215
FAFO,. now in the finding out stage
Maybe don't attack your neighbors then? FAFO, right?
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 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!
Complaint noted.
Not sure if cyberpunk or WW1 anymore. CyberSteamPunk?
Dieselpunk?
Solarpunk
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.
Your math seems off. A generic search says it costs like $500 to run a hot ait baloon on helium, which would be carrying significantly more weight eith 4-5 humans.
I get its not 1:1, but $700 for 15kg seems high.
700/14 gives a price of $50/m^3^ or so, and 14 m^3^ makes sense because air weighs around 1kg/m^3^ at sea level (where the helium is measured for trade). Unfortunately, some fucker named a cryptocurrency "Helium" so it's hard to find, but I did turn up this. Due to the situation in the Middle East it could even be multiple times that right now.
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.
Bullets indeed do essentially nothing against weather balloon type craft. Bullets from ground level, even less so unless they're significantly larger rounds. Oh, and you don't want to be downrange of all those misses either.
Flak would probably be the "cheapest best bet" for ensuring damage to the balloons' payload, but the collateral damage from debris could be significant. They will probably use some small missile to do the job, which is the only way to be sure, really. However, that's not ideal from a cost ratio standpoint, which leaves them wide open to the fact that;
Those balloons are also probably cheaper than you estimate, when produced at the same scale as the rounds of which you speak.
Which means that when and if the Russians put something in place to attempt to stop the balloons, the Ukrainians can simply send arse-loads of decoy balloons to waste Russian ammo supplies.
It might be tens of dollars rather than hundreds, that information is harder to come by, but it's not going to be cents. It's a lot of area of material, even if it's cheap material, and hydrogen isn't free either (helium is much much more yet). Plus, the drone costs what the drone costs.
Shooting from ground level probably isn't going to be the solution, because a balloon can fly higher than any heavier-than-air craft. Maybe bigger AA guns could be developed, but it's going to get less mobile, and eventually there's a fundamental limit to muzzle velocity set by the speed of sound in whatever detonation. Plus, if you're using large specialty rounds and a lot of them per hit we're right back to cost.
but the collateral damage from debris could be significant.
How so? There's a lot of empty farmland in the area, and it's wartime. It seems like unless the Ukrainians (or Russians; this will be copied) can still steer and reliably detonate the drone it's no longer an effective weapon.
How so? You think Ukraine will stop where they are with those, seeing the success they're having? lmao
They'll be hanging over Moscow like party balloons given the right wind conditions, what with Russia laying into Kyiv with anything and everything they have.
Given that they're sticking Pantsir launchers on the roofs in Moscow, Russia are indeed expecting it to get worse yet.
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.
"deep in the rear" sounds fitting.
Jellyfish UAP
shouldn't a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort? Sounds like a skill issue.
Sure. That assumes that this is detected and that the Russians happen to have a fueled up Mig 29 with crew available and time to prep the aircraft and intercept. That requires like a few dozen properly trained people to have actually showed up to work moderately sober that day.
ofc it should if you know where it is. balloon and ropes are plastic and therefore non-reflective for microwaves. drone is also largerly plastic so the only metal bits are wiring, battery and warhead
but wait, it gets worse: you can shoot down balloon, but after release drone is still pretty high up but it's now fast, and has just as small radar return as before
Luckily they developed radar that does not use microwaves about 80 years ago, so that isn't a huge problem. You can see them use it literally every time you turn on the weather broadcast because clouds aren't made of metal either.
using vhf-uhf equals to lower resolution and means that you might miss the drone entirely. and it doesn't fit on a fighter
because clouds aren't made of metal either.
Uh, source??
As well as what the other commenter says, a balloon cost a lot less than the jet fuel to scramble a jet and get it to where the balloon is, and then the jet can't be somewhere else. The goal isn't to make an undefeatable weapon, it's to cost the enemy enough money that they've got no choice but to give up on the war and go home.
Don't forget that it is more time on the mig. They have limited use before metal fatigue and other wear issues get them.
you should also count cost of damage to whatever drone slams into
shouldn’t a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort?
Nope. The U.S. did this to the U.S.S.R. constantly during the Cold War and the Soviets had less than a 5% success rate shooting down the balloons.
The US struggled with the one from China three years back. In the end it took an F-22 and a very expensive missile to get the job done.
What other comments seem to be missing (lol) is that Russians are afraid to pull up any aircraft that close to the front and that high, since patriot AA traps set up by Ukrainians a year or two ago.
Do not underestimate how hard it is to shoot down a lighter-than-air aircraft with projectiles is.
The holes matter but nowhere near as much as you think.
This might be a good use case for those fancy plane mounted high intensity lasers the military has been playing around with.
Really? Like, I guess there's not too much pressure pushing the gas out in this kind of balloon, but gas is still light and doesn't need much of a push.
shouldn't a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort? Sounds like a skill issue.
So firstly at 5-7km you shoot a balloon it doesn't just deflate and drop. It'll keep floating (slowly returning to earth over days).
You've been vectored in by ground controllers. You have to spend a heap of time waiting for orders and directions. You can't even see it properly. Its mylar. The FLIR, if its working, isn't showing shit when it comes to mylar.
Secondly imagine you're doing 800kph in a mig-29. Your radar won't lock onto the balloon.
So you somehow line up and setup guns for the shot. Bam, your past it before you have time to even think.
So you line up for another pass. You slow your MIG down to 350kph. This time you have maybe 5-8 seconds before you're pass the target.
You have no idea if you've hit it. You've probably missed it.
A couple more passes and now you're running out of fuel and or ammo (tactical fighters usually have enough ammo for a 1-3 second total firing time) and have to return to base.
Plus all the running cost stuff the other posters have pointed out makes using tactical fighters to shoot down balloons a completely losing proposition.
When the Americans shot down those Chinese balloons it was a near miracle they were able to do it.
Of interesting to note is one of the core applications for the Soviet / Russian A-60 airborne was to shoot down American "weather" balloons.
Really fascinating video (that goes into trainspotting levels of detail) by Not a Pound for Air to Ground
I guarantee I could bring one of these down with a pencil. The issues are knowing where it is, and getting the pencil to it...
And then what happens to the explosive warhead that is now falling at a rate of 120 mph after ten seconds or so?
First you need a second pencil...
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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