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19th Century Airship Technology for Port Security
fenimor writes "Airships - known today mainly for advertising flyovers at football games - are the core of a new coastal surveillance system in development for the the U.S. Department of Defense. These
stationary platforms 25 times the size of a Goodyear blimp will be equipped with an array of cutting-edge equipment for remote sensing, communications, and risk analysis, providing surveillance coverage over a surface area of 500,000 square miles from an altitude of 70,000 feet."
I can find out where they are and have the option of not being tracked I'm ok with this. Otherwise we just have Big Brother gone lighter than air. -I
Put a couple of these near the Mexico border and along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and we will have a safer America to enjoy.
I'm sure they wouldn't use hydrogen, but that still begs the question of how these will affect the worlds helium supply. Probably not that much, but from what I have read it comes from limited places (mostly Texas) and once has a tendency to escape into space once it is out of the ground. I have to imagine having lots of these large helium balloons will not help matters.
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This reminds me of JP Aerospace's plans and ideas for high altitude platforms to launch airships into orbit. Looks pretty nifty.
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THz radiation?
It says in the article it can be adjusted to see through plastics, clothes, etc
Clothes! Isn't this the same stuff that was responsible for all the X-Ray vision claims? Do we really want sensor platforms over most all of our major cities with the ability to see through people's clothes? I mean, I'm all for having the government check up on my library habits, but this may be taking it a little too far, no?
To reiterate my point, not feasible.
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You mention Icebergs and maritime activity. But most drug smugler boats are less than 8 feet above water at the top while most icebergs and any ships worth tracking are at least 40 feet at the top. Can the radar work with such a small profile? Also, will it work in high seas? Even normal weather in the north atlantic has at least 8 foot swells when you get out to sea. Will it still work then?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The intelligence agencies of the USA are extremely embarrassed that they couldn't infiltrate one operative into the Islamic terrorist networks, even though these spent many billions of dollars trying to do so.
What's even worse is that some 19-year-old stoned-out white hippie freak kid from Sausalito can buy a copy of the Koran at a garage sale, walk into to the Islamic Student Center at San Francisco State saying that "it's a really cool book, but there are some things that I don't understand...", and a year later be a full, trusted member of the Taliban.
This is the real reason why John Walker Lindh got 20 years in maximum-security prison; he embarrassed the Republicans. They keep him separated from the other prisoners because they're afraid that, like Malcolm X, he will convert the other prisoners to Islam. What the Americans don't really need is a million young people in prison, black and white, serving insanely long sentences for chickenshit drug 'crimes', to become radical Muslims committed to the destruction of the corporate ruling class when released.
We had plenty of helium then too. We wouldn't sell it to Germany because they had used Zeppelins to bomb London only 20 years before.
In those days, essentially all the helium in the world came from a hole in the ground outside Amarillo, Texas. It sits atop a big deposit of alpha-emitting ores, and every alpha particle sooner or later picks up two electrons, which makes it a helium atom. Helium was a big contributor to the economic development of the Texas Panhandle, which is why Amarillo is the only city with a monument to an element.
rj
Everything from Rednecks with deer rifles
.30-06 and there was a blimp overhead and we took at least a dozen shots at it. And like I said, I'm not a redneck.
Don't stereotype. I am certainly not a redneck but one time I was out in the desert testing out a new scope that my friend had mounted on his
You don't know all the positions of the government's satellites, why should you care about the blimps? And no, this isn't a tinfoil hat theory. Do you have any idea how many payloads are launched each year and described only as a "4000 kg to 6000 kg chunk of mass"?
... lmao ... think again. It's amazing the things you learn when you get into defense - and then it's funny seeing people squirm about something so trivial as a blimp floating along the coast.
Remember that satellite photo of the 9/11 ground zero area that could show vehicles and people? Think that's the best the government has
At 70,000 ft, atmospheric distortion (looking down) because a huge problem. You might be able to have optics that can make out a license plate in theory, but in practice it wouldn't be possible without some seriously adaptive optics.
These things have roughly 500-mile range, and yes, millimeter-wave radar is the stuff that Homeland Security wanted before everybody started reminding them that Ashcroft is a prude (so they started pretending they'd use image-processing to block that usage.) If you really believe all the funding applications here, you have to wonder when they'll put up a webcam...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You'd be surprised what you can do with a little knowledge of physics.
Let's start designing a really good airgun. Or actually describe something which already exists.
First let's remember that you can only accelerate something via gas pressure to the speed of the gas mollecules themselves. Any faster, and the gas will literally be left behind.
So we'll want to maximize the velocity of those mollecules. The energy of one of those little buggers depends on temperature. But that's not our ticket. Our ticket is noting that at the same energy (hence temperature) the less mass you have, the more velocity is needed to achive that energy.
Hence, you'll want a very lightweight gas. Hydrogen or helium will do just nicely. So we'll build a hydrogen gas gun.
Now to compress the helium. Well, have the airgun's barrel, which is a thin tube. We'll also have a much larger tube with a piston to compress the gas.
Think: a syringe. We push the piston in the large syringe body, to shoot a tiny sting through the tubular needle. Of course, at a much larger scale.
We'll also need to push the piston really hard, to create a lot of pressure. An explosion will do that just nicely.
It's really much like a conventional gun with a twist. Instead of the (relatively) heavy gasses from the explosion directly pushing the projectile, we compress hydrogen with them and the hydrogen pushes the projectile.
It's a very large device and very much a one shot gun, because reloading it takes ages. As such fairly useless against either ground targets or aircraft. (Against aircraft you really want something which sprays a lot of bullets.)
It also accelerates a dart to miles per second velocities. Theoretically, you could shoot at a sattellite in low orbit with it, except you would need to aim very very well. However, to punch a hole through a huge stationary blimp, it's perfect.
It's also low tech. A lot lower tech than rail guns. Any third world country could build one, if they wanted to. Heck, theoretically you could build one in your back yard. (But in practice the police would want to know about all those explosives you're buying.)
Until now, well, there was no problem for which it would be a solution. Now those blimps are just the problem for it.
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