blimps

The blimps in 2005 looked a bit different - they didn't have such a large obvious radar hump.

Sounds like what's needed is a bunch of high altitude blimps or cargo planes with air-to-air missiles.

As mentioned in a previous thread on this topic - they don't have to register surveillance blimps, tethered or free-flying.

These blimps have been used for well over a decade in the southern US border to detect low flying drug smuggling aircraft.

If you want a similar interesting problem where you could feel efficacy look at robotic blimps or boats, you can get kits!

I feel like the blimps I've seen are so close to the ground they'd just be harder-to-maintain cell/WiMax towers.

I lived in DC when they first started testing surveillance blimps there around 2005 or so.

Also, I'm pretty sure the blimps I saw were not tethered, but hard to say definitively.

Edit: even cooler would be autonomous or drone blimps carrying cargo!

Before the technology of rocketry became commonplace, UFO sightings were of mysterious blimps and airships, and the inhabitants claimed to be from Mars or Venus.

I am personally not sure what blimps would add, but this is ignorance, not even an attempt at saying they won't matter.

I personally like the idea of wind turbines being tethered high-altitude blimps.

That counter argument is logically equivalent to saying "Drones, Blimps, Automated Cars all could have been cabs.

Google's "Project Loon" (data delivery from antennas stationed on high-altitude blimps) was explicitly targeted at third-world areas without much on-the-ground infrastructure.

> But if you have active engines Maybe the "stealth" weapons of space combat look a lot like blimps.

Blimps would seem to be cheaper to deploy compared to satellites, and have much lower latency.