MKSheppard wrote:Even the lowest of them [balloons] hung at 100,000 feet, though some were over 110,000 feet in the air.
If you want to reach those kinds of altitudes, and do it over a long enough period to make it reliable as a deep strike weapon; guess what? The balloons will have to be ENORMOUS. We're talking several million cubic feet of helium/hydrogen minimal.
What? 100,000 feet is 30 fucking kms. Shep, that's bog-standard for Soviet recon aerostates of the late XX century. That's even bog standard for NATO aerostates.
Yeah, we are talking about large-scale inflation, but guess what? For a stratoballoon with a volume of 160,000 cubic meters, it would be filled on the ground with just 5000-7000 cubic meters. As it rises to 25-30 km altitude, where pressure is just 19mm, the volume of gas will increase 30 TIMES.
So Norseman could compactly transport those balloons, and utilize them properly. TO think otherwise would be ridiculous - the US, France, Britain in the 1950s launched balloons with recon duties over the USSR, which were supposed to cruise at 30 km. Am I to presume Norseman would not have those?
MKSheppard wrote:This is a photograph of one such high altitude (125,000 ft) balloon being launched in Antartica in 1987. Clearly, this is not something that you can spam a lot of fast in the numbers that Norseman claims.
I thought he had been preparing for the contingency. I mean, why the fuck have freighters with balloons?
Most likely case is a couple of balloons get into the air; and then Shepistani Air Force comes and bombs/rockets/strafes the ship to oblivion before it can launch it's other 90 balloons.
No, Shep. If Astarian designers were even mildly competent, they would create proper weapons.
120 tons of agents in Phase One launched in total. About 60 tons or so impact in Astaria.
So, 60 tons?
100 balloons launched against Shepistan in total. There are to be 200 more balloons launched; but they're sunk on board the ships when the Shepistani Air Force shows up and bombs them into oblivion.
What? Shep, seriously. 2000 balloons is possible.
http://dkba.wbrush.com/?id_cat=1&id_cat ... element=71
Does that look really hard to you?
It's a 33 km altitude capable balloon with endurance of 9 days, volume of 130,000 cubic meters, lowest payload of 250 kg, and initial gas volume on earth 1950 cubic m. of hydrogen.
And you can mass-produce that shit; hell, Soviet synoptics used it in their everyday operations.
40 shot down with air defenses at very long ranges -- Hey guess what? Something made of mylar and having several million cubic feet of gas in it is gonna make a bitchin' radar reflector; and guess what? I have a very long ranged missile in the BOMARC; with a huge warhead that will be a hell of a lot more effective in the thin air up that high; and guess what? Balloons can't manouver, unlike a manned aircraft!
"Million" cubic feet? Shep, 130,000 around that. And yeah, they can't manuever. But if you down them, once their payload falls down and the altimeter functions, it releases a cloud of anthrax.
So, 50-60 tons of anthrax are still yours to deal with.
So I can shoot them down well before they reach Shepistan. However, doing this expends Shepistan's last BOMARC warstocks, pretty much. We're out of them now.
Yes, Shep, you can, but the anthrax cloud incoming from the balloons will kill your nation. Contamination on the order of 500,000 square kilometers is just the beginning.
See guys? This is why I keep my schemes remarkably simple and easy, such as using Submarines to spam heavy SRBMs and ALCMs onto Astaria. They can be launched fast, arrive fast, and carry heavy warloads.
No Shep, that's why you're totally wrong.
When you get into cute trickery like balloons, and you don't know what you're doing, it fucks your plans up.
If you don't know how much volume you need to actually do it, or what kind of balloons modern industry can mass-produce, yeah.
Shep, you're stuck in the year 1944. Sorry, but Norseman's attack, even if you down ALL of his balloons, will be very deadly since a cloud carrying
60 tons of anthrax will cover your territory.
