The Balloon

[Anomalocaris]

Seems like there will be rain of bullets

Please, We Implore You, Don’t Try to Shoot The Balloon

If you tried to shoot the balloon yourself, here’s how it would go: you would shoot your gun into the air, the bullet would travel (up to about a mile), and then gravity would pull it back down. The speed the descending bullet travels at could still be deadly if you hit someone, or yourself, if you’re shooting at a high angle. Falling bullets can also land far off from their planned descent, putting individuals in the area at risk.  

Despite the clear danger posed by firing a gun at a target you absolutely will not hit, prominent conservative figures, second amendment advocates, and even gun manufacturers are encouraging their followers to take matters into their own hands.    

Former First Son Donald Trump Jr. tweeted to his followers that if the government won’t take down the balloon “perhaps we just let the good people of Montana do their thing… I imagine they have the capability and the resolve to do it all themselves. “

House Representative Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) told his Twitter followers to “take the shot.” Zinke wrote, “in Montana we do not bow. We shoot it down.”

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance tweeted an image of himself staring at the sky while posing with a rifle.

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted an image of herself holding a rifle with the caption, “I’m told there’s a balloon that needs to be taken care of?” The balloon is nowhere near Arizona.

KAK Industry, a firearm component manufacturing company, offered fans an “AR of your choice on the house” to whoever brought the balloon down.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...234673604/

There will be.   No ground based antiaircraft artillery ever devised can reach a target at 60,000 feet.     Most can’t reach even half that high.   That’s artillery, not rifle caliber bullets.

The balloon itself probably has very low heat capacity, so it is almost always at ambient air temperature,  this would make it a very cold and poor IR target.    If the equipment on the balllon is functioning, the gondola would put out some waste heat.  But the amount of waste heat is likely to be extremely small compared aircraft engine exhaust or aircraft skin friction heating.   So the balloon is unlikely to make a good target for any heat seeking missile designed to home in on any conventional aircraft.

The material of the envelope of the balloon is likely to be Mylar or some other radar transparent synthetic organic material, so it would be essentially invisible to radar unless it is coated with some sun/heat reflecting metallic coating.     From the bottom there seems to be no hint of such a coating, which would look either silver or black.     If the shell of the gondola of the balloon is made of metal, it would likely make a good radar target.   But lightness is important in any balloon, so the gondola may be made of some carbon fiber composite or other such light weight material.    That leaves only the metal equipment inside the gondola to reflect radar.     But onboard equipment would be rather small compare to any typical aircraft.   Radar waves will only bounce back efficiently if the radar reflecting object is at least 1/2 as large as the wavelength of the radar waves.    So if the interior of the gondola contains mostly relatively small electronic or other metallic items less than 1/2 radar wavelength in size,  they would still be almost invisible to radar.

So the balloon would make a poor target for most air to air or surface to air guided missiles.

60,000 is near or at most fighter’s ceiling.   They would struggle to stay aloft much less maneuver normally at that attitude.   But they may still be able to zoom climb up there to riddle the balloon with visually Aimee gunfire.    That seems to be the only reliable way to bring it down.   But hitting the near stationary balloon with gun fire while on a ballistic zoom climb trajectory is probably not what most fighter pilots trained for.    And the chances are even after being riddled, the balloon will still be able to stay airborne for quite some time because it will take a while for the lifting gas to leak out.

So it seems to me it is surprising difficult to actually shoot the balloon down, chest thumbing aside.