Saturday, November 06, 2010

Here's the Plot for Your Next Techno Thriller

Northrop’s Huge Army Spy Blimp Floats On | Danger Room | Wired.com: "The Army awarded Northrop a $517 million contract in June to develop a trio of unmanned, seven-story, football-field sized mega-blimps called Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicles. If successful, the blimp will stay in the air for up to three weeks at a time, using 2500 pounds’ worth of “sensors, antennas, data links and signals intelligence equipment” to capture still and video images of civilians and adversaries below and send the pictures to troops’ bases. It should work with the Army’s standard drone-controlling system, called the Universal Ground Control Station. And it’s a hybrid, lifted into the air by helium and propelled by four diesel engines."

3 comments:

Cap'n Bob said...

And can be shot down by a biplane armed with Vickers machine guns.

Deb said...

Cap'n Bob took the words right out of my mouth. I mean, a seven-story, multi-football-field-size flying machine wouldn't present much of a target now, would it?

Brent McKee said...

Apparently the Goodyear Blimp (or maybe all three of the current ones) gets shot at at least 20 times a year. The Helium is under low pressure and simply leaks out slowly. The airships that were shot down by "a biplane armed with Vickers machine guns" were lifted by Hydrogen, and those Vickers Machine Guns were firing incendiary bullets.