Chinese spy balloon

One can tell by all of the animation that this is nothing but a collection of sales presentations stitched together to look real. At best, this is nothing more than part of a disinformation campaign. I did find it funny the towed naval target clip that showed the splashes of missing weapon fire around the barge. A laser beam wouldn't splash water.

A simple review of Laser weapon technology at Wikipedia reveals all of the aspirations this video presents and most of the engineering complications ignored by this video. The YAL-1 laser weapon system appears to be the only laser weapon system that came close to being effective. The YAL-1 was intended to target ascending ballistic missiles and not a balloon. I won't speculate if the cancelled YAL-1 system could pop a balloon at any altitude, let alone 30 km.

I agree, I could have picked a better video but I like a discussion and you didn’t let me down… thank you.

Yes, as far as portable, the draw back is the power requirement where a carrier would power it with its reactors. Portable,,, where is the power coming from.

Also a couple of things here going slightly off topic, but will address some of the issues you brought up,… using a laser not as a weapon but as a tool and lasers characteristics.

1.) As far as bouncing off of water, anyone with experience with lasers, for myself, for a CNC laser cutting aluminum, the aluminum has to be masked, and the reason for that is, when when the laser melts the metal, it creates a mirrored puddle of aluminum that will reflect the beam energy. More on this…

2.) again having used CNC lasers for cutting metal the laser like the plasma on a plasma cutter only melts the metal, to penetrate you need high pressure gases (normally they use a enert type of gas such as nitrogen to lower any contamination or reaction, but I’ve used compressed air also) the high pressure gases or compressed air is used to clear and ‘blow’ the molten metal away. As a weapon,… well, melting is good. And for a balloon,… well… I have a small portable laser it would work great… I’m sure the military has larger ones without the high power requirement to incapacitate the balloon.

3.) you’re correct about ‘propaganda’.

in another life, I worked R&D with 99% on military projects. All the contracts out there, it was normal to put out sales ‘propaganda’. Just make damn sure you have task specialist to back it up because they have people like yourself that will tear it apart. And task specialist are not managers or directors.

an example… we had did the ‘propaganda’ and won one of three contracts, for a proto-type. With the winner of the proto-type selected getting a contract for the first 144 units.

proto-type was built and it went on trials… there were issues… one was a huge one… where the unit failed and had to go to repairs… the oversight committee it was asked why? The director said to the military they were too hard on the units.

I *&*& when I heard the dumb SOB said that and ask if I could interject… and I started with, what the director really means, this is an R&D project, we expected challenges, this testing is where we find out what needs to be done.

We realize that when you find that your in a hot zone, your not going to follow SOP’s, what you’re going to do is your going to red line and beyond it to get yourself out. And this trials will enable you to do that.

they then asked how is this going to be mitigated. (It was a metallurgical failure, where weight limits of the unit played a huge part.)

I told them, from quick thinking and really no planning on this unknown failure, this is what we’re going to do. Which was a simple straight forward fix. Which satisfied them.

so yes, it is propaganda, because R&D doesn’t come off the shelf.

but back to the topic, it’s good to have an open brainstorming discussion, where there are Negative Nancy but there are no bad ideas because both always leads to details on the fixes, which frankly, I enjoy.

I'm glad you appreciate a good engineering discussion. You are very welcome.

Speaking of clever engineering, in the Wikipedia report I provided there was one brief paragraph and link of clever engineering using a drawback as an asset, the Electrolaser. Instead of trying to minimize the energy loss of ionizing the gas media (air) between laser and target, this ion trail becomes a conductor for an electric discharge onto the target. There are still many complications to be addressed to making this a practical device but turning a drawback into an asset is still cool.

‘electrically conductive laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC)’

I never knew or thought that could be done. I wonder if that’s something similar to what Tesla was trying to do with his free energy experiments in Colorado.

Which brings up the relationship on how that fits into the ElectroMagnetic Spectrum.

I only ask that is what other possibilities and applications you may discover… and that’s what I enjoy on R&D, it’s like your looking for something in your house, like a screw driver, and as your looking for it, you find your vise-grip or what ever that you didn’t realize you lost…

that’s how a thread like this can go off-topic and suddenly, it leads to a discovery…

My concern is the Chinese may have used this as a rehearsal for an EMP attack.It is possible to launch a nuclear EMP device from a balloon,we did it in the 50's.

Military signals used to be sent by lead shielded cables,but not anymore.I am sure they have better methods now.Did you ever wonder what those nitrogen tanks strapped to the poles were?They kept to keep lead cables pressurized to prevent moisture,and to detect leaks,tampering,etc.

A relatively small nuclear EMP, high altitude explosion could paralyze the entire east coast and result in millions of deaths due to communication and transportation problems:No food,water, heat,cooling,electricity,etc.Anarchy would reign as people fought for dwindling supplies of fuel and food,water,etc.

Here is a link to the first balloon launched EMP nuclear blast:

https://www.futurescience.com/emp/EMP-history.html

That’s the basis of intelligence gathering, find the weakness of the best possible offense with the most advantages gains with the fewest loses…

Without or before the fog of war sets in.