3 ms·

And how do you radar-shield all these balloons to prevent the enemy aircraft knowing about them 100s of km before they enter that airspace?

• naasking 4y ago
  Radar filters out objects with small profile because otherwise noise makes radar useless. Make the balloon + payload smaller than this size and/or augment the small size with stealth techniques to minimize footprint. The balloon payload can be an origami-like foldable structure that unfolds into something much larger than its collapsed size to cover a larger surface area than its initial radar profile. This is common for things we launch into orbit. The turn radius of a hypersonic object is very large, so you signal the balloon payload to unfold in the general region the aircraft will pass through such that it can't turn in time to avoid that region. Boom. Alternately, the balloons themselves could explode just before the craft passes through that region and the debris itself gets scattered with a certain probability of hitting any passing aircraft. The debris acts as shrapnel because of the aircraft's velocity rather than the explosive used to blow it up.