A sphere is less area than anything else for the same volume.
Ah; I’ve heard of those, and wondered if there were any available. They are perfect for bringing down a balloon. But I’ve never heard of one being used in anger.
Analyzed by top men.
Top. Men.
I’m wondering if the previous balloons went over Mar-A-Largo.
Lots of hot air there to keep it aloft.
OTOH, the extreme suckiness there might have pulled the hapless balloon down to sea level.
That is what took down Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.
They use to do that at the military base near me. They had a rail line dedicated to delivering the material for analysis. I forget what the group was called.
It was the Foreign Technology Division.
Substantially any missile that’s intended to shoot down airplanes has a continuous rod warhead. That’s been bog-standard tech now since the 1960s. For ground-to-air missile, ship-to-air missiles, and air-to-air missiles. Regardless of which country makes them.
The reason you don’t hear about it as such is because it’s standard.
Thanks!
Those things are nasty.
Dumb question, but wouldn’t a missile’s expanding air-wave sphere of explosive force radiating outwards essentially be enough to inflict enough damage/diversion to either ruin an enemy aerial target, or send it permanently off-track? i.e., missile guidance would/could be to just to get the missile to fly enough ahead of the target, detonate and create the big expanding air wave bubble for the enemy aircraft to “run into?”
I think the thing is you don’t have to hit the target, just throw a mass of twisted metal close enough that pieces will hit it. The metal moves further than the blast.
Apparently not or they wouldn’t design warheads the way they do.
Don’t forget this explosion is taking place in the context of very high speed flight. Of both the missile and, balloons excepted, the target. At combat speeds of 500 to 1200 feet per second, any disturbed “air bubble” even 50 feet across will be blasted through in a small fraction of a second.
The AIM-9 short range infrared-guided has a ~20lb warhead. But that’s for the structure, the aeroshell, the rods, the explosives, and the fuzing electronics. There’s probably 2 or 3 lbs of explosives in there, since that’s the least dense of various materials.
For comparison, the longer ranged radar guided AIM-120 has a ~45lb warhead. The MIM-104 Patriot ground launched SAM has a ~200lb warhead.
You might well do some damage with the blast from a big warhead like on the Patriot. But even so, the shrapnel / rods being thrown out by that blast ensure you tear stuff up, not just bend it a bit or deflect its path.
A comment I made in the context of midair accidents is that it’s easy to look at a jet going by and forget that it’s serenely doing its flying thing in the midst of a 300, 400, or 800 mph hurricane. You don’t need to shred the jet to make it crash. You just need to damage it enough that the forces exerted on the structure by the windblast due to its own speed tears it apart.
Obviously this last bit doesn’t apply to balloons. OTOH, once the very soft fragile envelope is shredded and enough of the lifting gas gets away, gravity takes over right then and there. Then you’re watching a prompt uncontrolled, albeit slow-moving, plummet to the surface. They even crash in a sorta-stately fashion at a sorta-stately pace.
A sphere is the geometric body with the bestest “volume to surface” ratio of all bodies (from a heating pov, our houses should all be spheres to minimize heat-loss ;-).
But of course a blimp has the advantage that you can orient it so that the “small” part of the cigar is pointing into the winds, whereas a globe, by definition, does not have a small part.
Less total area. But an aircraft doesn’t care about the total area, only the cross-sectional area. So you want something long and skinny oriented in the direction of motion.
There are also other factors favoring a sphere, for a balloon. Balance the desire for long and skinny for low air resistance, and those other factors, and you get the shape of a blimp.
This is the second mention of U-2s I’ve seen in this thread. I had thought that there were only a handful of those still flying, all operated by NASA for purely research purposes. Did the black ops agencies keep a few for themselves after all/
I’m not sure this applies to this kind of aircraft. High-altitude balloon aircraft rely on upper-level winds for propulsion. The steering mechanism is altitude adjustment (adding or venting He). Both wind speed and direction change with height, so its ground-based pilots adjust its altitude based on the direction and speed they want it to go. A spherical shape is easier to build, and catches the wind efficiently. Check out the different wind-flow patterns (10 hPa = 85,000 ft, 500 hPa = 18,000 ft) at this site.
Ordinary high-altitude balloons maneuver in that way. But ordinary high-altitude balloons don’t have propellers, as this one was claimed to. If you’re going to be using propellers, then it makes sense to use a blimp-like shape.
I think the propellers were just to keep the solar panels pointed at the sun.
All the easier to bomb London.