6 ms·
Airships are deceptively tough. They don't move very fast and it takes a long time for the lifting gas to leak out unless they've taken catastrophic damage. I
by gozur88 10y ago
Airships are deceptively tough. They don't move very fast and it takes a long time for the lifting gas to leak out unless they've taken catastrophic damage. In WW I the German airship L-33 was hit by an anti-aircraft shell that exploded inside the envelope during a bombing raid on London, was attacked by an airplane as it descended, and still the crew walked away.
http://horseformer.blogspot.com/2013/12/achtung-zeppelin-vii-luftschiffkapitan.html http://horseformer.blogspot.com/2013/12/achtung-zeppelin-vii...
Of course they were lucky because the lifting gas they were using was hydrogen, something we wouldn't use today. But they took damage that would easily have destroyed a plane, and the airship was in good enough shape upon landing the captain felt the need to set it alight with flare guns.
A modern air-to-air missile, with its 25 pound warhead and assuming it could lock on at all, probably wouldn't do much to an airship. SAMs are a different story, of course, but you wouldn't take something like this near a SAM site.
I would feel much safer in an airship than, say, a cargo plane.
- ISL 10y agoSpecialized warheads might do well against them. Airships are a rare target these days, but if they're more common, new tools will emerge. These come immediately to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-rod_warhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-rod_warhead
- gozur88 10y agoContinuous rod warheads are pretty standard for air-to-air missiles. At least they were when I was in the business. But I doubt they'd be more effective than straight shrapnel against an airship.
- dredmorbius 10y agoOne of the lessons from this is that if you want to be able to do damage to a target with a directed energy weapon (and ballistic and explosive projectiles are forms of same), you've got to be able to _interact_ with the target. It's a general problem of energy interactions -- if an energy form and material don't interact, it's as if the energy wasn't there. Glass and visible light (to a close approximation), neutrinos and matter, magnetism and non-ferro- or -para-magnetic substances. Cannonballs and tissuepaper. At a biological level, transmitters and receptors, which generally require specific molecular properties to interact -- this is how transmitter blockers work, but stopping up the receptors. Carbon monoxide, similarly, binds strongly to hemoglobin and doesn't let go, preventing oxygen and CO2 transport. Punching holes through an airship canopy ... makes it settle faster. The airframe itself is sufficiently large that terminal velocity is pretty slow as well -- large surface area, small mass. You'd need either very-well-timed explosive charges, or cutter-type materials, or a thermal weapon which could melt the envelope -- the Airlander looks as if it would probably melt with sufficient applied heat.
- gozur88 10y agoYeah, that might do it. Probably have to design the guidance system specifically for that kind of target, though. Also, I wonder what kind of radar return you get off of mylar. You might have trouble hitting it if they put some effort into minimizing the return from the gondola.
- dredmorbius 10y agoIt depends a lot on whether or not it's aluminised. I suspect not much though -- looks a lot like fog or something. Which would limit a lot of missile targeting systems, though heat-seekers might still find the powerplants. From images shown, the gondola itself might well be largely non-metallic. If that were made of composites, including framing, it should also have a pretty small radar signal. Lidar, properly tuned, could probably pick up something.