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No no no. Sensors are how you stay alive. You never turn them off when you are in a tin can in the middle of the sea with no visibility and enemies around. A primary goal of any naval force is to maintain situational awareness and to establish total control over an area. "River city 1" is an...

See my comment above. You are using true air speed while the jet flies with the available air and indicated air speed. 1000 knots true air speed (800knots indicated at 10k feet) is not out of the ordinary for an F-18 that can reach mach 1.8+ Consider maximum-range cruise airspeed is around 0.85...

Another issue with those calculations: we are using knots which is dependent upon the air density. What we ideally would need is the TAS=true air speed of the jet to calculate its movement. The higher you go the less dense the air is and the indicated airspeed will drop. So 350knots indicated...

Yes we don't have enough data for anything in this case. My assumptions are valid if this was hovering at "high altitudes" (couple of km is sufficient) for a long time and then "moving fast". An exotic design (inflatable/deflatable balloon + fixed wing) might also explain it. Or something else...

My calculations above are not as dependent upon FOV as I thought. Basically changing the FOV yields minimal changes in the results. The main factor is the F-18s speed. however I made a mistake in my previous calculation. To calculate the size I used the distance of the first picture with the...

I think those are meant to improve stealthiness at night rather than to improve the optics of the visor. Basically at night you don't want an enemy or prey to see the green light of the goggles in the dark and be alerted to your presence. Every little source of light counts and the bright green...

We are in similar ballparks. Just a note: 161knots is lower than the stall speed of the aircraft at that altitude for sure. The F-18 stalls at around 200 knots with no flaps and minimum load at sea level.

Not really. As you will notice the Anduril Ghost linked does not state a maximum altitude. It is meant to fly at low level. Being a helicopter it is intrinsically unable to fly very high. The higher you fly the less dense the air gets. So propellers don't work as well. And normal quadcopters...

As you can see from the video posted above by Mick. The endurance of a consumer drone flying at high altitudes is a couple of minutes. The helicopter style is more efficient (one engine versus 4 of a quadcopter) so it can achieve longer endurance at sea level. However, the higher you go the...

If the balloon was 1/3 of the size I've calculated you would need to scale down the whole "triangle" and that would give you a third of the distance (so very very close) and the aircraft would need to go 1/3 of the speed and would be stalling even with full afterburner. Even at half the speed I...

Not at the altitudes reported. Just reaching high altitudes would be a significant hassle for a battery powered ship launched drone.They normally fly for minutes if they need to reach such altitudes. Forget 90 min. Battery breakthrough definitely required with the current publicly known tech...

Extreme approximation of the calculations here... Using FOV of 53° for the camera (not sure it's the right one tried finding an exact value but I failed...in any case this is such an approximation that I think it shouldn't introduce such a big error). I calculated number of horizontal pixels...

Military ships can do what they please. There are no rules when talking about the military. Just consequences. They could have accosted the ships without boarding them to collect a lot of data and watch as the drones were recovered with no consequences at all. I think they would have done it...

Considering they found it in the first place I would assume some sensor picked it up first. Probably radar. Not all fighters have ATFLIR on board. But they probably have more data that we just don't have. Most balloons are pretty much invisible to radar or very faintly reflective depending on...

0.375 is at the edge of my guesstimation then. Things happen fast in a cockpit :) @135 knots (stall speed with full after burner) that's 26 meters travelled @350 knots that's 67 meters travelled @580 knots (typical F-18 high altitude cruise speed) that's 111 meters travelled @1000 knots (kinda...

Tried improving on the gif by stabilising the cockpit and fading between frames to "animate it". The timing is around 1 second. What I notice: - the pilot is tracking the object with his head. - the aircraft is turning right towards the object due to its angle of bank which is increasing...

Wow great animation! If we get timestamps that would be enormous... We could then calculate a lot based on a few assumptions like the probable speed of the aircraft. Mick's simulation might also help if we try to match it. Given two pictures were taking we can exclude a "chance" encounter/pic...

At this point the most probable hypothesis are: - the U.S. miliary has lost situational awareness due to bureoucracy/secrecy and is misidentifying party balloons (unlikely but possible) - some foreign power is spying on the U.S. armed forces (with some new tech?) (most probable) - other? The...

The most probable hypothesis definitely. The color of the lights (red/green) points to something earthly as it matches ordinary navigation lights. It raises a lot of questions though. Why would covert military drones have high visibility lights on them? Why couldn't the navy track them and see...

Interesting.... From the link: Agree with others that the most probable explanation here is some misidentified/unknown natural phenomena... if those were man made objects visible for so long the tools/sensors of the US Navy would have identified them easily at such close range.