- cross-posted to:
- genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
Rest easy fellow patriots, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade will no longer be terrorizing our skies with their $12 pico balloons after being annihilated by our big, beautiful $400,000 sidewinder missiles.
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$400,000 sidewinder missiles
Imagine if that money was instead given as grant to meteorology hobby groups in Illinois, instead of using that money to blow up their shit.
they did, what was the last barometric reading when the missile popped? crucial data right there
If China simply released a few hundred thousand dollars worth of balloons, they could exhaust the entirety of America's air defense munitions.
Get a ham radio license (requires study, but only costs $15 every 10 years in the US), learn how APRS, works, and attach a transmitter to a balloon. Along the way of learning this stuff, you'll encounter various groups who do it.
RIP to their entire project. https://www.picoballoon.org/technology#preorder
Apparently the one over Lake Huron took 2 Siderwinders to shoot down, implying they somehow missed a stationary balloon the first time. Which frankly means the balloon won.
What prevents these pico balloons from just getting into a normal airplane's way?
Pico balloons are typically about 3 ft. in diameter on the ground before they are launched. As they ascend to altitudes of 20,000-50,000 ft., the super-pressure balloon envelope expands by about 2-3 times in size and achieves neutral buoyancy, allowing them to float at a roughly consistent altitude. Wind currents then push them through the atmosphere, with some balloons capable of circling the world several times before they pop or fall.
Couldn't they just at some point float on in front of a normal plane at that altitude?
Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade. Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.
Is this just junk and pollution?
Mostly they avoid it by the sky being big and empty, so you’re mostly just not going to.
But also in the US the limit is 6lbs of payload or you have to register it with the FAA. Basically even if a plane did hit one most planes would care the same amount as when they hit a bird, which is to say “not at all.”
