(February 4, 2023 at 7:55 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I wonder how many spy satellites, high-level spy planes, and drones the US has over China at any given moment.

Equating satellites with aerial vehicles is a false equivalence. No nation has sovereign rights over the space above it's land, only to the airspace over it.

As for spy planes over China, I doubt we do overflights. Their radar is fine and they'd be trying to shoot any planes down just as we did this balloon. U-2s/TR-1s make big, fat targets even for the old SA-2s that brought Gary Powers down. We fly ELINT missions around their periphery in order to maintain our databases on their radar capabilities, but those aren't into sovereign airspace, so there's another false equivalence on your part.

As for drones, I don't think we have any drones stealthy enough to evade detection and destruction. And once destroyed, the Chinese would most certainly trumpet that fact.

All nations spy on each other. All nations also defend their airspace.

You are a remarkably uninformed person when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Our drones are notoriously vulnerable. Many of them have been shot down by brokedick insurgents using small arms from the 70's. Often enough, captured intact - and ofc..then..leading to knock offs from hostiles regimes.

Me, personally, I think The Balloon tickled a certain demographic subsets fear spot..that demographic being comprised of people for whom spy balloons were culturally relevant. People who interpret the world with their spy balloon based filters. People who, fwiw, think spy balloons were bad enough (or, at least the other guys spy balloons), but fail to realize how much better/worse we've all gotten at surveillance since. If the chinese want to read your license plate, they can do it from space. If they want to read your texts, they can do it from a starbucks. Or maybe they don't need to do any of that because they can just ping your debit card activity anytime they want.

In fact, just assume that someone -has- tagged your tag and -is- reading your texts at all times and -does- follow you by purchase..because if it's not a someone doing that it's a something. We don't live in a surveillance state, we live on a surveillance planet, and balloons are an insult to every party involved no matter how prominently they might feature in an aging brain. The positive upshot here is that you can stop worrying about balloons..because it's far...faaar worse than you imagine, and has been for some time.

(February 5, 2023 at 10:48 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Most of these lost balloons are never recovered even when there was a preexisting plan in place to recover them.  They'd be looking for a package that a roughly 10ft balloon could have lifted - assuming it survives the fall and they tracked it down and can reach it.  It had it's highest potential counter-intel value (just running with chinese ufo spy airship thing for shits and giggles) while it was still aloft.  When it could be surveilled, when it could be fed disinfo.

In 47' of water, and knowing pretty much precisely where it crashed, finding a 2 cubic-foot sensor package is not a big challenge. Sonar, shallow dive that allows long underwater times, close to shore for easy resupply ... it will be found and soon.

I suspect that we were doing bandwidth analysis on it while it was aloft to suss out what gear it was using to examine our systems, but even so, recovering the hardware would be of much additional value. Such recovery would also confirm the nature and purpose of the payload itself.

Forgive my quoting Wikipedia, but to add to the above:

Quote:The balloon carries an underslung payload described as a "technology bay" estimated to be the size of "two or three school buses"; it was powered by solar panels mounted on the payload.[a] The envelope of the balloon itself is "much larger", according to a U.S. official cited by CBS News.[7] The same official described the craft as featuring a rudder for limited steering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_China...n_incident

[Bolding added -- Thump]

Something that big will be found, if it hasn't been already.

Of course MTG and other morons thought the people of Montana could have just grabbed a gun and shot the balloon down.

Just saw a post with Donald Trump Jr. echoing that sentiment. In the comments someone referred to Jr. as Traitor Tot. Gave me the giggles.

Traitor Tot. That's a good one.

(February 5, 2023 at 10:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Our drones are notoriously vulnerable.  Many of them have been shot down by brokedick insurgents using small arms from the 70's.  Often enough, captured intact - and ofc..then..leading to knock offs from hostiles regimes.

That’s because historically drones have been used for missions where the risk of shoot down is considered high.   Better lose a drone than deal with a dead or captured pilot.

They recover lost torpedoes routinely. Some have pingers, some don't. The lost ones mostly don't.

recovered torpedos didn’t get hit by a missile and then plunge 60,000 feet into the sea.    on the other hand, the envelope of the balloon might float and would be easy to spot from the air.