TR
Apologies, I was overly rude - you are purely reporting what you are being told. The problem is the Snake Oil is being peddled with increasing desperation at present.
Originally, in this thread (and others
http://www.pprune.org/military-aviat...istan-isr.html) we were told that this was going to be an all-seeing uber-persistent ISTAR asset that needed minimal support to operate from austere locations. Now, it is, "we're going to sell 4 day aerial safaris to a dozen people with more money than sense" and that it will need to be moored to a mast and it will now only fly for 4-6 days compared to the bold claims of being airborne for a month. Just how many people are going to want to fly over the Grand Canyon or Serengeti rather than get really up close and personal with the geography and animals by helicopter or 4x4?
Lighter than air (even if it gets 30-40% of its lift by other means) is an utter folly and until we invent anti-gravity drives then the notion of having a machine that can efficiently pick up stuff/people and drop it/them elsewhere without support is going to remain a pipedream. The helicopter and tiltrotor are our best hope at the moment to get anywhere near this dream. The balloon (or if you must HAV) does not have a wide enough spectrum of speed, reach and cargo carrying capability to ever be viable as a mainstream vehicle - niche capabilities tend to cost a fortune and then whither and die!
The tired old carousel of Lighter-than-air (LTA) continues to revolve, on average once every twenty years or so. Is that an Aereon or a Megalifter? In a poor light a Skyship looks much like a Dynairship. Whatever virtues LTA once possessed have now been overtaken by the enrmous reduction in payload size and power consumption and the ready availability of uav's of all sizes, from Globalstar downwards, with which to deploy them. Time on station has been a red herring for years, the area to focus on being "on station" LTA has never been any good at this, a twenty knot headwind reduces your speed of advance by 40%, and is likely to result, if prolonged for anytime, in the vehicle being as likely to be found in Alabama as Afghanistan. In the trophosphere the situation gets worse! The main attraction of LTA lies in the fact that those seeking investment in such crackpot schemes know that investors have no reliable database of what the build or r&d costs for such turkeys ought to be, it's rich picking time for the snake oil salesmen when an air ship project hits town. Luckily, the tired old carousel at DARPA and similar institutions revolves at about the same speed, whenever anybody at such government offices wants a little extra cash for themselves, why not flag up a new "Walrus" or "Skycat"? It like goldfish, a short attention span means you can re-introduce the same nonsense time and again and wait hopefully for the cheques to drop through the letterbox! It is just possible that a conventional blimp of about 100 metres, approximately similar to a "K" class but with advanced glass cockpit and lightweight diesels, could make headway in the coastal surveillance/anti piracy field, but its a small r&d task, no money in it for the speculators you see. I know what I am talking about, invest at your peril! John Wood (Ex Chief Exec and co-founder of Airship Industries)
Source:
http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-to...630679/?page=2 posted by John Wood in 2009
$2Bn - what a waste...
LJ