Hacker News Reader

Comment by ribosometronome | Hacker News Reader

Panic, shut down the airport, and reveal their top secret methods of defense against actual attacks.

And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.

But what do we know, maybe it was an evil terrorist party balloon. You see, the wall just needs to be a little higher to protect that beautiful country from all southern evils.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

> And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.

Sounds like a great way for a drug-runner to proceed - release 1000 balloons across a very large area, and have only one of them carry their payload of drugs (or whatever).

They (apparently) have much more efficient ways of doing this.

My guess would be that an actual catapult and an RC car would be enough. It may be necessary to be airborne to cross the land border, but only just enough for the physical barrier, the rest can be on land.

That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine

I have wondered if this would help Ukraine. Let a thousand balloons float serenely into Russian airspace. Some of them may have drones on them waiting to be cut loose and drop a payload on something important. Or they may be carrying a weighted 3d printed shell of a drone that does nothing, Russia can't afford to take that chance. And likewise in the other direction.

Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?

Those winds favor Ukraine and this is something they are acutely aware of. Ukrainian drones into russian held territory have a range advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com