Well, I don't mean shooting down U-2s, since we don't fly those anymore, I mean the hypothetical "10 U.S. balloons over China since the start of 2022". Why did it take more than a week to trot out that claim? Of course it's already been categorically denied on our end. I strongly tend towards believing our intel/military people on this one, simply due to the sophistication of our satellite tech. But maybe we have a need for in-situ comms sniffing over there that can't be accomplished on the ground, idk. I guess I'm curious why they kept tempting fate with the U-2 when Powers was shot down in 1960. Didn't even initiate the Black Cat squadron until '61. Hard to believe that it wasn't just like you imply, knowingly sending aircraft and pilots to their deaths or capture. Dude how long do you think it takes to ride an ejected pilot's chair with parachute down from 70k+ feet? That's gotta be like something around 30 minutes. Got a whole military junta welcoming party by the time you touch down. btw, I love the stories of the SR-71 in its heyday, when they'd be like "missile locked on to us, sir". "OK, full throttle", and that was the end of that. U-2slow would've been the meme. But yeah, maybe we're a few weeks out from the Chinese fabricating a U.S. balloon take-down. Would not surprise me at all. Still, any UAV shootout exchange, real or fabricated, does not scare me nearly as much as the increasing desperation of Vladimir Putin.
For human-ish blob (edit: on a parachute) weighing 100 kg dropping from 20 km, I got around 14 minutes under the simple equation of motion, with drag proportional to speed squared. It'd probably be closer to 10 minutes for stratified atmosphere, but I can't be arsed to calculate it that precisely. :PDude how long do you think it takes to ride an ejected pilot's chair with parachute down from 70k+ feet? That's gotta be like something around 30 minutes.
Did you use the cross-sectional area of a parachute, or a person? How'd your foot heal up, btw?? Been too long, good to see ya around :).
Cross-section of parachute, yes, sorry for confusing wording earlier. It mostly corresponds to 1.7-2.0 air resistance coefficient in all those plug-n-play calculators on the internet if you want to cut corners. Foot's OK. What's puzzling is that I can jump rope and do dexterity ladders like it's nobody's business, but running gives me pins and needles progressing to stabbing pain. So kinda not doing that.
I mean, I get what you're saying. It's not likely that we fly U-2s over anywhere we aren't on extremely convivial terms with. I care about this stuff entirely too much and one thing I can say with certainty: the US really likes an asymmetrical frontier. We're somewhere between 250k and 300k rounds per insurgent killed in Afghanistan, depending on how you ask. That's around three metric tons of ammo. It was argued during the Vietnam War that we could have paid every man, woman and child in North Vietnam $57k a year to put down any weapons and declare us the victors and come out fiscally ahead (pretty much the way the Treasure Fleets worked, incidentally). We know SR-71s/A-12s never flew over the USSR because it didn't take long for the USSR to make some truly hot-shit missiles. We know the SR-71s/A-12s overflew China... until they got some truly hot-shit missiles. 'member this? We have zero fucking reason to fuck around with balloons. The overwhelming political sentiment in the US towards China is "take their money and slap their bitch asses down if they forget their place." China, on the other hand, is busily establishing themselves as the only transcendent empire in the history of mankind and if you disagree on any level you're an enemy of the people. Dollars to donuts: Chinese spy satellite overflights are a known quantity in the US intelligence community. If the Chinese actually wanted to learn something new they'd have to get creative. On the other hand the United States had launched something like 6,000 espionage balloons by the time Xi was a Party member so it's safe to say we cut that shit out ages ago or else little boys would have US Spy Balloon trapper keepers the same way they have SR-71s. Proxy bullshit? The incursive shit we did against Soviet Air Defense was really fucking hairy. Provocative AF. As soon as it became clear that things could escalate we scaled back... but only riiiiiiiiiight up to the edge. Mostly. Flight "double Oh Seven are you shitting me" So we poked China with Taiwanese pilots because (1) we could deny we had anything to do with it (2) We could pretend we weren't doing it just to piss off the Russians. But as soon as we figured out that the Chinese were saltier at the Russians then they were at us, we quit cold turkey and that's pretty much where we spent the rest of the Cold War. A while, yeah. I think terminal is somewhere between 20 and 30 feet per second at sea level but probably a fuckton more that high up. Chute might not even do anything for the first 10-20k feet. They're definitely gonna have time to suss you out. I think there's a lot of bravado there. These guys? Mach 8. A lot of the US' cloak of invincibility comes from knowing who to pick fights with. I think we decided to up our anti-foo-fighter game in 2018, and we needed an excuse to pop some pigeons. 'cuz here's the thing - soon as those things start shooting back we're in a whole new ball game. This whole kerfuffle, my guess, was "are you fucking kidding me with these balloons" followed by "well shit maybe we get lasers now." All the rest of it is posturing.Well, I don't mean shooting down U-2s, since we don't fly those anymore,
I guess I'm curious why they kept tempting fate with the U-2 when Powers was shot down in 1960.
The intelligence gathered by the Black Cat Squadron, which included evidence of a military build-up on the Sino-Soviet border, may have contributed to the U.S. opening to China during the Nixon administration by revealing the escalating tensions between the two communist nations. Shortly after Nixon's visit to Beijing, all reconnaissance flights over the People's Republic ceased, and the Black Cat Squadron was officially disbanded in the spring of 1974.
Dude how long do you think it takes to ride an ejected pilot's chair with parachute down from 70k+ feet? That's gotta be like something around 30 minutes.
btw, I love the stories of the SR-71 in its heyday, when they'd be like "missile locked on to us, sir". "OK, full throttle", and that was the end of that. U-2slow would've been the meme.