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250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan
Toe, The writes "Gizmodo details the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) (based on the P-791), a spyship from US Army's Space and Missile Defense Command capable of hovering at 20,000 feet. Planned for deployment in Afghanistan, the ship can float for three weeks and carry well over a ton of payload, apparently surveillance equipment. The video on Gizmodo of the P-791 shows that these ships are a hybrid not only of both buoyancy and propulsive lift, but also of both awe and hilarity."
I read TFA and the wikipedia entry for the P-791 but I can't seem to find any actual details on the crafts construction. Specifically, what material the outer skin is made of. Seems like this kind of airship would be extremely vulnerable flying over hostile territory.
Much romance surrounds travel by blimps/airships as they float gracefully through the air. But on watching that video, i have to say it it seems to be one of the least elegant take-offs (and landing) around.
With this new Imperial Probe Droid those rebels don't stand a chance!!!!
Nice headline! "250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan In" - in what? In November? In 2010? In next ten years? In mission to provide big target in sky? In huge ball of flames? In super-secret mission that no-one knows about?
"DARPA's goals for Vulture are not trivial: 5 years on station with a 450kg/ 1,000lb payload, 5kW of onboard power, and sufficient loiter speed to stay on station for 99% of the time against winds encountered at 60,000-90,000 feet."
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/DARPAs-Vulture-What-Goes-Up-Neednt-Come-Down-04852/
After painting evil elephant faces on them, and adding mini-gun trunks.
Oh, to be an (telecommuting) operator. Sitting at a bar in Georgetown, gunning down bad guys with your own killer-flying-elephant, half a world away.
Well given the summary says it is meant to stay airborne for the best part of a month, I doubt ascent and descent are major worries.
I have no personal knowledge, but my impression is that our troops are getting slaughtered by roadside bombs; mainly because they don't have the manpower or surveillance assets to control even heavily travelled routes. Anything that can help that must surely be a benefit.
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No. I can't find anything discussing it, but I have a vague notion that the singular form is used when a distance is use as an adjective: "An 8 inch gap", "A 7 mile hike", "A 50 mile trip", and so on. O.k., so thinking about that enough to type it into a clear sentence led me to this, and the rule is that adjectives are not plural in English:
http://www.grammar-quizzes.com/adjective.html
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Now you may well be right that the war is unwinnable, should never have been started and should be ended as soon as possible. Certainly that is a valid and reasonable point of view.
My problem with you is that you seem to be advocating cutting support for the troops before they get pulled out. This is simply dishonest and a betrayal of the armed forces. Pull out, or fully support them. Doing neither is not (or at least should not) be an option.
Mine wasn't, but then I understand the difference between hydrogen and helium.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The crew of the airship has been made available to the public, the Army has recruited a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes brought together under impossible circumstances from completely different backgrounds and cultures including:
-Guy with tough exterior yet internally continues on a never ending journey of soul searching
-Hot chick who uses her hotness to tame the tough exterior of soul searching boy
-Underage girl with mysterious supernatural abilities
-Relatively hot chick who doesn't know she's hot and hangs out with guys that have obvious emotional problems
-Overly cool guy who is infatuated with himself to hook up with any of these girls on the ship
-Random tough guy who is there to do man tasks like open jars and move furniture for all these emo boys and girls
-Some non-human creature that nobody really knows why is even there in the first place
-Pilot, named Cid, reportedly just completed rehab for alcoholism and a gambling addiction.
Master, master
This is recorded through a fly's ear
And you have to have a fly's eye to see it
It's the thing that's gonna make Captain Beefheart
And his magic band fat
Frank, it's the big hit ! It's the blimp !
It's the blimp, Frank ! It's the blimp !
Squirrel!
This kind of airship will, once at operating altitude, be essentially be impossible to shoot down unless the enemy has a true SAM based defense (e.g. SA-11). SAM would have no problems locking on, as they tend to be driven by an active radar on the ground - I doubt you could hide something that big from radar in any useful way (although, I wonder if making it extra radar reflective might not actually work better since it would give the missile to large an area to aim for?). Stingers have a useful ceiling of around 15,000 feet, and they're driven by infra-red, which means you probably wouldn't get a lock on.* The only other thing that would work would be a proper flak gun at around 88mm. While there's a lot of those lying around Afghanistan, getting them in working order, manning them, and providing reliable ammo would all be very problematic. Remember that flak is only really useful if someone is manning it 24/7 - the ceiling might be enough, but the range is terrible. * Of course, the problem with all this is that given the MOUNTAINS in Afghanistan, I wonder if there isn't a shoulder fired active radar missile available. The ceiling wouldn't have to be 20,000 feet, but rather 20,000 feet - the height of the mountain the defender is standing on. Also, it looks gay.
I was promised flying cars...Why are there no flying cars?
No. When used in the attributive position, the unit labels on such quantities are given in the singular form, whether it's a 250-foot airship, a seven-mile trip, a twenty-dollar entree, or a three-day conference.
Now, if you put it in the predicate, then you use the plural form: the airship is 250 feet long, the trip is seven miles, the entree costs twenty dollars, or the conference lasts three days.
If you have more questions like this about English grammar and usage, I'm available on Lang-8 (same username as here). HTH.HAND.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
As for the LEMV: a 40-foot long, 15-foot wide area behind the only sometimes-manned cockpit will carry intelligence systems, like radar and wide-area motion sensors, that will beam information back to commanders on the ground.
sometimes-manned.
"Guys, I had to parachute down to get some more water supplies and left the thing running at 20,000 feet. How do I get back up?"
29 mpg. YMMV.
Actually Hindenburg was designed to be filled with hydrogen and wouldn't have flown effectively using helium. Graf Zeppelin II was the one that was designed to be filled with helium and start operation after Hindenburg, but it never got off the ground because of US trade restrictions on helium. Change from hydrogen to helium wasn't easy, lots of design changes had to be done and passenger capacity reduced. Hydrogen has significantly more lift and since it's cheap airships could vent it out easily to reduce buoyancy.
You would kill a lot of innocents with that policy, and ultimately lose any political support we may still have. But maybe if you know that area is suspicious, and you have a convoy going through that area you can warn them to be even more careful of that spot. More, if you had blanket coverage of large areas of Afghanistan, maybe commanders wanting to navigate a route could go back through the last days/weeks/months of surveillance and look for anything suspicious.
I dunno, I'm no soldier, but I have been trying to keep informed on Afghanistan. I've seen talk about a massive increase in surveillance as a tool against roadside bombs. The only arguments I've seen against it have been along the lines of; can't do it, it would cost to much.
Maybe it isn't practical for other reasons (I've certainly no knowledge that this blimp is actually intended for this role), but we are taking a terrible amount of casualties from bombs; both deaths and horrific injuries. I hope something can be done about it and as a (British) taxpayer I am certainly willing to pay for it.
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I like your thinking to the point where the mere thought of having mod points sends little rivers of anticipation running down my inseam.
I completely and utterly disagree with this, and it depresses me that so many people think as you do.
Your armed forces have not betrayed you. They are doing their duty, as they have sworn to, and obeying the orders given by their political masters. Who were elected by democratic vote. Blaming the soldiers is simply a cop-out. You cannot muster the political support to pull out as you want, so you advocate cutting off resources since it is a battle you may be able to win.
This is a betrayal, and it will cost the lives and limbs of those who are willing to die to protect you. It isn't the military's fault that the politicians sent them into Afghanistan and still have them there 8 years later. They are dying and being maimed for these decisions, while you are simply troubled by your conscience.
You disagree with Afghanistan, fine, possibly I agree with you. What you need to do then is get your forces out of Afghanistan, and if you don't have the support to do so then try to bring people around to your views until you do. But keep your hands off the purse strings.
Thunderbirds are go!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
And now an airship with three buttocks.
From down here it looks like a participle!
Yes, it should be "2011." In the /. submission form, there used to be a form-imposed length-limit on titles.
Now the limit appears to have been removed, but it is still enforced after submission.
So while I was preparing the story, the "2011" was in the Title field, but it got nixed on submission. My bad for not noticing the single missing word when I previewed the story.
Of course there is no Edit command on submissions. But I figured if the article got approved, someone would fix the title before sending it to the front page.
Call Nick Fury at SHIELD, find out how big he wants his.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
That makes no sense... Getting up there isn't all that hard, but as it happens, there's a lot of sky that doesn't contain airships. Getting up there with a payload and a guidance system that will actually lock on to the blimp is the hard part. An AIM-92 Stinger missile has only a range of 8km, (which I assume means distance, not height) against stationary targets. That's about the best you can do for shoulder launched weapons. If you want to hit that blimp, you're going to need a really big missile. Think several meters long, a thousand kilograms, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, specialized launchers, etc. etc. Nothing to hard to get for a real army, but not something your average goatherd with a rifle is likely to have.
The problem isn't necessarily reaching an altitude of 20,000 feet. A commercial airliner routinely flies over 30,000 feet high. If this is in their airspace and they can detect/find it, you can be sure they'll find a way to get to the altitude. The problem comes in when you actually try to hit it. As others have pointed out, this thing most likely has a very tiny radar signature, meaning you need good resolution radar to detect and lock onto it. Once you've overcome the challenge of finding and locking onto it, you have to overcome any countermeasure systems this is sure to be loaded with. Then you actually have to hit it. A fire-and-forget method, such as the boys did with their space camera, would have virtually no chance of hitting something at 20,000 feet. It's a very, very big sky and an airship like this isn't simply sitting stationary, it'll be flying a station keeping pattern which will probably be varied to prevent its route from being too predictable.
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
Wow - no Final Fantasy references yet... and to think I was about to dust off my gunblade.
That is not true and is a common misconception. The lift is generated from the buoyancy which depends on the difference between the density of air and the density of the gas. Since hydrogen and helium are both very less dense than air, the lift differences are small. For example, a 20,000 liter balloon will generate about 500 lbf if it is hydrogen and 460 lbf if it is helium [http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html]. Also, of interesting note is that the Wikipedia article on on the Hindenburg argues that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by the frame being too flammable, not the Hydrogen.
Airships that are covered in solar panels could be extraordinarily efficient. Get a biomass burning generator to power the electrical system when the sunlight isn't enough. The gas provides passive buoyancy, or just make a majority of the surface absorb heat to keep the air hot. The "free" energy from the sun provides the thrust.
Never underestimate the power of a slow moving vehicle in travel for 24 hours straight. They had them at 60+ mph in the 1920s, so at 50mph average, you could go 1200 miles in 24 hours, which seems like the speed of slow rail travel without the required infrastructure.
It's not going to capture the LA-NY trips, but for regional pleasure travel, it could be a real winner. I know I'd rather spend a day reading a book or cruising around the internet than driving.
I don't know, after my experiences with flying in an airplane, I think I'd actually pay good money for a blimp ride instead... assuming that I actually get _some_ leg space on a blimp, I could live with it taking an hour longer in flight. Quite happily.
Plus, honestly, have you flown in the last 10 years or so? Between having to come an hour early just to make it through the byzantine controls and bureaucracy in time, and stuff like having to wait almost an hour on the runway because someone forgot to also load the luggage (for bonus points: it once happened in _both_ directions)... if an airship line can simplify that and maintain, say, a 200 km/h speed in a straight line, it might actually be faster on the whole. Well, for short to medium distance flights, anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You do realize that 9-11 was ordered by a guy living in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban, right? You can say what you want about Iraq, but going to war in Afghanistan was IN RESPONSE to us being attacked. It was hardly random.
Completely with you on this one. There's a reason we had most of the world's support (or at least understanding) for invading Afghanistan, and it wasn't just that our image was better at the time. There is no conceivable Commander in Chief -- Al Gore, even Ralph Nader -- who wouldn't have put our forces' boots on the ground in Afghanistan in response. Even freaking Canada thought it was a cause worth spilling blood over (that and they're in NATO).
It's too bad the Iraq debacle distracted us so much from the justified war. Before it began, I was worried the Admin. would see Afghanistan through rose-colored glasses and assume it'd be a cakewalk. Turns out they took "The Graveyard of Empires" seriously, and took very pragmatic steps like befriending the Northern Alliance and all the warlords immediately. No, it was in Iraq that all my worst fears became reality, and even worse took vital attention and resources away from Afghanistan. I doubt we'd be out of Afghanistan today, but a lot of the reason the Taleban has kept resurging is because we didn't have the resources to hold the territory we kept taking from them. The very fact that I'm talking about a conflict where "taking territory" is even a relevant concept, but we wasted our army in an urban insurgency hellhole, just depresses me.
The enemies of Democracy are
The US also happens to have harbored terrorists inside its borders. Luis Posada Carilles bombed a Cuban airliner, and so far as I know, he still lives in the US, and he cannot be deported. Since we will not hand him over, Cuba has the right to invade our country and, in the process, kill thousands of innocents who have no connection to the government (intentional or not). Then, after the invasion, the Cuban government
SSC
There actually is a third option: Steam From an article on that site: "As seen from the Table, this is about 60% of the lift of helium and more than twice the lift of hot air."
Argh Link didn't post: http://www.flyingkettle.com/
These aren't a balloon, and they don't "pop". They run at about +1 PSI and have been tested to take several hundred rifle rounds and even several RPGs through them, with neither catastrophic failure, nor rapid enough loss of lift to prevent finishing a mission and returning to home base.
+1 PSI just doesn't gush enough gas out the hundreds of holes (which the material prevents from turning into a giant rip, and the low +PSI doesn't exacerbate rips either) that the gas tanks on board can't easily keep up with for hours.
So, comedy aside, no, a guy with a shotgun won't even be close to enough. And good luck firing a shotgun or rifle sitting in a lawnchair balloon, Mr. Pendulum. :)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Or you can just start using the metric system like everyone else.
BTW, its a 76.2 metre airship.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
>1) Are they really more efficient?
>...2) What gas to use though?
Airships can be very efficient, but only when they are gargantuan. The lift goes with the volume while the cost and drag goes with the surface area, so the $/ton efficiency goes up linearly with size. Given some internal structural rigidity, airships can be reasonably fast without giant engines (roughly 100-200 km/hr for on the order of 100W / kg payload.) The problem is that you have to have someplace big enough to land and store them and some way of dealing with them on the ground when the wind kicks up. A lifting-body partially buoyant airship relaxes the need for extreme size, allows easier ground handling, and makes flying easier by allowing altitude changes to be less dependent on managing buoyant lift.
Helium is not an economical choice of lift gas - it is too expensive to vent yet will leak out slowly through any light-weight material, it is nonrenewable and far more useful for cryogenics than lifting. Hydrogen is dangerous if pure - it can safely soup-up a lift gas mixture, though. Hot air is low performance in every possible way. Ammonia is poisonous and some what flammable. Methane is flammable and does not perform as well as hydrogen.
Steam is actually the best lift gas from many points of view, giving 60% of helium's lift and being non-toxic, cheaply produced from water ballast and engine waste heat and is easily ventable for buoyancy control, but steam airship design does require some envelope insulation and provision for condensation collection.
In 2006 Slashdot had an article on a similar lifting-body airship design: "New Aircraft is Part Blimp and Part Airplane" where I commented:
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and buoyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in flight as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry