5, 4, 3, 2, 1... Thunderbirds are go!
Looks like thunderbird 2, but white
Huge new airships for US Army: designed in Blighty
British engineers are to partner with a major US defence contractor to build a large "optionally manned" robot spy airship, intended to lurk for three weeks at a time in the skies above Afghanistan. The LEMV airship to be built for the US Army. Credit: Northrop/HAV Now that's a big robot. American arms'n'aerospace goliath …
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 12:31 GMT JimmyPage
20,000 feet ?
and you can bet your life that's the official ceiling ... I wouldn't be surprised to learn they can go to 30,000 +
look up in the sky, con trails excepted, you can't see a plane that high. Sure, a highly-equipped air defence could, but that's one thing the taliban ain't. I would imagine all sorts of radar profile tricks will be used to make it virtually invisible anyway.
Hopefully the video systems fitted to these beasts will be sensitive enough to spot small changes in terrain over a few hours to indicate where IEDs are buried. Who knows, maybe it would be possible to fit them with a laser sight to pick out areas on the ground to avoid. They could certainly feed GPS co-ordinates in real time to expeditionary vehicles.
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 15:05 GMT JimmyPage
not sure of your point ?
or is that sarcasm ?
The structure will be sufficiently large to have *some* radar signature. You might need some quite fancy toys to see it, but it won't be invisible.
Anyway, even if the taliban do spot it and fire on it, they'd have to give their own position away doing it ....
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 14:39 GMT Desk Jockey
About bleedin time
This should have been done ages ago. Only the army would be willing enough to have an un-sexy, but perfectly functional system such as this. It is a pity the air force had to go and scupper them at every turn.
Forget weapons, they just add complexity and fast jets can deliver them. Having a nice and semi-perminant eye in the sky monitoring and co-ordinating eveything is exactly what the grunts want. I hope they put people on them rather than going the whole un-manned route. People with brains, a keen eye for patterns and doing week long tours in the sky will be worth their weight in gold to the soldiers on the ground. Adding communication nodes to the hybrids will be pretty useful too...
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 14:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Actually, Air balloons could be easily made invisible to the naked eye.
With a twin skin reflective internal and translucent external, the internal reflection of light around the wals, would easily make the thing effectively merge in.
That said. At 6 miles high. To anyone who doesn't suffer blue entopic syndrome, the thing would be effectively invisible anyway. And I imagine that without crew it could sit higher. It's not like the Taliban have Vulcans and Growlers doing Ironman impersonations.
Bearing in mind the alleged resolution of some spy cameras, at 100 miles or more up. The angle of incidence would be ludicrous. If a spy sat can see to say, 0.66 inches per pixel, this would be able to read the newspaper from 6 miles. Also, spy sats have to move. This doesn't.
What I'd use it for though is rapid terrain scanning. At this resolution, you could blitz areas on a daily basis and do differential analysis on the pictures of the dirt between the days. In the same way Kestrels see mouse piss as bright light, this would see the actual trail of the nutters, or better still, disturbed earth.
Hey presto, infra red picture of the nutters digging holes, and if they missed it, differential picture of the ground between nightime and morning, where they've planted the IED.
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 14:48 GMT John Savard
Another way...
To allow an airship to stay up without the constant consumption of fuel, and yet to have it land without venting helium... one could have it get most of its buoyancy from large helium gasbags, but to have a small hydrogen balloon tethered far above the rest of the airship at a safe distance to pull it upwards for that last little bit of lift.
That would allow indefinite hovering, and if the hydrogen balloon is lost, the other techniques remain for landing gradually.
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Thursday 24th June 2010 18:06 GMT Nigel 11
Neutral-bouyancy fuel
The technologically elegant solution is fuel with the same density as air. Inflate a gasbag with methane, which is lighter than air. Burn a mixture of methane and liquid fuel such that the loss of bouyancy attributable to the methane you've burned always equals the loss of weight of the liquid fuel you've burned. Or use a mostly-ethane gas mix with the exact same density as air.
Back to inflammable gasbags, of course ... the Hindenburg casts a long shadow. But surely the lesser propensity for methane or ethane to leak and ignite coupled with modern polymers for leakproof bags ought to be safe enough for an unmanned platform?
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 14:49 GMT SlabMan
The blimp's last words
I know nothing about aeronautics, so here's comes a silly question or 2.
Where's that 30,000 ceiling measured from?
Isn't Afghanistan high above sea level?
So isn't that a few thousand feet less they'd have to lob a missile?
If I were a Taliban commander, and thought I could do half-a-billion's worth of damage in one go, I might just submit a CapEx form for some suitable Russian or Chinese surplus kit.
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 16:06 GMT Desk Jockey
Heat seeking
Russian designed AA missiles tend to be heat seeking. For most aircraft this means high performance engines with fast spinning turbines/propellers tend to attract the seekers. For a blimp, it will use bigger propellers or impellers turning slowly and thus will not generate much heat as the lift is being provided by the helium. Naturally they will have the full counter measures suite fitted just in case...
Radar guided missiles tend to need a large power source and antenna nearby to guide the missile. With god knows how many bored US jets patrolling the sky, any the Taleban purchase will not last long!
As for height, that will affect the missiles as well as the aircraft as thinner air reduces their thrust. Anything that can actually reach 20,000ft would have to be quite large and thus quite easily targeted by patrolling jets. All allied aircraft have full counter-measures suites and so far they seem to be working well, forcing the Taleban to use rocket propelled grenades for helicopters coming into to land as opposed to being able to shoot them at range with a proper AA missile. It is very easy to get old AA missiles on the black market, much harder to get the newer and more effective ones, even the Russians and Chinese keep very strict controls over them.
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Wednesday 23rd June 2010 09:03 GMT MacroRodent
Missile thrust
"As for height, that will affect the missiles as well as the aircraft as thinner air reduces their thrust."
True only for a jet-propelled cruise missile. A true rocket, like found in all anti-aircraft missiles, just flies better if the air is thinner! It does not need air either to burn, or to push against. Their ceiling depends only on the amount of propellant.
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Wednesday 23rd June 2010 14:37 GMT Poor Coco
Quick answers
30,000' from sea level. Yes, Afghanistan is high up. Yes, it's a bit less to lob a projectile. But (a) with US ECM tech and (b) given that it'll be unmanned in action, then shooting it down will be difficult; will reveal the AA missile launcher; and will only cost the Americans the cost of the airship, which is probably on a similar magnitude of expense as the AA missile would be to the Taliban (with a much smaller budget), so the shoot-down would be pointless except perhaps as a diversionary tactic.
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 16:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Also,
"Conventional airships could never fulfil the Walrus requirement as they had to take on equal tonnages of water ballast when offloading heavy cargo. This was to prevent them becoming uncontrollably buoyant and surging wildly off the ground - then to soar through their "pressure height" and lose most of their helium."
What's wrong with a small petrol powered vacuum pump that reduces the pressure into a gas tank to reduce buoyancy.
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Tuesday 22nd June 2010 23:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
The great thing...
about airships is that you can dress one up as a giant George W. Bush and have it fly around Afghanistan broadcasting (in a folksy impersonation of GWB) "you misunderestimate us at your peril", "Bring it on!" or maybe "Taliban, you thought you struck me down, but I have come back more powerful than you can possibly imagine!!"
And you can defray the cost to taxpayers AND really piss off the Taliban by putting some beer signage and "Girls Gone Wild" video advertising on the sides of the thing!!
Death from above!!
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Wednesday 23rd June 2010 08:55 GMT Adrian Esdaile
As designed by Hugh Jarse
Ah, I see how it works!
While the Taliban are ROFLing because someone put a giant American Arse in the sky, the US Bum-Blimp will drop, er, sh1t on them.
If they paint it blue, they could make it look like an overstuffed pair of jeans.
Yep, that's mine with the Spiinal Tap badge.
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Thursday 24th June 2010 08:37 GMT Mr Sceptical
New type of suicide bomber!
You've had explosive belts, bikes, cars, buses, vans, trucks and planes - bring on the era of the suicide balloonist*
Stick a man in a basket with a load of helium balloons, a large fan and a one way ticket to paradise and they'll be floating up to an elevated launch platform to shoot at the big floating infidel in the sky. A couple of RPGs and they have air-to-air missiles!
* I didn't say this would be likely to work - it would be total luck if they got within a 10K of an airship, even if they knew where it was first.
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Friday 25th June 2010 08:38 GMT Aculeo
I must admit...
... I'd quite like one. It looks like it could be the aerial equivalent of living on a narrowboat. I'm a bit put off by the requirement for constant dynamic lift, but I guess a large, lazy, drifting circle would be fine. I presume it'll have an autopilot? Radar? Some sort of TCAS widget?
Where do I sign?
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