The US military is already looking into using blimps to expand radar range/increase response time for detecting hypersonic missiles. Is it feasible to also place some sort of CIWS defense on such a platform.
Missiles would obviously not work, but if you ran a massive power cable from a carrier to a blimp/lighter than air craft carrying DEW like lasers or microwaves and have it hover a few hundred feet above, could it make a difference?
>could it make a difference?
Probably, all the laser needs to do is put a small pencil sized hole in the missile and it'll rip itself apart at supersonic speeds.
Seems like a cost effective and simple to implement solution to just toss an existing laser platform in a blimp. Plus it overcomes one of the big downsides to smaller kWh class lasers, that is time required for the laser to burn through the target. Being a few hundred feet above sea level would give the laser an ability to target further out over the horizon
Yes, the laser blimp meta has been studied since the late 1990s.
>Is it feasible to also place some sort of CIWS defense on such a platform.
>Missiles would obviously not work, but if you ran a massive power cable from a carrier to a blimp/lighter than air craft carrying DEW like lasers or microwaves and have it hover a few hundred feet above, could it make a difference?
Why would missiles obviously not work? Missiles are probably the only thing worth putting on those as they can plot an intercept trajectory.
>newtons third law
Unless you create a self powered dirigible with thrusters to counteract launching a freaking missile that shits gonna fly around like a poorly knotted ballon animal
>Unless you create a self powered dirigible with thrusters to counteract launching a freaking missile that shits gonna fly around like a poorly knotted ballon animal
Anon, Is this bait? Or are you uh, a little special?
You do know that missiles detach from objects before they ignite their motor, r-right?
OP here. My point was that missile systems could potentially weight too much weight for little gain, like one sea sparrow is 400 LBs, where as the 50kw fiber laser systems in development weigh around 500 pounds but offers more “ammo” for the weight.
>where as the 50kw fiber laser systems in development weigh around 500 pounds but offers more “ammo” for the weight.
A 50kw laser would likely have far more than that amount of mass in capacitors and batteries unless you plan on tethering these things with cables. I don't even know how you'd recharge it in a sane length of time either. I don't think arming them at all is very worthwhile, but if you are, missiles are a way more mature technology, and lasers are fragile as hell.
How do you maintain a laser that's floating that far above the earth? What's the lens going to cost given that it needs to be anti-fog, anti-ice, moisture proof, hardened against extremes of temperature, and if you float high enough, it'll even be exposed to non-insignificant amounts of cosmic ray bombardment.
That’s what I said in my OP, the tethers would run power from the ship to the blimp. It’s already standard practice for blimps that house radar and ISR equipment. JLENS is a great example of that, although the tether didn’t hold up so well, you should read on the jlens frickup, pretty funny
Also, it wouldn’t need to be 60k feet above the earth. Just 200 feet above sea level allows something like 50 miles of extra visual range over the horizon compared to lasers on the ship at sea level
CIWS are way heavier than missiles
CIWS just means close in weapons systems, basically a name for a specific role, point defense. They used to be primarily gun based lime the phalanx and the one the Moskva submarine had, but the term is also applied to missile systems like the RIM 116 is a CIWS platform.
In that sense laser systems are technically CIWS on naval assets.
not the original anon, but you do realize that missiles launched from on the ground - several hundred feet up lose a shit ton of energy due to the immense air resistance right? One of the reasons why jets want to launch their missiles from as high as possible is to minimize air resistance & the speed that the jet is traveling at at the time of launch does significantly impact the range of the missile.
Overall I'm not saying that it's impossible to launch missiles from blimps, just that there's no way it's worth it. A laser that can be powered from the ground however is certainly more viable.
Because you can launch the missile from the ground and use the blimp simply as an AWACS platform. A missile on a blimp is as sensible as having the refueling station integrated into the jet rather than the airport.
>americans resorting to blimps
HAHAHAHAHA
>you were born too late to lazily float over a battlefield in your comfy zeppelin, lobbing explosives down on helpless enemy conscripts from above
pretty sure this concept is mostly for continental cruise missile defense despite the editorializing
With some of the drones they have, they can record high resolution to a remote server location.
The problem is how to keep them up 24/7. Well there you, soon there will be 2 blimps for every major city.