 spy planes being unforgivingly shot down over enemy air space (Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union and Rudolf Anderson over Cuba) and one of their electronic surveillance planes forced to land in enemy territory (Hainan, 2001) while the Pentagon and their multi-million waste of money can't even do the same thing that Soviets and Chinese already did against undesirable intruders.

calodo2003 said:
Closer to 60K per a few sources, within the service ceiling of a Raptor. Read that a radar guided missile might be best due to how big the fecker is (width of three commercial buses), a gun run being the second best.
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Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) are perfectly designed to hit those things at high altitudes where fighter jets can't reach as well. If they decide to get rid of the balloon over the Atlantic, I see no reason why the US Navy can't fire one of those RIM-161 SM-3 at it from a destroyer.
 
RedDevilQuebecois said:
Americans are very unforgiving when it comes to trespassing.

From a more historical perspective alone, I say Americans have a right to be mad when they have seen their own U-2 spy planes being unforgivingly shot down over enemy air space (Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union and Rudolf Anderson over Cuba) and one of their electronic surveillance planes forced to land in enemy territory (Hainan, 2001) while the Pentagon and their multi-million waste of money can't even do the same thing that Soviets and Chinese already did against undesirable intruders.



Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) are perfectly designed to hit those things at high altitudes where fighter jets can't reach as well. If they decide to get rid of the balloon over the Atlantic, I see no reason why the US Navy can't fire one of those RIM-161 SM-3 at it from a destroyer.
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Good call.
 
RedDevilQuebecois said:
Americans are very unforgiving when it comes to trespassing.

From a more historical perspective alone, I say Americans have a right to be mad when they have seen their own U-2 spy planes being unforgivingly shot down over enemy air space (Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union and Rudolf Anderson over Cuba) and one of their electronic surveillance planes forced to land in enemy territory (Hainan, 2001) while the Pentagon and their multi-million waste of money can't even do the same thing that Soviets and Chinese already did against undesirable intruders.
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Just seems a bit daft to me, to suggest this is anything other than a lost weather balloon. For starters, its exactly what the purpose of this thing is, what it is designed and used for, its not military hardware. Why they would adapt something you can't direct to any degree of accuracy, to travel over 7,000 miles, taking god knows how many weeks, that's obviously going to be seen, to perform a task their spy satellites are already doing on a daily basis, is totally beyond me.

U-2 was a military plane conducting military ops over Russian airspace in a time of practical war, of course its getting shot down, when they figured out how. The E-3 is also a military aircraft and literally killed a Chinese pilot, accidently or not, while surveying disputed airspace, can't blame them from dissecting the aircraft a bit before returning it tbh.

Yank freaking out like their under attack and thinking they know better than the Pentagon :lol: Comes across as a little embarrassing. If they are curious about what's on it, they'll pick it up later no doubt. Its not some advanced aircraft, probably designed in the US in the first place tbh.
 
@Simbo Okay, but what will you say about Korean Air Lines Flight 007? On one extreme, you have the Soviet/Russians shooting about everything in sight when it encroaches their air space. On the other extreme, you have the Americans doing next to feck all when there is an intrusion or a situation in their own air space. Why can't the best way be in the middle?
 
I'm surprised no american civilians with their trigger happy approach haven't started trying to shoot at it
 
I've been presuming that the Americans could have disposed of this pretty easily, and probably tracked it the whole way, but chose not to purely to avoid giving away how their defences are set up. If that makes sense. I imagine they weighed up what the Chinese would gain from leaving it in the air versus what they would gain from examining their response.
 
The surveillance incidents involving advanced technology and described in the classified report were potentially more troubling, involving behaviors and characteristics that could not be explained.

Officials said that further investigation was needed but that the incidents could potentially indicate the use of technology that was not fully understood or publicly identified. Of the 171 reports that have not been attributed to balloons, drones or airborne trash, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”
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BOOM!
WfUYAFT.jpg
 
Lee565 said:
I'm surprised no american civilians with their trigger happy approach haven't started trying to shoot at it
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Multitudes of rounds have been expended by the citizenry, a popular congressperson basically called upon them to take the balloon out.
 
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever room Xi Jinping is sitting now.
 
Looked like whatever hit it, it the undercarriage. Good luck recovering that mess.
 
With commentary from a local redneck in Myrtle Beach:



From other videos, it looks like they got the balloon and not the payload.
 
Will the air crew be able to paint a balloon silhouette under their canopy? They should.
 
You can see individual vehicles in Beijing on a cheap laptop using Google satellite view. Does that mean China should shoot down all the satellites, or is there some sort of height limit above which spying is allowed?
 
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