stealth blimp

[Orionblamblam]

I never said that was MY view on the subject, just that in your haste to ridicule pseudo-abductees and UFO lovers, you had overlooked the possibility that two aliens from outer space COULD look different if from a different planet.

Irrelevant to the discussion. What's relevant to the discussion is the fact that there used to be a vast array of "different species," but once there were a few pop cultural references to a consistent design for aliens ("Grays") the "abductees" focussed in on that. Similarly, humans have been seeing Weird Shit In The Sky for millenia. But after 1947, the Weird Shit all started to look like saucers.

This sort of thing is well understood by adveretising execs. Get the public to see some "iconic" image as the defining baseline for a concept, and people will start seeing that image everywhere.

 

[Colonial-Marine]

Now I don't think alien species have actually abducted people, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have "surveyed" our planet, although they wouldn't need to fly through the atmosphere to do this. Perhaps joyriding over the US or USSR and seeing how many interceptors they could get chasing them was something they did for fun?

Is it me or does everything involving blimps on these boards leads to a discussion on UFOs and aliens?

 

[Orionblamblam]

Is it me or does everything involving blimps on these boards leads to a discussion on UFOs and aliens?

When the thread starts off with claims that are patently ridiculous (mile long airships seen in broad daylight, yet somehow not photographed), the thread is clearly on the crazytrain. And one of the many stops the crazytrain makes on it's loop between Looneytown and Nutberg is at Flying Saucer Junction.

 

[The Artist]

This is just my thought - and I wonder if any studies on this have been discussed - that the answer is not just paint or paint and light. The answer - to me - seems to be a blend of color, value and reflectivity. Figure a way to make the surface reflect that scattered light.

Yes they have. And the best night camouflage colour is grey! But unfortunately black has a psychological romantic edge so some night aircraft are repainted black even though they would be much harder to see in all night conditions painted grey.

But back in the real world it is interesting to notice that no amount of black or grey paint made the Zeppelins invisible in their night strikes against Great Britain in WWI. The size of a blimp is always going to create a very large edge between it and the rest of the sky and its cylinder shape means you can’t counter shade the edges like a flat aircraft shape (because the edge will always be changing based on the geometric relationship between observer and target). The best way to be hard to see in the sky is to be very blended (or apparently so thanks to camouflage), very small and very far away.

Are you mixing apples and oranges here? Aren't blimps and zeppelins two different things? My understanding is that blimps are non-rigid envelopes surrounding the gas bag or bags. Zeppelins or dirigibles are rigid airships with a structure supporting both the envelope and the gas bags. While the overall shape of a dirigible is a cylinder with pinched ends, the cross section will reveal a ring of flat planes. This difference is important to what I was thinking about.

Under certain conditions, anything will create a hard-edged hole in the sky but that ring of planes makes a dirigible more likely to show hard edges under a wider range of conditions. Those planes make it more difficult for the ambient light to be reflected around the 'edges.' The organic shapes of a blimp or even a Spitfire fuselage practically drag the ambient or background light around the 'edges.' In harsh frontlighting conditions that ambient reflection is not clearly distinguishable but it is there. In other lighting conditions and from certain viewing angles that reflected light masks the 'edge.' This is the "lost edge" that painters talk about. The flatter (at in lusterless) the surface - say flat black or flat dark blue paint - the lower the masking effect of that reflected light. Picture a highly polished Blue Angels Bearcat parked next to a war-weary Hellcat. From several viewing angles the Bearcat would present a greater degree of lost edge than the Hellcat. This is what I was thinking about when I suggested a solution being a mix of color, value and reflectivity. If you can find the best use of reflectivity to lose the 'edges' of your aircraft that that hole in the sky might be less noticeable. (That is unless you are close enough that that hole is a very big hole in the sky.) And. I agree with you about gray and/or grey - there is a difference* - being the better color for night camouflage.

Elsewhere in this thread the suggestion of illuminating the skin or masking the shape with lights was discussed. In my opinion, unless your entire surface is covered with these lights - and each light computer controlled to match the value of the sky opposite the aircraft - this approach would be effective along only a narrow viewing angle. From any other angle the lights would be seen as lights. While the idea of using a surface coating that illuminates with a charge may sound appealing, it to would be effective under limited conditions - all of them being daylight, dawn or dusk conditions. Under night conditions that illuminated skin - even at low levels - would stand out as a light source.

*I read somewhere, and I believe it was in a book on aircraft camouflage and markings, that one meant the range of color values obtained by mixing black and white and the other meant the color range obtained by mixing complementary colors together. I'm going to have to go through that book and find that passage.

 

[saintkatanalegacy]

perhaps because they're relevant to the topic according to some people

hallucination→OMG SAUCERz!→tell everybody→OMG SAUCERz!→report to government→proven to be a hoax→OMG government conspiracy!→OMG government haz alien technology!→OMG stealth blimp!→goes to a forum→OMG stealth blimp!→then tin foil hat brigade comes in→OMG alienz abducting people!→everybody dies from brain cell death→end of story

 

[The Artist]

*I read somewhere, and I believe it was in a book on aircraft camouflage and markings, that one meant the range of color values obtained by mixing black and white and the other meant the color range obtained by mixing complementary colors together. I'm going to have to go through that book and find that passage.

I found the passage. It was not in that book but in the Ian Huntley Column in Scale Aircraft Modelling, Volume 5 Number 2, November 1982 Page 86.

I stand corrected on part of what I said as you will see in this quote.

According to the dictionary definitions, if black is mixed with white the result is gray. On the other hand any colour which is modified by the addition of a little black, or a little black and white, results in a grey tint of the original hue.

But nowadays it seems that the actual spelling of a word is not all that important when talking generally about colours, unless of course a particular spelling is given to a named aero-colour.

From a camouflage point of view, grey has always been a useful colour, for if carefully chosen it will reflect or take up any surrounding colour as in the chameleon effect. The Blue of a sky can tinge a grey into a blue-grey. Ground colours too can tinge a grey on low flying aircraft.

Cloud colourings will also alter the appearance of a grey aircraft and, in fact, grey makes for a good overall camouflage provided an aircraft is on the move. Conversely, a grey aircraft on the ground needs to have a covered pen or other concealing screen if it is to escape attention from enemy reconnaissance.

 

[Stargazer]

What's all the fuss about GRAY and GREY, anyway? Both are one and the same word, with GREY being the British spelling and GRAY the American one. That's what we learned (learnt) in school over here from an early age, a spelling distinction like so many others, period (full stop). Any attempt to find semantic differences between the two is beyond be. Whatever is not black and not white, but any amount of combination of the two is GRAY or GREY, all 254 shades of them!

This being said, little aliens from outer space are called the GRAYS, being spotted by Americans...
And Jean GREY... well, that's her name. ;D

 

[Sundog]

What's all the fuss about GRAY and GREY, anyway? Both are one and the same word, with GREY being the British spelling and GRAY the American one. That's what we learned (learnt) in school over here from an early age, a spelling distinction like so many others, period (full stop). Any attempt to find semantic differences between the two is beyond be. Whatever is not black and not white, but any amount of combination of the two is GRAY or GREY, all 254 shades of them!

This being said, little aliens from outer space are called the GRAYS, being spotted by Americans...
And Jean GREY... well, that's her name. ;D

Actually, IIRC, the accurate reason for the different spelling of grey and gray is that there actually are two kinds in that color category; Grey has browns as it's base tones and Gray has blue as it's base tones. In other words, grays are bluish (cool) in color and grey is brownish (warm) in color. However, as with most words, their use gets mixed by culture.

For instance, jet's aren't engines, they're powerplants. Yet most of us still refer to them as jet engines. Also, cars are powered by engines, not motors, well at least not until hybrids came along, in which case they have an engine and a motor.

No matter how we define words, people will eventually use them as they wish, irregardless (<=== A non-word I hear people use all the time. It's a double negative which in the end would mean, "regard.")

More to the point: Stealth Blimps. If they exist, I hope they look cool. My guess is there were probably some prototypes made for military uses, but I've yet to find any evidence of anything in mass production. It would be kind of hard to hide and way too big to fit in all of those underground bases.

 

[saintkatanalegacy]

this thread needs to be moved in whiff ;D

 

[kcran567]

Look all you guys who laugh and say '"ufo nut" have got it wrong. The technologies are there (magnetohydrodynamic drive) cruise ship sized boats are using it. Static lift is real, and if it gets sighted people will think its a UFO! including the people in Tora Bora or Afghanistan that you are surveying.
Heres a good article:

http://black-triangles.blogspot.com/2007/03/nids-2002-hypothesis-its-dod-blimp.html

I guarantee you a lot of money is going into this because it is so utterly useful.

I live in Phoenix and the witnesses (doctors, ex governor) described a ship (they thought was a UFO) That was "gigantic" and "a mile long" they said the skin "undulated" and "shimmered" and had a star field projected on it. Some of the witnesses said they could almost touch the skin. Guaranteed this was a real object and a stealth blimp. Some kind of malfunction occurred that night.

 

[Abraham Gubler]

and the witnesses (doctors, ex governor) described a ship (they thought was a UFO) That was "gigantic" and "a mile long" they said the skin "undulated" and "shimmered" and had a star field projected on it. Some of the witnesses said they could almost touch the skin.

[flash=200,200]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0i-whGHf-Y[/flash]

 

[XP67_Moonbat]

"UFO nut"!

 

[saintkatanalegacy]

for a mile long stealth blimp, they sure are visible enough for people to claim they exist :

 

[Orionblamblam]

for a mile long stealth blimp, they sure are visible enough for people to claim they exist :

That's one of the good tests to determine whether or not someone it truly on the level: are their stories internally consistent? Super-stealthy aircraft with bright friggen' lights. Alien spacecraft capable of traversing the lightyears and making 90-degree turns at Mach five... brought down by a thunderstorm. Vehicles made of virtually industructible materials that crash... and scatter shrapnel all over everywhere, without an explosion powerful enough to explain why an indestructible craft got shredded. Shady dark conspiracies involving the scariest, smartest people on the planet... that make mistakes so stupid that some idjit with a blog can figure it out.

 

[John21]

God, now that you make it sound like that, all the theories I talk to people about and so on seems kind of....off.I am still a bit of a ufo/paranormal nut thought and probably always will be ;D

 

[Orionblamblam]

God, now that you make it sound like that, all the theories I talk to people about and so on seems kind of....off.I am still a bit of a ufo/paranormal nut thought and probably always will be ;D

The difference between an "aficionado" and a "nut" is that the nut makes little to no effort to critically analyze the "theory" he's interested in, but instead views it as sort of revealed wisdom. There's not a thing in the world wrong with being interested in UFOs. There's lots wrong with making unsupported assumptions.

 

[edwest4]

for a mile long stealth blimp, they sure are visible enough for people to claim they exist :

That's one of the good tests to determine whether or not someone it truly on the level: are their stories internally consistent? Super-stealthy aircraft with bright friggen' lights. Alien spacecraft capable of traversing the lightyears and making 90-degree turns at Mach five... brought down by a thunderstorm. Vehicles made of virtually industructible materials that crash... and scatter shrapnel all over everywhere, without an explosion powerful enough to explain why an indestructible craft got shredded. Shady dark conspiracies involving the scariest, smartest people on the planet... that make mistakes so stupid that some idjit with a blog can figure it out.

Are you the "real" Dr. House? You have a highly developed rant-slash-burn-the nutjobs schtick. Good, I'm sure, among your friends but a bit boorish on a public message board. I've dumped bigger message boards for less.




Ed

 

[Orionblamblam]

I've dumped bigger message boards for less.

 

[sublight]

How about we just start a new thread called "classified LTA platforms"?

I would sure like to know who Dr. Adam Chu was working for in the late 1980's when "He helped design a phased array radar integrated into a powered, station-keeping stratospheric blimp"....

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Dr. Chu worked on concepts for powered blimp applications in the late 1980s, primarily in the systems analysis role. He helped design a phased array radar integrated into a powered, station-keeping stratospheric blimp, using modeling and simulation to detail the structural, mechanical, electrical and propulsion subsystems.

I think that makes it adequately clear this was theoretical work. Topic is locked.