Weird California sighting

a reply to: boomer135

All I've ever heard is rumor on that one, so I don't even know if it's flying around. So that's about all I'll ever say about it.

a reply to: cosmicts

I've been told that the military has done a number of studies, and come to the conclusion that the only way to insure that a ballistic missile strike against the US could be thwarted is if the "counter-measure" was already place in the upper atmosphere.

Not in obit

Not on a sub.

And certainly Not sitting on the ground, even with hypersonic capability.

But on-station at an altitude above 65,000FT.


Seems a bit fantastical to me, but that's the story I was told.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: boomer135

All I've ever heard is rumor on that one, so I don't even know if it's flying around. So that's about all I'll ever say about it.

Well. Was about to ask VTOL transport as in V22 or VTOL fighter as in AV-8/F-35B

Unfortunately I'm with Domo on this one....

a reply to: Zaphod58 That's what I was thinking also and it may have had something to do with my sighting if it was being tested or used in this area for training 4 years ago I was trolling around the ranges close to the camp Mackall training area at around 2am hoping to catch a late night early morning parachute jump as I often do and I was parked near one of the drop zones just blowing off time waiting for something to happen when I got out to take a leak just as I was about to get back in my truck I felt a rush of air blow past me and I just thought it was a strong wind gust but when I looked up I almost sh*t myself about 800-1200 feet up was a totally silent black triangular craft moving slowly towards Camp Mackall Army Airfield so I hop in my truck and follow it and I got to within 800 yards of the airfield when I noticed it start its decent and when I got a little closer I ran into 2 black suburban type vehicles and out pops 4 special forces types asking what I was doing and there was an ongoing opp in the area then pulled me out of the truck and searched me I never said a word about seeing the craft for fear of being taking in for questioning and didn't want to lose my clearance to be on certain areas of the base for my job but the craft resembles the one Astr0 is describing totally silent triangle moving slow size wise close to b-2 size maybe a little bigger with a red beacon light n the middle and 3 white lights one at each point but it only displayed slow flight no high speed flight like others describe.

I know this whole story sounds odd and when I said the craft made its decent it could only be described as a VTOL capable airframe because the runways at Camp Mackall Army Airfield are to short to land a craft of this size the normal way the largest planes I've ever seen land there are C-130's and the occasional C-17 but that's it and I had an Iphone with me that night and even though I didn't take pics because it would have been useless as dark as it was wen I was searched it was taken an I was highly pissed cuz I only had it for a week but I kept my mouth shut because I valued my job and didn't wanna become a prison wife and as far as what I do for a living I work for a local environmental company and we do a lot of cleanup work all over Fort Bragg and the range areas and certain parts of the base require me and a few of my coworkers to have a TS clearance and one neat area I visit often is delta forces compound and that's all I will speak of that. P.S the only aliens I believe in are the border hopping kind that speak Spanish i'll start believing in the other type when I shake hands with one.

Ok back on topic Zaphod would the place where our sexy lady is staying over happen to be Hao Island in French Polynesia it looks to have a long enough runway and 2 nice size hangers and its pretty secluded ?

originally posted by: Domo1
a reply to: boomer135

Ugh I hate you guys so much sometimes.

It's like dating the girl that's saving herself for marriage but doesn't mind flashing skin in this forum.

But when you finally get into her pants the experience will be something out of this world

Or so I assume

My thoughts exactly.
Still chuckling at that analogy, a reply to: domo

originally posted by: Whiplash32
Ok back on topic Zaphod would the place where our sexy lady is staying over happen to be Hao Island in French Polynesia it looks to have a long enough runway and 2 nice size hangers and its pretty secluded ?

Stateside, up north. Check back a page or two..

a reply to: clay2 baraka

Im sure she gets around maybe youre both close. Who,says theres just one. Who says she doesnt jet set from place to place frequently.

YA KNOW id LOVE for them to do a very high speed flyby of my house in SC. i mean just above house top

Well, my day job put me into radio silence for a few days, but now I’m back. Let’s take the Portugal sightings at face value and see where that leads…..

Initially, I carried the hypothesis that this new vehicle might be a transatmospheric vehicle (TAV) boosting out of the atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory, performing a lifting entry, and transitioning to a hypersonic glide. There are two factors that argue against this: First of all, the objects came in off the Atlantic and went feet dry at the coast on a heading just about due East. If you assume that the vehicle would have launched from the US or US controlled territory, there is virtually no way that it could have been heading directly 090 degrees when it crossed Portugal’s coastline. This is due to orbital mechanics considerations, which I will skip over for the time being. Secondly, the fact that it did a fairly short radius turn on an apparently constant speed trajectory within the sight of one of the ground witnesses means that it was inside the atmosphere at that point. Assuming the two Portugal sightings were of the same object, it was an airplane, not a spaceplane.

Unlike a spaceplane, when an airplane moves from point A to point B, it is continuously pushing all the air molecules between A and B out of the way. That results in continuous drag, which requires continuous thrust. A reasonable conjecture is that the continuous green glow is the visible signature of the continuously operating propulsion system.

Given that it was an entirely endoatmospheric vehicle, there is no good reason the propulsion system would use rocket power and a lot of good reasons it would not, so, let’s assume it was an airbreather.

Based on the witness accounts, the vehicle appeared to be moving across the sky about 5 to 6 times faster than commercial jets (which cruise around Mach 0.9). So let’s guess that the vehicle cruises between Mach 5 to 6, or approximately twice the speed of an SR-71.

Speaking of which, the SR-71 is a good vehicle for comparison. Suppose, for argument, this new girl has about the same wing loading as the SR-71. That would mean, among other things that it should be able to fly roughly the same subsonic profile for purposes of takeoff, landing refueling, and formation flying with fighters, as observed. At top speed, flying twice as fast, it only needs ¼ the atmospheric density of the Blackbird, meaning it wants to cruise at a higher altitude. (If the nominal cruise altitude of the Blackbird is 100,000 ft, then the new girl would fly at about 130,000 ft.)

I would expect that the new girl would have at least as good a supersonic L/D as the Blackbird—in fact probably slightly better, what with improvements in computational fluid dynamics, and all. That being the case, it would have the same or slightly better specific fuel consumption as the Blackbird (i.e., burn the same mass of fuel per unit mass of aircraft, per unit of distance travelled).

Aerodynamic heating on the nose and leading edges scales like the Mach number, cubed. So, doubling the flight Mach number from 3 to 6 will increase the heating by a factor of 8. This means the nose and leading edges undoubtedly have thermal protection materials on the outer surfaces, beyond what the Blackbird had. Mach 6 is too slow to justify ablative materials, so I would expect something like shuttle tiles over an actively cooled load bearing structure. Active cooling is no doubt accomplished by circulating the fuel before burning it.

Flying twice as fast as the Blackbird with the same L/D basically means that you have to burn twice the mass of fuel per unit distance travelled, and this is where I think they had to get creative. The normal way to get twice as much fuel burn would be to keep the fuel/air ratio constant and pass twice as much air through the engine. I don’t think there’s any internal aerodynamic flow problem with flying turboramjets like the JT11-D at Mach 6, compared to Mach 3, and I have to assume that the JT11-Ds on the SR-71 were nearly optimized for their ability to extract thrust per unit mass. So you couldn’t just open up the inlets and let twice as much air in and expect them to stay lit at Mach 6.

To get twice as much thrust per unit of distance travelled, without increasing the size of the engine, you have to solve two problems, simultaneously. You have to be able to sustain stable combustion of your main fuel (presumably JP-7) well outside of its normal fuel/air ratio AND you have to be able to effectively double the flame front speed of your propellant/oxidizer mixture.

What Zaph is hinting is that they are injecting a combination of fuel + oxidizer into the combustion process when the vehicle is at high speed cruise. The addition of oxidizer pushes the fuel/oxidizer ratio back towards stoichiometric, where it is most efficient. I surmise that the “fuel” they are injecting is chosen not just for its heating value, but also for its ability to improve the combustion speed. Tri Ethyl Borane (TEB) is the obvious choice since it is highly pyrophoric; that means that when it is injected, it burns everywhere at once. The flame front doesn’t have to propagate from one end of the fuel/air mixture to the other. TEB is slightly more energetic than straight hydrocarbon fuels, so there shouldn’t be any efficiency loss. It’s also already in production and has heritage from the SR-71 program. The oxidizer could be any one of a number of storable substances. The usual suspects would be Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO), Hydrogen Peroxide, (H2O2), or perhaps Nitrous Oxide (NOS).

One big problem with use of Diborane aircraft fuels back in the 1950s was that one of the products of combustion in a Nitrogen rich environment (like the atmosphere) is Boron Nitride (otherwise known as Cubic Boron Nitride—CBN). CBN is an industrial abrasive, second in hardness only to diamonds. Burning Diborane fuel in a turbojet was equivalent to continuously sandblasting the inside of the engine. They usually had to be rebuilt after each flight. Injecting the Boron rich fuel into the ramjet duct bypasses this particular problem.

Overall, Zaph is presenting a perfectly consistent and logical description of a Mach 6, ISR aircraft. I have no idea why the naysayers don't think he knows what he’s talking about.

Here is something for you to consider. Say you can reduce air drag by 90 percent? would that lower the heat generated on said aircraft?. What is teh craft uses a similiar system to the black triangles? reducing drag to almost zero or reducing heat to nothing due to its energy sheathing of the craft? the SHARPS program I bet has been used to enable this and other aircraft to reduce their drags.

a reply to: 1947boomer

Excellent, informative write up of the possible technologies involved in the suspect craft. Thanks.

I wonder if they would need as extensive heat protection of the leading edge and internal structures if the altitude was much higher than the 130k ft surmised? The thinner the air the less friction heating?

a reply to: 1947boomer

If there was transatmospheric vehicle along those lines, I would say it was the yellow light that people (including me) have seen. It always seems to travel in a straight line at an extremely high rate of speed. It would make sense for it to be what you described with the climb into space and the hypersonic dive down.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: boomer135

All I've ever heard is rumor on that one, so I don't even know if it's flying around. So that's about all I'll ever say about it.

Let's just say naval special warfare command and there limitless budget...

a reply to: boomer135

VARIOUS?

originally posted by: Sammamishman
a reply to: boomer135

VARIOUS?

No. Its not operational yet I don't think

I do think various will be a game changer though. Check out the video on this page. That gun is pretty bad ass.www.lockheedmartin.com...

a reply to: 1947boomer

hi there,

Great informative post,

thanks for posting.

Snoopyuk

originally posted by: clay2 baraka

originally posted by: Whiplash32
Ok back on topic Zaphod would the place where our sexy lady is staying over happen to be Hao Island in French Polynesia it looks to have a long enough runway and 2 nice size hangers and its pretty secluded ?

Stateside, up north. Check back a page or two..

We're talking about its current location - the one out over the pacific right now.

The Montana location discussed a page or two back, was where one *could* have been kept... But, certainly not where it's at now.