Message posted by Sundog on February 21, 2005 at 17:51:09 PST:

Actually, Stealthy Blimps do go together. Although I would say all of the stealthy designs I have seendrawings of are actually dirigibles, not blimps. blimps are gas bags, dirigibles are rigid sturctures and the structure gives it it's shape. They look like giant flying wings. Although you can "Shape" blimps, to an extent. For daytime they would fly very high. At night they would be virtually silent and it's reported one of them actually has a "Starfield" lighting system on the bottom. The advantage they have over other aircraft is that being virtually silent, they can use much more sensitive audio sensors than other aircraft. Also, due to their large size, they can carry much larger aperatures than any other aircraft which makes them ideal for different types of recon/intel gathering/ew warfare, etc.

At the bottom of this article you can see an illustration of such a design that Lockheed Martin released in the early 80's

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/black_triangle_020805.html

It's also reported that some of these blimps would literally be high flying missle ships used as part of an anti-missle defense system.

In Reply to: Re: Stealth Blimps posted by Will (NorCal) on February 20, 2005 at 16:29:53 PST:

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