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Russians complain that cheap Hornet UAVs now reach Crimea.
(thelemmy.club)
Maybe they should leave...
Nyet, comrade, glorious mother russia is on a winning streak! Putin said so! So much winning in 4 years of ~~war~~ SPECIAL OPERATIONS, just like the USA in Iran!
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.
I saw the idea floated in the header image as well.
Maybe don't attack your neighbors then? FAFO, right?
Cry more Ruskies, your tears are delicious.
Call a Waaah-mbulance!
FAFO,. now in the finding out stage
Not sure if cyberpunk or WW1 anymore. CyberSteamPunk?
Dieselpunk?
Solarpunk
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.
When your balloon needs to lift 15 kg to 5 km, it suddenly becomes significantly expensive. According to the internet™, you need 14 cubic meters of helium, which alone would be like $700. You will also expect to lose half of them to random winds, so you need to launch at least 20.
Also, 15 kg drone is not that much destructive, it only carries 5 kg of payload, while Shahed typically carries 50 kg.
For this application hydrogen makes more sense.
Yeah I thought the same thing, but no. People who actually launch weather balloons swear off hydrogen like a plague, because apparently it explodes while you are filling the balloon.
That makes sense, although in wartime it would matter less. You can also generate it fairly portably with ferrosilicon and acid.
It's worth mentioning a football field or whatever of Mylar won't be free. Big balloons retail for hundreds on their own according to a quick search.
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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.
If it can find and approach the balloon close enough to set off a grenade,
That is the problem. Weather balloons usually fly between 18-37km above sea level. That is hard to impossible to reach for even a fighter jet, which have service ceilings of 18km. Simpler cheaper aircraft can not fly that high. With the guns range being somewhat limited, you basically need to fire a missile at the balloon. That however is too expensive.
Screenshot says they're flying at 5-7 km altitude though, which is a very different situation
Is why I said looking holes in the hanging drone :)
The "hard to counter" thing is arguable, because yeah, anything that's up there reflecting radar can theoretically be shot down (and probably by something cheaper yet). They might not be set up to detect and attack balloons right now, though. I mean, even NORAD famously wasn't for a while.
Shot down with something cheaper than a balloon?
Brother, handgun rounds probably cost more than balloons, and I can't think of anything cheaper, offhand.
A small arms round costs cents at scale. A big balloon like that costs hundreds of dollars, and the drone hundreds more. The bigger question is if a bullet would do enough damage.
For targeting the balloon, the eventual best weapon might just be a sickle-ish blade, either on a rod or rope. Melee weapons worked for most of human history, and if your target has airspeed zero, why not? If you're hitting the drone, you'll need something more heavy-duty; small arms, a small mine or a powered blade. I suppose just tangling it or lassoing on a drogue chute could work.
The obvious choice for interceptor drone is a small blimp. It's faster then an unpowered balloon, but still very stable and capable of extreme altitudes.
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While I love this for Ukraine. This is very bad news for countries down wind of hostile powers. I.E. China. They could launch hundreds of thousands of these cheap drones and wreak havoc in Japan and the US.
"deep in the rear" sounds fitting.
Yeah, noted, we'll get right on that.
Jellyfish UAP
I wonder how well you could do if you brought up a glider with explosives this way. Get it in deep/high then let it glide super far.
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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