I swear I’ve seen this idea floated in !noncredibledefense@piefed.social (in one incarnation or another) before. Not too hard to come up with it independently but I’d like to imagine some engineer on break browsing NCD for inspiration.
Jellyfish UAP
Complaint noted.
Wow, whoever had that idea is genius. Cheap and hard to counter.
I see discussions of launching migs, but really, you’d want to launch smaller aircraft - prop planes, or maybe a small drone with a fragmentation grenade to poke enough holes in the hanging drone to disable it, something like that. And that’s assuming you can launch anything like that into the airspace without risking it being shot down.
If it can find and approach the balloon close enough to set off a grenade, I’d probably want to target the UAV more than the balloon. If the UAV is still functional when the balloon is shredded, it could potentially just be deployed early and find a target of opportunity on the way down. Which leads to another point, if a hostile is detected inbound, they again could just launch the UAV and find something for it to go after - it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a list of contingency targets along the projected route.
Not sure if cyberpunk or WW1 anymore. CyberSteamPunk?
Maybe they should leave…
Nyet, comrade, glorious mother russia is on a winning streak! Putin said so! So much winning in 4 years of
warSPECIAL OPERATIONS, just like the USA in Iran!
“deep in the rear” sounds fitting.
shouldn’t a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort? Sounds like a skill issue.
shouldn’t a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort?
Nope. The U.S. did this to the U.S.S.R. constantly during the Cold War and the Soviets had less than a 5% success rate shooting down the balloons.
The US struggled with the one from China three years back. In the end it took an F-22 and a very expensive missile to get the job done.
Sure. That assumes that this is detected and that the Russians happen to have a fueled up Mig 29 with crew available and time to prep the aircraft and intercept. That requires like a few dozen properly trained people to have actually showed up to work moderately sober that day.
shouldn’t a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort? Sounds like a skill issue.
So firstly at 5-7km you shoot a balloon it doesn’t just deflate and drop. It’ll keep floating (slowly returning to earth over days).
You’ve been vectored in by ground controllers. You have to spend a heap of time waiting for orders and directions. You can’t even see it properly. Its mylar. The FLIR, if its working, isn’t showing shit when it comes to mylar.
Secondly imagine you’re doing 800kph in a mig-29. Your radar won’t lock onto the balloon.
So you somehow line up and setup guns for the shot. Bam, your past it before you have time to even think.
So you line up for another pass. You slow your MIG down to 350kph. This time you have maybe 5-8 seconds before you’re pass the target.
You have no idea if you’ve hit it. You’ve probably missed it.
A couple more passes and now you’re running out of fuel and or ammo (tactical fighters usually have enough ammo for a 1-3 second total firing time) and have to return to base.
Plus all the running cost stuff the other posters have pointed out makes using tactical fighters to shoot down balloons a completely losing proposition.
When the Americans shot down those Chinese balloons it was a near miracle they were able to do it.
Of interesting to note is one of the core applications for the Soviet / Russian A-60 airborne was to shoot down American “weather” balloons.
Really fascinating video (that goes into trainspotting levels of detail) by Not a Pound for Air to Ground
Do not underestimate how hard it is to shoot down a lighter-than-air aircraft with projectiles is.
The holes matter but nowhere near as much as you think.
What other comments seem to be missing (lol) is that Russians are afraid to pull up any aircraft that close to the front and that high, since patriot AA traps set up by Ukrainians a year or two ago.
As well as what the other commenter says, a balloon cost a lot less than the jet fuel to scramble a jet and get it to where the balloon is, and then the jet can’t be somewhere else. The goal isn’t to make an undefeatable weapon, it’s to cost the enemy enough money that they’ve got no choice but to give up on the war and go home.
Don’t forget that it is more time on the mig. They have limited use before metal fatigue and other wear issues get them.
you should also count cost of damage to whatever drone slams into
ofc it should if you know where it is. balloon and ropes are plastic and therefore non-reflective for microwaves. drone is also largerly plastic so the only metal bits are wiring, battery and warhead
but wait, it gets worse: you can shoot down balloon, but after release drone is still pretty high up but it’s now fast, and has just as small radar return as before
Luckily they developed radar that does not use microwaves about 80 years ago, so that isn’t a huge problem. You can see them use it literally every time you turn on the weather broadcast because clouds aren’t made of metal either.
because clouds aren’t made of metal either.
Uh, source??
I guarantee I could bring one of these down with a pencil. The issues are knowing where it is, and getting the pencil to it…
And then what happens to the explosive warhead that is now falling at a rate of 120 mph after ten seconds or so?
