aerostats

Clearly the solution is aerostats tethered by transmission cables.

All the balloons shown in the article's image and embedded video are tethered aerostats rather than drone blimps.

It's quite another to have aerostats and quadrotors watching every inch of a city all the time.

One likely consequence is that any launch aerostats would be at best highly unstable in their altitude and station-keeping characteristics.

A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders.

At a minimum defensive systems will still need large, expensive sensors mounted on ground platforms, aerostats, or larger fixed-wing drones.

Using free-floating blimps or aerostats seems like one of the simpler ways to put transmitters at sufficient altitude to increase coverage.

Customs Service operated a network of aerostats to help counter illegal drug trafficking.

Have a look at the aerostats used in Afghanistan.

Diamond Age also posited ‘aerostats’ - macroscopic diamond structures that are structurally solid, but contain nothing but vacuum, enabling them to be used to generate buoyancy in air.

I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy use.

It makes sense to go there (or maybe Venus, but aerostats would be a big chunk of new engineering) first.

I was kind of sad Google went with "project loon", which seems kind of..loony to me..rather than UAVs, tethered aerostats, or LEO constellations.

"As of press time the aerostats are intended to stay in the air 24/7, and to be taken down only for a monthly maintenance cycle and during extreme weather events such as hurricanes." To any potential attackers, read that statement carefully.

Aerostats, as lighter-than-air craft, have vastly more-tightly constrained mass budgets than any water-based floating structures.