Quote:
Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b
All you really need to do to a dirigible is pop it a few times.
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Well....yes and no. It depends partly on the overall design.
The dirigible, or more accurately, aerostats that I worked on for a year or so used an internal ballast tank, or bladder within the aerostat itself. This is basically a big gasbag within the blimp that holds lighter-than-air gas. The rest of the blimp's shape is provided by normal air pumped into it. Think of it as one big bag with one or more smaller bags stuffed into it.
Most aerostats these days use a helium/hydrogen mixture that's more helium than hydrogen, obviously. Nobody wants a repeat of the Hindenburg. Thus just shooting at it won't result in just a big fiery explosion either.
Hitting the main body of the blimps that use this design, aerostat, dirigible, whatever really won't do that much. To bring it down you need to tear open some good sized holes in the ballast bladder itself, and just a few pops from some Chinese/Russian AK-47's not going to do it. To illustrate, there was an "incident" some time ago (no, I won't say when or where) where an unmanned aerostat broke loose of it's tether and started drifting toward the Iranian border. Problem was these aerostats were used aerial observation and had a few sensitive pieces of equipment aboard. Naturally, the U.S. Army didn't want the Iranians getting their paws on this and sent up a Blackhawk with the minigun door gunners and they did a circle around the aerostat, blasting it with the minigun. Seems they didn't quite hit the ballast, as while it was well shredded, it just kept on floating. Finally, a pair of F16's (or F15's, not sure which) got diverted and brought it down with a shot from a pair of Sidewinder missiles. The problem was rectified in later models, should the aerostat ever lose it's tether, with the installation of a large capacitor attached to a set of wires along with a GPS and trip sensor. If the GPS sensed the unit was drifting away too far from it's current position, the capacitor fires and burns a huge clean hole in the ballast, causing the unit to lose ballast and eventually come back to earth.
Aerostats are still pretty susceptible to bad weather though, particularly high winds, more so than aircraft obviously as they are still basically just big balloons, a big floating lighter than air mass just begging to be smacked around by the storm gods if they get ornery, that IMO is one of their biggest flaws and why you don't see quite a mass deployment of them.