Officer of Engineers

It's a blimp; most likely using helium. RPGs and even AAMs ain't going to squat.

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Chimo

nutter

How is it any different from an aircraft carrier in this respect?

My bet is that it won't simply be allowed to fly around in unprotected airspace...

glow

balloon + hole = ________________

Parihaka

Super-light materials, a heavy base connected to the cells by a web of support members.
I'd use a heavy machine gun burst traversing the mid-line from either fore or aft to concentrate the effect over a narrow angle of fire, it'd be like running a buzz-saw along the side and it's boyancy woud take care of the rest.

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In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Officer of Engineers

1) It's compartmentized. You need to blow alot of holes
2) It's military, meaning it would have some sort of self sealing mechanism
3) The best you're going to do is a slow leak, meaning more than likely, the craft will deliver its cargo.

Parihaka

I'm not looking to create a huge hole, I'm looking to destroy a significant number of the structural members. By shooting from fore or aft I'm doing what the old sailing ship captains did by raking from the stern: concentrate the fire along the length of the ship to cause maximum damage. Take out the structural elements on one area and gravity vs bouyancy does the rest.

Officer of Engineers

You're assuming the structure ain't armoured. In fact, we're assuming the outter layer ain't armoured.

Parihaka

Armouring it would create the law of diminishing returns for lift capacity.
The best way I can come up with to protect it against this sort of attack would be to use composite plates for structure, much like the way plasterboard creates torsional strength against lateral movement in a wall. The plates would be a honeycomb sandwich.
The cells, and I'd have 10's of thousands of them, would be arranged in a fuller sphere shape for maximum strength, each one glued to the other with the gaps between the spheres also used as helium cells. For resistance to bullets or explosives i'd put soft fibrous material inside each sphere, along the line of insulating material but consuming very little of the volume of the spheres, basically like extremely fluffy cotton wool. (I'm sure there's an engineering term for this but damned if I can thing of it)

This way the rigidity and strength of the blimp is spread across the entire surface area of both the external and internal structure.

The other thing I'd do is make them absolutely massive, in the 2 kilometre or larger range.

Officer of Engineers

We're talking an airlifting an entire armoured battalion. This thing got lift to spare.

Parihaka

I'm suggesting the size for defensive capabilities. Blowing up a bean-bag is easy, blowing up a bean bag 2 km long isn't

Edit: sorry, just got it, your talking about armouring. The calculations to effectively armour something like this are beyond me, but I'm willing to bet it's in the hundreds of tons...

canoe

What about flammable warheads? Say some kinda of jet fuel dispersal system that ignited a few seconds after impact?

Parihaka

Many small compartments with flexible baffles.

Jay

Sir,
Being an Engineer wouldnt you love to have this beat for a deployment, maintenance withstanding?

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A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Officer of Engineers

Being an OpsO, I would love to be able to assemble and deploy in battle formation upon touch down. If this is a blimp, then there's no need for a landing or even a prepared field and not even necessarily within the enemy's range. 3 or 4 of these and I can deliver an entire brigade in less than 5 hours and in formation.

ArmchairGeneral

Airships are gonna be big soon. The idea's got too much potential, and it's a proven concept.
On a similar note, anyone heard about the Pelican concept? This one does use wing in ground effect, supposed to carry something like 20 MBT's across oceanic distances at 300 knots or so. Seems like a good idea to me. Great for rapid deployment, especially if you could make it a seaplane, although IIRC, that increases the power requirements considerably. I think when I calculated the total horsepower it came out to something like 10 times the horsepower of a modern cruiser.

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"Apocalyptic thought is curiously pleasurable."
-Theodore Dalrymple