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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."
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?
Seems like this kind of airship would be extremely vulnerable flying over hostile territory.
Exactly. I'm not exactly sure what weaponry would be able to hit a target at 20,000 feet but it's a big, slow-moving target.
On the other hand, I love the whole idea of gasbags as a means of transport, and would really like to see them come back for civilian use. I can see their time coming again as fuel bills rise or the carbon emissions of winged craft become too scary.
Airships got a bad rap as a result of some messy crashes, but by of perspective, even with the Hindenburg crash 63% of the passengers survived. Whereas if you're in a plane when it crashes, you can usually guarantee that you're toast.
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.
1) Are they really more efficient?
They're certainly better than helicopters for hovering and slow patrolling, but for transporting lots of people or stuff to a definite destination I doubt it. Given the typical shapes used, I can imagine them spending lots of fuel just fighting the wind or air resistance. Not going to be easy to beat ships or trains, or even normal planes.
Airships are fuel efficient if you don't mind going wherever the wind blows you.
2) What gas to use though?
I don't think there will be enough helium to go around:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-02-Helium_N.htm
So the options are hot air (which doesn't produce as much lift) or hydrogen (which has significant PR problems for airship usage).
I suppose this would be a smaller problem. Could use hydrogen both for fuel and for lifting.
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.
This sig all sigs devours
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.
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.
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
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.
There are no hand held weapons that reach out that far. Those people talking about RPG's and sniper rifles are clueless. I'd be a little worried about stingers; Raytheon claims it can reach out that far, but not that high. I'd be more worried about medium sized howitzers - but most howitzers aren't configured for dual purpose like naval guns are. You'd have to park it on a hillside to get the elevation necessary, then it would probably fall of the hill when fired. More, we are talking about skills that "army" gunners don't have - they do not routinely track and target air/naval targets. The best bet seems to be an AA battery, but I've not seen any indication that anyone in the region has AA. Remember, when the Russians were there, the Afghans relied on our donations of stingers. I can't recall one report of AA emplacements such as Saddam Hussein had in Iraq.
Finally - anything that has a reasonable chance of hitting the damned thing is going to have radar and/or laser targeting. Since they are trying to target a surveillance craft, chances are good that as soon as they light up the electronics, it has targeted THEM!!
"Is that a train I hear? OH SHIT!! INCOMING!!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The spire of the Empire State Building in NYC originally contained an airship docking port on the 102nd floor.
Although this idea sounds awesome in theory, it was incredibly dangerous in practice, and no airships ever managed to safely dock with the building due to severe winds and updrafts.
The idea was eventually scrapped, and the spire was converted for use as a transmission aerial, which is still in operation today. The building still retains several peculiarities relating to the unused airship terminal.
Coincidentally, a few years later the building would later survive a direct hit from a B-25 relatively unscathed. The idea of a rooftop air terminal was later resurrected with the construction of a helipad on top of the nearby Pan-Am building, which also proved to be extremely dangerous, and was permanently closed after an accident in the 1970s.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I like your thinking to the point where the mere thought of having mod points sends little rivers of anticipation running down my inseam.
While I don't know about Afghanistan specifically, it seems to me like trying to use it anywhere near a country that's not already been soundly thrashed and left defenseless, is asking for trouble.
Yes, you're not going to hit it with an AK-47, but for example a SA-2 is going to hit you from 20 to 30 miles away (depending on the exact model), and up to 66,000 ft high. IIRC, if you're a large slow and non-maneuvering target, it can actually go quite a few more miles purely inertial at the end. (Pretty much like a dart with guiding fins.) Unless you're going to pack some equally oversized missile as counter-measures, no, you're not going to get much use out of targeting it before it targeted you. Though technically you will get such an early lock, because the targeting radar will lock on you at 40 miles or so, well before the actual missile actually launches, and the early warning radar from almost 200 miles.
It's an old and cheap missile, and it's probably the most exported missile. It's all over Eastern Europe, ex-USSR, China and IIRC in a few arab countries too.
Mind you, against a fast and low flying modern airplane, it's probably useless, and against helicopters even more so, since it has a 4 miles or so minimum range. But against a blimp? That thing was designed against the early cold war idea of big bombers flying high and not being able to maneuver much. A blimp is pretty much making its day again.
And if we're talking artillery, why bother with a howitzer on a slope, when half the world got one or more of this or this or even more likely this from the Soviets. I know at least Iraq had a lot of the latter.
Yeah, fat lot of good it did them against modern airplanes, but you show up in a blimp within 3-4 miles of one of those and you'll get a lot of holes fast.
So basically, as I was saying, yeah, if you just have to patrol the skies of Afghanistan or some other county you've already thrashed and conquered, and you know you'll never face anything heavier than a RPG or AK-47, it's great. But then the old WW1 Zeppelins would be just as great. And it pretty much doesn't matter if it has its own anti-radar missiles or not, because nobody will shoot a missile that high. The missiles that go that high (like the SA-2) aren't exactly concealed-carry sized, if you get my drift.
But that's about it. If this thing shows itself anywhere else, it doesn't matter how many anti-radiation missiles you pack on it. It's a big slow target, and just asking for it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I agree 100% that this airship would be worthless against a decently funded opponent with access to WW2 weapons and munitions.
Regarding the targeting of ground based weapons - remember, this airship is to play the role of an AWACS. I don't expect that it is as effective as AWACS, but it doesn't sit up there unattended. It is meant to find targets for ground and/or air forces. Paint it with radar, it relays the info to a combat control center, and someone is given a strike mission. That could mean the enemy has several minutes to fire at the airship - or, it could mean they only have several seconds. A well trained gun crew only needs those seconds to kill a target, a poorly trained gun crew might never hit the target.
So many variables.
Personally, I wouldn't invest money in this airship, but it could very well prove worthwhile.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
From down here it looks like a participle!
Thankfully, as the article states, the military isn't planning on making this aircraft to open a speedy and luxurious cruise line over Afghanistan. The airships will be used for aerial surveillance, where staying in one place for long periods of time is the main goal. They are designed to remain aloft for a few weeks at a time, something that ordinary aircraft can't do.
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.
True but then again this thing will have a long slant range as well. At 20,000 ft it's sensors will have a very long line of site. Well outside of the range of those guns and probably the SA-2.
In a limited theater type war if anybody was to light up one of these with radar I am sure that it would get catch a HARM very quickly.
Think of this as a supplement for the E-3 and the P-3.
The P-3 is big and slow and so far none of them have been shoot down over Afghanistan. And yes they are actually popular sensor platforms in that theater.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The real problem is speed, or rather the lack thereof. Air travel became as popular as it is because it's so much *faster*. People might book an airship flight once a decade for the novelty, kind of like a cruise ship trip, but they're not going to hop on the blimp whenever they need to get to the other side of the country. The trip would take too long. Jets are faster, so they win.
People still use cars for cross-country travel. It appears that there's a serious misconception about airship speed here. Maybe we're used to seeing blimps lumbering around stadia (yeah, I typed stadia). These limp airships are only about 1/4th the size of classic rigid craft, and are intended to cruise around 30 knots. The Hindenburg made 85 mph on 4 diesel engines. The USS Akron could do 83 and the Macon 87. These were all built in the 1930s, and were designed to be much faster than surface vessels with much longer range than heavier-than-air ships. Assuming a modern passenger airship could do 100-200 mph, it could easily compete with high speed trains and cars -- even jets for trips under 500 miles or so. People use jet travel not for the speed advantage over airships, but rather for the all-weather availability. It would seem the military picked 20000 ft operational altitude to mostly avoid the problem of weather closer to the surface.
I am not a crackpot.