To me it does not look strange. These missiles are very advanced electro-mechanical-optical systems with a lot of R&D behind it, and that is what you pay for. Also factor in the fact that they work for government contracts, which are usually significant more costly. You may wish that the request to tender from the Government includes "as cheap as possible", but usually it is the opposite.
That's not really what I mean.
It's the lure of the rabbit hole. Resist!
Oh man, I'm not trying to create a conspiracy out of it.It's the lure of the rabbit hole. Resist!
Accept that reality is sometimes not intuitive.
(What feels off to me is that AAWSAP received 50 missiles worth of money to chase werewolves and commission ~40 fringe physics papers.)
Depending on how you do your bookkeeping, essentially free, since it could replace training exercises or at least proficiency flying hours (is that the correct term?) that would otherwise have to be done.
Or something in the range of an order of magnitude too high.
I understand. It is downright shameful how sometimes money gets allocated for things everyone knows will be useless.. It is because the people deciding on these things decide on money that is not theirs and is coming in anyway. Also these people's career depends more on how much they spend and not per se how successful it was.
I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to imply that you were. (Hence the smiley.
)And a fair chunk goes to shareholders who stash it in the Bahamas.
Article: George F. Kennan wrote in his preface to Norman Cousins's 1987 book The Pathology of Power, "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military–industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."[21]
Now THAT'S a rabbit hole (and not a conspiracy one).
That's politics.
Basically, "because it was so expensive, they have to tell the public what it was", which they did, except for the ones they couldn't find, so presumably more money should've been spent on those searches?
It is true I don't trust the government because they lie all the time. It would satisfy me if the Executive branch (the FBI in this case) provided their full report to the Legislative branch (gang of 8 at minimum). And a member of the gang of 8 gave some summary of what the report said to me in the public.
But I don't really buy the expensive part.
Lots in this thread, but what was the final US statement on the AK shoot down recovery? Is it still that nothing was recovered?Some new info since Feb.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/read-...ntified-object-shot-down-over-yukon-1.6548510
And you'd trust those members of the government if it gave you that information, but you don't trust the government? What if the answers you got were "We don't know" and "We didn't find that"?
Good catch. I usually hear the phrase "recovery and exploitation". Exploitation typically means analysis. But it is not clear.
You'd have to ask them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-the-pentagon-shoot-down-a-harmless-ham-radio-balloon/
According to a statement issued last week by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), nearly 1,000 weather balloons, laden with battery-operated sensors, launch each and every day. They soar for a couple of hours before bursting at high altitude and air-dropping their data-packed payloads back to Earth via parachute.
The numbers for hobbyist launches of pico balloons are harder to come by. But according to estimates from Bill Brown, a high-altitude ballooning expert and a rocket engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, student organizations and ham radio groups around the world launch at least a few hundred pico balloons each year, with most originating from the U.S. and Europe. “There are about 20 to 30 amateur-radio pico balloons flying at any given day worldwide and around three or four traveling across North America daily,” Brown says.
That is your opinion. I actually think the chances that millions have been spent responding to pico balloons is small. They would be easy to identify both visually/FLIR and with radar and with radio tracking. They are common legal air objects. IMHO
Can you support this claim with evidence?
I think we get you don't believe these were pico/hobbiest balloons. What then, IYHO, do you think they were? Alien craft? Intel platforms launched by foreign governments? Interdimensional craft? Or are you just betting the field?
Please don't invite speculation. We're looking for facts.
I'm still hoping for the response to his invisible IR flare query to Northrop Grumman.
I agree with the statement in general, but in this instance it goes to Arthur's insistence that the government is lying to him. That leads to the inevitable conclusion that he thinks he knows but just can't get the gov't to admit it. Knowing what is in his mind would be helpful in resolving the matter.
I disagree. Facts and evidence matter. Speculation does not.
One step at a time.
NASA has the same "idle costs" as the military. Everything does.
I think this is a point we could get some additional facts about. It is my understanding that various different radar platforms have the ability to recognized "signatures" of known objects. It provides more information than location and speed/trajectory.
Article: Radar cross-section (RCS), denoted σ, also called radar signature, is a measure of how detectable an object is by radar. A larger RCS indicates that an object is more easily detected.
In general, RCS is a function of the orientation of the radar and target. A target's RCS depends on its size, reflectivity of its surface, and the directivity of the radar return caused by the target's geometric shape.
ChatGPT is not a reliable source.
-- https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/Until 2010, Boeing charged an average of $300 for a trash container used in the E-3 Sentry, a surveillance and radar plane based on the 707 civilian airliner. When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a “commercial” item, meaning that Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous levels, according to a weapons industry source who spoke to RS [= Responsible Statecraft].
In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit.
https://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/rb66.en.html
Much more important for the respective radar signature are special Doppler frequencies through parts moving at or in the target, e.g. rotor blades or compressor blades of the engines, which also gave these modulations their name: Jet Engine Modulation (JEM). These Doppler frequencies depend on the number of parts and their rotational speed. Due to the rotation, these parts constantly change the instantaneous radial velocity in relation to the radar and are concealed at certain angles of rotation. Their rotation thus produces a characteristic pattern of Doppler frequencies. All Doppler frequencies must be measured and correlated with the image in the database. Like a fingerprint, these can be used to identify the aircraft type.
In addition, balloons typically don't have fast-moving parts that can generate a Doppler signature.
Well, he might have been seeing the search, not a recovery operation per se.
If the debris is of modest size and distributed over a wide area, even a modest snowfall would make it very difficult to find.
I don't doubt that but my comment was more about their primary roles.
City firefighters tend to sit around the station 24/7 (they do live there) doing naff all, waiting for a call to come in.
Personnel who are off on a training course for additional qualifications are not on shift.
You may want to inquire if the personnel doing community outreach is on shift while they're doing that.
That's part of their job, yes. It's still intermittent work.
In the USA, at least in my area, they are also trained as emergency medical technicians. I see them almost daily, out and about with the ambulance but seldom with the fire truck.
