>>97482
This story is fucking hilarious and I love it.

The Americans have shot it down! Hopefully it flew all over the sky in random directions blowing a loud raspberry when they shot it, but I have yet to confirm if this happened.

To be that visible from 60k feet it must have been absolutely huge.

>>97485
As big as three buses, according to Sky News who also have the video of it being shot down:

>>97488
It's good to see America's premier air superiority fighter, whose total development budget exceeds most countries defence spending, finally being put to good use in shooting down a balloon.

Let's hope the replacement currently in development includes a long stick with a thumbtack on the end.

>>97490
At least the fighter can be re-used. The one missile they fired at the balloon cost about £400,000. I can't imagine there was no possible other way to do that.

>>97491
Sabre-rattling Yanks shorting Raytheon stocks in the background.

>>97491

I believe the balloons are quite low pressure due to the altitude so if you shoot holes in them they tend not to do much aside from descend very, very slowly.

>>97491
It's the Americans, if anything they need a very good reason to not throw inappropriate amounts of ordnance at things, and six figures is a drop in the ocean.

>>97517
Those missiles have a shelf life, might as well fire them off at something before they expire or go to the Raytheon Whoops! isle

The Chinese knew that the Americans would track it with military radar and shoot it down with a very expensive air-to-air missile. They also knew that the Americans would target the balloon, in an effort to gather intelligence from the wreckage. When the Americans do inspect the wreckage, they will discover that the surveillance instruments carried by the balloon are pointing sideways, not down at the ground. This will not be a surprise to the intelligence chiefs who advised Biden not to shoot down the balloon. The Chinese will be disappointed - but not surprised - that the Americans used an F-22 rather than an F-35.

>>97519

To be perfectly honest I doubt the Chinese don't already have full schematics for the F-35 from a spectacularly undewhelming espionage method like hacking some contractor's Gmail account or something like that.

>The US has shot down another unidentified flying object, this time over Lake Huron near the Canadian border, in what is the fourth such incident this month.
>The incident on Sunday is the third time in as many days that an unidentified high-altitude object has been shot down by American fighter jets.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64620064

Someone mind checking in with a nuclear missile silo to make sure they're alright. Just a hunch.

>>97520
They're almost certainly monitoring the War Thunder forums.

The yanks have shot down four objects, they don't know what those objects are, they can't ascertain how they were remaining airborne and they might have lost track of where the debris landed.

2033 is continuing on a streak of being totally normal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-64627059

>>97525
>He also adds the US government knows what the balloon was was doing, where it was going and emphasises how much larger it was - capable of carrying three school buses and flying at a much-higher altitude.
Damn they could fly higher than three school buses that's incredible.

>>97526
What?