to answer everyone's questions:
1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may
2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel
3. the altitude is at 100hPa
4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only
5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable
6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon
I’m having an absolutely awful day. My Dad had to call 911 to get my stepmother the care she needed and everything just went downhill from there.
As rough as my day has been, I have spent a lot of time with your app today. It’s not perfect (of course) but I have had a lot of fun with it today. As dark as today has been, that really means a lot.
You have gotten some really solid feedback today and I can’t disagree with it. But speaking as a user, this product has made my day significantly better. Thanks for putting this out into the world.
A little bit of UX feedback: It would be great if the balloon were a draggable object, not just click once & then again, I tried to do this about 10 times before I realized: click once on the balloon and then again on the map! Or maybe edit the instructions (click balloon and then map).
Either way, I enjoyed this greatly! Thank you for building this.
I love the disclaimer "not a credible source for military intel". I know you are probably putting that to disclaim knowing where a particular balloon came from but it sounds a bit like "If you want to spy on another country, build your own simulator" - lol.
at around 60 deg south there is no land at all, causing the wind and sea current to be exteremly strong, meaning the balloon can 'circumnavigate' the globe in time as little as 5 days, it is also known as the screaming sixties
Isn't the actual distance to cover much shorter also at those latitudes, in order to 'circumnavigate' the globe? Because an equilatitude circle is much smaller.
Correct. Look at the specifics for Burt Rutan's Voyager world-record non-stop heavier-than-air circumnavigation. They specified the need to cross the equator twice in order to avoid such shenanigans, perhaps with a few more constraints.
This was really fun to mess about with. Interesting how some balloons take very similar paths for a bit, but then go on an entirely separate second stage. UK and Norway can follow a very similar path to get to the US, but then Norway's loops around Canada for a bit while the UK's head south. It's fascinating.
If you're bored and want to run mass simulations with your data I'd love to know which country is the hardest to spy on via balloon.
I wonder if there is a way to simulate a balloon in reverse, i.e. given its destination figure out which sources it could come from. Maybe it would just be a matter of reversing the winds and time? Would be interesting if it were doable.
It has a feature where you specify a target point and the origin point and it plots the changes in altitude your ballon will need to make to reach the target (if possible). Was surprising to me that if launched far enough away, a balloon can end up nearly anywhere in the US it wants just by controlling altitude.
Without any context on the page, my first impression is this is presented as a tool for people to validate certain theories such as "could a balloon released from china at some recent time and date have actually blown into the US?"
As other comments have pointed out, the lack of ability to test with different altitudes makes the tool unfit for that purpose.
That leaves an open question of what the creator is hoping people will see in this. Is it a game or toy? Is it a technical experiment? Is it art? Does the maker not care what it is to us? (but, still, I'm curious what it is to the maker)
Certainly one can think of obvious improvements - which I generally think is a sign that a tool has a lot of potential. I would put it somewhere between art and educational tool: I hadn't really thought that much about how far a balloon could drift in a given time period and this did kind of make me realize that they move pretty "fast" - around the world in 80 days? How about 80 hours.
Sometimes you just have time to make a think that has the potential to provoke further discussion and interest - which seems like what happened here.
Also, they said the balloon had "limited steering capability" which I assume means it could nudge itself in a direction or at least adjust it's altitude.
> To identify helpful wind patterns, Loon used advanced predictive models to create interactive maps of the skies. These maps allowed the team to determine the wind speed and direction at specific altitudes, times, and locations. The team then developed smart algorithms to help determine the most effective flight paths through the varying wind layers. With the aid of these algorithms, the balloons could accurately sail the winds over thousands of kilometers to reach a desired location and remain clustered around those destinations in order to deliver consistent connectivity below.
> It is possible for the balloon to change its altitude and then pick up different wind directions and velocities.
I've tried multiple different levels from 090 to 520, and it seems the deviation within level is extremely minimal.
i.e. maybe a difference between 70deg and 75deg, but if it's going in the general direction of east, there's not an altitude to turn around or even sidetrack.
Airships like a Zeppelin or blimp have some propulsive component to them that let them navigate without the wind.
A balloon can only navigate by catching different winds at different altitudes. When you can control the altitude from 60,000 feet to 120,000 feet there is a significant amount of variation in the direction of winds.
Can’t give an answer but my thought here is that this thing probably would like to be swept up before the news cycle turns and balloons aren’t a thing anymore. Looks and feels like something put together in a bit of a hurry (which is perfectly fine)
It is what you believe it to be (most of the time politically). People use it prove the theory. Other people use it to disprove. I can only see the fun with technicality on using the real data to simulate this.
Q: How would we differentiate between a spy balloon and a weather balloon?
A: Well, it's not really possible - the NRO (the highly secretive US satellite agency) makes a lot of geospatial data available to scientists for use in studying everything from forest fires to fault geology to ocean ecosystem productivity and beyond.
This has to be one of the coolest things I have seen this year on HN; last year it was the "endless acid banger".
It's tempting to let feature-creep make this bigger, but other than a few UX tweaks, it's perfect the way it is.
Then again, is there is anything I could think of for version 2.0 it would be satellite imagery from the virtual balloon (depending if Google maps allows that in their API)
update: I have now added a disclaimer that this site is aimed at for fun usage only, in case we would scream at each other over the topic of fidelity and application
This is amazing; really puts in perspective how hard it would be to say you know someone sent a balloon exactly to you, or that they didn't mean to... its something you could plan for (like this shows) and something that probably is very fickle
Only fun thing I found to do with this is race two cities' balloons around the world and back to original longitude. DC comes from behind and beats NY (at least at precise locations I selected).
Floats all the way around the world before passing within a few hundred feet of the start point. I was quite surprised when the second launch I tried turned up an (almost) eigenfloater of the matrix.
This site can be used to demonstrate how small perturbations in initial conditions led to big differences over the long run, aka: butterfly effect. Try to place to balloons near each other and you'll see how their trajectory end up differing by a lot.
It's interesting because climate modeling/forecasting with a very powerful computer could tell you where and when to drop your balloon to pass certain targets.
You should be aware that it is possible to direct your balloon pretty much anywhere by just changing the altitude.
If I was China and I wanted to make super advanced balloon to spy on US I would definitely make it so that it can use air currents at different altitudes to direct it where I want.
interesting - what is the confidence interval on this? if you start a balloon in the same spot at the same time does it always end up in the same place? or is there a wide range of where it could be
My (uninformed!) suspicion is that the confidence interval has to be very wide.
I’m worried about things like: the size and weight of the balloon, the altitude of the balloon, and very difficult to predict future changes in wind speed and direction during the course of the balloon’s flight.
to answer everyone's questions: 1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may 2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel 3. the altitude is at 100hPa 4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only 5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable 6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon