Where do you think Darpa would keep this large heavy lifting blimp? Project Walrus.

airbornecombatengineer.typepad.com...
The above article tells of Darpa's lighter than Airship Airbourne carrier Walrus.
They say a C130 holds 22 tons. These wil hold between 500 and 1000 tons.
How big is that gonna be? And where would you keep these very large targets?
The article is 05 and say by 08 they should be aloft.
These would be huge and a few flying together would be Massive.
www.defensetech.org...
They say its cancelled but an engineer on the link above said these blimps were gonna be the size of the Queen Mary but in the Air. Wow.





[edit on 24-2-2008 by VType]

[edit on 24-2-2008 by VType]

[edit on 25-2-2008 by VType]

Super Sized Thunderbird 2 anyone?

If they are the size of an aircraft carrier they'll need to be stored somewhere pretty freakin big!

Wonder if the timeframe is correct? If it is, shouldn't be too long before big cigar shaped ufos start showing up all over the place.

MonKey

How about Austrailia??
They're flat, and boring..
Pinegap is there..
Pinegap, come home to america!!! We miss you...

Ever noticed how many threads there is, on pinegap and austrailia?
click here to know why..

I would guess underground

my guess is that it doesn't really exist yet, and what is about is probably the size of the goodyear blimp a 'small' (comparitively) scale proof-of-concept test. this is the way people usually do things.

the article says that they expect to have a long range proto ready by this year, it doesn't say it has to be full size, just full range. plus the tone of the article when speaking about its payload is speculative and wide ranging, suggesting that the details are vague hand-waving sort of ball park figures.

i very much doubt that it would be practical to operate such a craft. its a sitting duck in terms of defending it... several well placed low tech bullet holes and you have a big empty bag. The losses should one go down would derail a whole military campaign... i just don't think the military would commission them.

You'd need rock solid air supremacy and force protection to use that thing, I dread to think how long it'll take to load/unload it on the ground and it's top speed isn't going to be brilliant.

I don't know where they got the 22 tonne figure for the C130 from, I haven't come across one yet that you can get more than 10 tonnes on after fuel.