I had this idea for an area denial weapon for aircraft.
The idea is to fill the air with particles similar to volcanic ash, so any incoming aircraft would risk damaging their engines.
How doable is that? I guess covering an entire country is out of the question due to the immense amount of ash needed, but how about deploying it just in the immediate area of sensitive military installations that need to be protected?
So then the opposing force knows exactly where to send their cruise missiles?
How would you keep the ash in the air?
Clearly the thing to do is to build your sensitive installation inside a volcano. Probably not a great idea for a nation, but perhaps if you were a private individual and wanted a secret location to take the world over from this would be a good start. Probably has somewhere to set up a shark tank and somewhere nice for my cat to play too.
Well, in between the million giant ash cannons you’d need to get that amount of ash into the air you’d place ten million giant fans to keep the ash from falling.
Or even better, you could mix iron into the ash and then have a giant fleet of levitating magnets pull the ash up against gravity.
Plus you are denying airspace to your own forces.
This sort of thing has been discussed, at least in a science-fiction game setting, as a possible point defense in space against laser weapons or even missiles, and in that context is usually referred to as sandcasters.
I can’t comment on its practicality.
Perhaps old-fashioned barrage balloons would accomplish what you’re thinking of.
Nanobot clouds. Little solar-powerd bugs with a diamond dust coating that can hover in dense formation creating a cloud. Or perhaps they rest on rooftops awaiting the signal to deploy. When they get the signal, they navigate themselves into the flight path of the threat and get themselves ingested into the engine. How hard could it be?
I would think that such a weapon would only be used by those who have already been denied access to the skies.
They are already at risk from anti-aircraft guns & missiles, frim other aircraft, just from flying in unfamiliar airspace.
War involves putting your forces (and their equipment) at risk. You send dozens of planes, each with dozens of bombs against an enemy ship or base, hoping that one of them might drop a bomb that hits a critical spot. Knowing that many of the planes & pilots will be shot down during the attempt.
As Grace Hopper (Navy Admiral and ‘mother of COBOL’) said:
“A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships were built for.”