I don’t think augmented reality has been applied to in cockpit training yet.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
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I don’t think augmented reality has been applied to in cockpit training yet.
doubt it, how is it such a coincidence that it drifted to the biggest geopolitical rival? i imagine this isnt even a chinese balloon at all.
Jet stream ?
Sometimes things really are what they appear. But yeah, who knows what happened?
USAF&US army ineptitude against something they've been using since the 1950s looks quite (un)impressive.
To be fair - the target really isn't a joke and is difficult to deal with using conventional measures.
During WW2, Japan had a program to send bombs strapped to balloons over. There was no guidance involved and they were built to lose air, etc. over time and fall to the ground, detonating. Their movement pattern was based on the Jetstream and quite a few landed in the Californian forests IIRC. It wasn't ever anything more than nuisance but it is possible. That said, the Japanese got that accuracy from launching from the Japanese home islands and didn't much care about any potential collateral damage hitting Canada or even where it hit in the US.
China sending just 1 near-space balloon from central China and waiting weeks to see if it would go over Montana to spy on US silos? Sounds absolutely absurd and I'm leaning on the simple answer that it's just a weather balloon.
Yeah... they have done it, they have a f-22 with a balloon kill painting...probably psed.
With modern knowledge of meteorology (both peacetime global monitoring system and national space-based monitoring), there was no 'if' - they could know where and when it'll go. Moreover, it's quite steerable - both globally (chose the necessary stratical layer with the necessary wind direction) and locally (it has a certain amount of power from those huge solar batteries - and thus expecting at least some propulsion capability is due).
Unlike ww2 Japanese balloons, which could rely only on fragmented weather science and mechanical time fuzing - here it's stupidly simple to make the thing satellite-controlled (and also upload everything it collects in real time).
Moreover, those ballons are actually remarkably cheap to make and launch - those can be launched in thousands for no economic strain - and, thanks to lower altitudes, comparatively negligible drift(compared to satellites), and extended time over the target - even cheap recon payloads (optical, SIGINT) will be able to both get higher resolutions/amounts of data than ludicrously expensive satellites, and look underneath the anti-satellite roofs&covers. Exposition angles matter.
Potentially there is even the capability to release sneaky secondary gliders...or other gliding payloads, if one doesn't think that was serious enough. Bomber balloon may sound jokes and fun compared to a billion USD apiece stealth bomber ... until the world's most powerful military can't really do sh...t about it.
Overall, I am personally of opinion that (1)the thing is likely genuine, and (2)it appears to be the single loudest failure of US continental defenses since 2001. A thunderous slap in the face, all the more loud, because for 1960-80s NORAD it would've been a piece of cake mission.
p.s. at least watching self-calming by Twitter netizens was fun.
If it really was true that the balloon could carry a 3 ton payload, that's a lot of 3kg suicide UAVs they can carry...
MwRYum
Major
Fake photo, actually.
But fret not, we should have the real deal in a few days, perhaps during a photo-op which Joe Biden paying a visit to the F-22A squadron in question, rounding up the victory lap we witnessing now.