Is there any reason not to have nuclear powered airships? Their radars would spot surface and enemy aircraft at ranges of up to 330 miles, hustle at 2-10x a surface vessel, and could be loaded with more firepower than a cruiser.
Is there any reason not to have nuclear powered airships?
Max load is severely limited and mostly used up for crew and parts.
Except the HULA manages to carry 500-1000 tons of cargo while being conventionally powered and still had a range of 22k miles. That was something developed two decades ago. I think you're thinking of airships like the Hindenberg and such from last century.
>
>Nuclear reactors are not easy to air cool
Molten salt could be used for the meantime. Deployments go no longer than a month, and having a loiter time of two weeks would be sufficiently valuable. A 1955 study on nuclear airships from the US suggested 40 tons max for shielding using an ancient reactor type. That's less than 10% of the cargo room available on something like a HULA.
molten salt and..... air? You're still exchanging heat with the environment.
Why have a crew?
That's a good question. Maintaining fire control and having an onboard cryptology department makes sense though. Computers can be fooled, people add a layer of common sense.
Nuclear reactors are not easy to air cool, especially at low speeds, and you would need heavy shielding onboard for air and ground crews.
It's like an attack helicopter but worse
Except it has thousands of times more firepower and can loiter for weeks across the entire globe.
>Extremely expensive
>Gets shot down by a stinger
Who cares. We have anti satellite missiles. It doesn't work just give up
Missiles exist
I'll admit, hypersonics are a huge uncounterable threat, but only Russiah as viable hypersonics.
You wouldn't have to float it at low altitude. Stingers can only hit things at low altitude. The designs would be primarily an extremely high altitude air-controller, a drone controller command ship, and a general purpose missileer for surface attacks. They're mainly naval weapons, also. The point of having a radar that can punch out to 330 miles is to be around 150-300 miles away from most tactical targets and thousands of miles away from targeted bases.
You don't even have to get into hypersonics an airship is target practice for a fighter with any missile
The idea is that a high altitude airship with multiple radar frequencies will detect a fighter before the fighter is in range and have enough short range counter-measures with both hard kill and soft kill options that it will be able to defend itself the same way a surface vessel would. It would be even more survivable since it has some level of mobility and third dimensional movement.
It would be punching out well past the average range of any other fighter. Of course, the design plan involves using Russian missiles which prioritize range such as the AA13. The speed of the airship is between two and ten times that of traditional destroyers. Yes, it's possible to have an airship moving over 300 knots. The designs from a century ago were not designed to be aerodynamic because they knew they didn't have the engines to accommodate speed anyways.
Satellites don't have missiles, lasers, chaff, etc. A few have jammers. Satellites lack agile propulsion, they only have propulsion designed to sustain orbit for the most part.
HULA. But even the 1955 study using outdated engines and excessive shielding still allowed for several dozen tons of weapons, excluding crew and accommodations.
>even more survivable
building an armed airship that big would only justify sending even more munitions at it.
and only one needs to get through
it's fucking huge, anon.
Think of why -until very recently- that the only class of ships to hit above 30k tons were Carriers.
way too vulnerable
best use would be to fly it above an enemy city and "get shot down" to irradiate them
Nothing says air superiority quite like a giant, slow-moving hunk of metal
Based and Tanc a Lelek-pilled
kinetic kill satellites exist now.
every nation raced to build satellite killer missiles because of that.
these would just be easy meat to a satellite hovering above it in geosync orbit
weight
>Is there any reason not
"Pop"
Because airships only fly when they're lighter than air. I don't know of any handheld nuclear reactors. Weight is a bigger issue than it is on aeroplanes.