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High-Altitude 'Security Blimps' Coming Soon
quackking writes "The AP is reporting (in New York Newsday) that the Georgia Tech spinoff company TechSphere has sold their concept of immense (300 foot diameter), high altitude spherical surveillance blimps to the honchos at Fort Benning, GA, and production is beginning now! (more here.) These things are as big as a 30-story building. Meanwhile Lockheed-Martin is working on gigantic 500-foot long robot blimps, (and more here.) This would be 25 times the size of the well-known Goodyear blimp. Says Mayor Don Plusquellic, 'For Akron, it's a very emotional thing.'"
"Our Proud & Patriotic Security Blimps will roam the country in Freedom Flotillas keeping evildoers at bay."
- John Ashcroft
In America, You watch Good Year Security Blimp!
Security Blimps? And here I thought they were going to use the blimps to display something like: "Run Windows Update, People Who Own Spam-Bot Zombie Computers!"
Hey, fine. As long as we get to put an antenna on it and use it for wireless access.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Weren't surveillance blimps all the rage during WW-I ? . . . Nearly a century later and we've gone full circle . . .
admittedly I didn't look at the site... but thinking about giant security blimps reminded me of the "guards"...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Soon, a stout steamer will carry all of our correspondence be-tween the United States and the British Empire, reducing communication time to a scant six weeks! Huzzah!
References to "1984" have become so common and hackeneyed these days that it's become kind of like the second order version of Godwin's Law or something. I'll agree with this.
But is this a reasonable time to start referencing 1984, now that they've started implementing actual plot devices from 1984 (the surveillance helicopters) in real life??
....Does anyone else hear some spooky voice saying 'Must Spawn More Overlords!'
Maybe this is all just a mass coverup to crashing alien craft. The numbers of crashed alien vessels has increased to the point where we need to make sure we have enough high alt. blimps cruising around so that we can claim one crashed!
From the TechsSphere page on the project:
This release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) the Company's financing plans; (ii) trends affecting the Company's financial condition or results of operations; (iii) the Company's growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) the declaration and payment of dividends. The words may, would, will, expect, estimate, anticipate, believe, intend, and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors.
Man sometimes the beauty of legal double talk brings tears to thine eyes...***sniff sniff***
... perhaps because one of the original US military airships was the USS Akron?
These blimps were actually aircraft carriers. Akron's sister ship, USS Macon, once "dive-bombed" a Navy ship carrying President Roosevelt, dropping a bundle of newspapers for his reading. The stunt was intended to prove the worth of aircraft against ship targets.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I've got them both beat... I'm working on a sport-utility blimp that's nearly the size of Australia!! The only problem I have so far is that it's a little hard to maneuver around smaller blimps.
Just think though, with enough robotic blimps spying on us, the satelites won't be able to see us. Will this mean I'll need to build a new kind of aluminum foil hat?
The next trend will be finding "coldspots" instead of "hotspots" - places you can go to live freely outside of the benevolent observation of the government.
but only if they fill them with Hydrogen!
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Notice their plan for using the blimps for homeland security. Notice the lack of ballons to the north. Do we trust canadians now? (j/k) But seriously, what happends when somone flys over canadian air space and around the blimps?
The distance a gun will shoot striaght up is surprisingly limited; small bullets suffer from a great deal of drag and you actually can't neglect gravity.
Handguns are a non-started; you'ld need a large, specialized anti-aircraft gun to even think about it.
GURPS has a range of 1,650 yards.
Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 can reach about 1,240 yards but some some inexplicable reason is more popular.
The old Chivalry & Sorcery RPG had a range of nearly five miles, but figuring out how to shoot it could take years.
As far as shooting them down goes . . . one could easily shoot down an AWAC (large radio relay and surveilance plane) too, but they are escorted and/or fly near, but outside the combat theatre.
The intent of balloons/blimps is to keep them outside the theatre of combat . . . If it flies high enough, then one can use it to spy enemy activities past the horizon . . . or at least the horizon at ground level. In other words, at higher altitudes, one can see/snoop on radio transmissions/etc. further than at ground level due to the curvature of the earth . . . so even if you fly behind friendly lines, you can still spy on the enemy.
What if we put a frickin' las--- oh, never mind...
rtfa.
Floating about 13 miles above the earth and holding a stationary orbit for 12 to 18 months,
Sure, you got a gun that can shoot 13 miles straight up?
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Not only were both rigid-body airships and blimps everywhere, helium was declared a strategic war material. A National Helium Reserve was established in 1925, and we've been sitting on stockpiles of the stuff ever since. Finally, it will get used for its intended purpose (hopefully...)
Civilian aircraft (including airliners) rarely fly much above 40,000 feet.
Shouldn't be a problem.
The biggest danger window would be during blimp acsent and descent.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
Sounds just like a larger implementation of the not-too-sucessful Aerostat program they tried along the Southern borders of the US.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Thats true. But considere the position of the earth:
During the early age of the solar system, while planets were still unformed, the inital blazing (with a lot more flux in the solar wind) of the sun pushed most light materials into the outer solar system (very rough explanation, i know). Thats the reason why the inner planets are no gas planets to begin with.
Now step 2: There was still a lot of helium remaining, but as the lightest gas (after h_2), it went up in the athmosphere and off into space. Its a slow process, because the bolzmann distribution isnt likely to give a atom escape velocety, but it happens. And they had 4 billion years of time...
The result is that nearly all helium on earth is the result of alpha decay (thats the reason why natural gas, of all things, is the best source of helium, at least on some oilfields: helium tends to collet in the same spots than the gas while going of from deeper layers of the earth)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
There have been several posts to the effect of "what a big target, anyone with a gun could shoot these down". Consider the physics of this for a moment.
A Magnum-powered hunting rifle has a muzzle velocity of around 2,000 mph (You could try using an AK or such, but these are going to be considerably lower velocity). With the high-altitude blimps flying at 65,000 feet per the article, your shot would hit it in about 22 seconds, were it not for two things:
The first is gravity. 32.2 feet per second squared downward acceleration. Vith v^2/2*g = 131,400 feet maximum height, there is high enough initial velocity to hit the blimp.
The second problem, however, is air resistance. The aforementioned bullet loses half its velocity within the first 1,800 feet or so even in level flight, and continues to slow down from there.
Between these two considerations, there is no way for a bullet (except maybe from a huge cannon) to hit something that is 65,000 feet up in the air.
Even if you did hit it, a blimp is not going to suddenly pop like a rubber balloon. You might get lucky and hit a motor or some other critical component, but just hitting the surface of the blimp (which is what makes it such a big target) is just going to put a 1/3" hole in something as big as a skyscraper, and make it leak at a negligible rate.