Order of the Stick

[IndianaJoe3]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I like the zeppelin.

 

I think it's a blimp, not a zeppelin.

[Susano]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I think it's a blimp' date=' not a zeppelin.[/quote']

 

Yeah, it says "Bad Year" and has an underslung gondola. That's a blimp.

[Lucius]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Actually, I think it's an airship powered by elementals.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

And this is a palindromedary. Or is it a backandforthtrian?

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

If it explodes, it's a zeppelin.

 

JG

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

If it explodes, it's a zeppelin.

 

JG

 

The Hindenburg had a smoking room. Little known fact.

 

Still think airships are incredibly cool.

[archermoo]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

The Hindenburg had a smoking room. Little known fact.

 

Still think airships are incredibly cool.

 

No reason for it not to. Or at least no more reason for it not to than for a gasoline powered craft.

 

The hydrogen filled the gas bags used for lift, not the passenger area.

[Shadow Hawk]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

No reason for it not to. Or at least no more reason for it not to than for a gasoline powered craft.

 

The hydrogen filled the gas bags used for lift, not the passenger area.

 

Not all zepplins used hydrogen. American zeps used helium.

Hindenburg was designed to use helium, but America wouldn't sell.

To this day, the U.S. has a "National Helium Reserve" for military airships. Now, if we only had some military airships...

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

The Hindenburg had a smoking room. Little known fact.

 

It was the Thirties. Daycare centers had smoking rooms.

 

JG

[Lucius]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Not all zepplins used hydrogen. American zeps used helium.

Hindenburg was designed to use helium, but America wouldn't sell.

To this day, the U.S. has a "National Helium Reserve" for military airships. Now, if we only had some military airships...

 

Spy balloons go into high demand in Afghanistan

 

By Tom Vanden Brook

WASHINGTON -- The hottest U.S. weapon in Afghanistan lacks a lethal

capability, floats thousands of feet in the air and doesn't carry

troops.

 

It's a spy balloon.

 

The Pentagon is sending dozens of the balloons to Afghanistan to meet a

growing military demand for video surveillance of insurgents.

 

Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said balloons fitted

with high-powered cameras are needed because unmanned planes such as the

Predator can't be built fast enough. Carter says the demand for video

surveillance equipment from Afghan battlefield commanders has been 20

times the rate of supply.

 

Spy balloons are the latest example of how unmanned weapons are

revolutionizing warfare, says Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century

Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Commanders are

pioneering new uses for drones and balloons the way their counterparts

in the early 20th century developed uses for planes, he said.

 

"We're in a transition period in war," Singer said. "This kind of

experimentation is a pretty good thing. You don't know exactly the right

way to use it at first. The difference between winners and losers is

that winners have been the ones who have experimented."

 

Spy plane use has soared in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2005 when the

military flew 6,165 surveillance missions, according to the Air Force.

Last year, there were 18,898 spy plane missions, and through August,

there were 11,229.

 

Enter balloons, which look like small blimps and are known in the

military as aerostats. The military began shipping them to Afghanistan

to get a better look at how insurgents increased their planting of

improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They're part of an effort by

Defense Secretary Robert Gates to rush equipment to counter the IED

threat for the 30,000 additional troops President Obama ordered to

Afghanistan.

 

There are more than 30 spy balloons in Afghanistan, up from a handful at

the beginning of the year, Carter said. The goal is to have 64 of them

tethered thousands of feet above bases and key roads.

 

By comparison, there are 27 round-the-clock patrols from Predator and

Reaper drones, said Air Force Col. Scott Murray, director of

intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for the U.S.-led coalition

in Kabul. That's up from nine in August 2008.

 

The spy balloon's camera is the same kind as the one on the Predator

drone and can see 10 to 15 miles away, Carter said. Recently, one

spotted insurgents planting makeshift bombs. They were captured, he

said.

 

"You can spot someone burying an IED or setting up a checkpoint on a

road near you; you can catch someone about to mortar your base; you

(can) check whether the market is open in a nearby village," Carter

said. "It's a (drone) in every local commander's backyard. There was no

hope we would ever get that with the expensive fixed-wing airplanes. But

we can get that with these."

 

At $10 million apiece, the balloons are about half as expensive as

drones and the equipment and personnel needed to fly them, he said.

Occasionally, they have been lost in high winds, although a few were

recovered.

 

Balloons could someday carry cargo or be used by aircraft for refueling,

Singer said.

 

"In essence, it's acting as a poor man's spy satellite," Singer said.

 

The balloons' visibility appears to help deter attacks, Carter said.

"The bad guys think it's looking at them at all times and will catch

them," Carter said. "For good people, it provides a comfort that their

environment is secure and they're being overwatched."

 

Murray, the surveillance officer, said some believed the camera could

see through walls or women's clothing. It can't, he said. For now,

anyway.

 

 

 

 

Danger Room: What's Next In National Security

 

All-Seeing Blimp Could Be Afghanistan's Biggest Brain

 

By Noah Shachtman

 

Come this fall, there will be a new and extremely powerful supercomputer in

Afghanistan. But it won't be in Dave Petraeus' headquarters in Kabul or at

some three-letter agency's operations center in Kandahar. It'll be floating

20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and

listens to everything for miles around.

 

That is, if an ambitious, $211 million crash program called "Blue Devil"

works out as planned. As of now, the airship's "freakishly large" hull -

seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp's - has yet to be put together.

 

The Air Force hasn't settled yet on exactly which cameras and radars and

listening devices will fly on board. And it's still an open question whether

the military can handle all the information that the airship will be

collecting from above.

 

U.S. planes already shoot surveillance video from on high, and listen in on

Afghanistan's cellphones and walkie-talkies. But those tasks are ordinarily

handled by different aircraft. Coordinating their activities - telling the

cameramen where to shoot, or the eavesdroppers where to listen - takes time.

And that extra time sometimes allows adversaries to get away.

 

The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors,

all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The

supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in

the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an

upcoming ambush.

 

The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in

less than 15 seconds.

 

"It could change the nature of overhead surveillance," says retired Lt. Gen.

David Deptula, until recently the head of the Air Force's intelligence

efforts. "There's huge potential there."

 

The first phase of the Blue Devil project is already underway. Late last

year, four modified executive planes were shipped to Afghanistan, and

equipped with an array of surveillance gear.

 

Phase two - the airship - will be considerably bigger, and more complex. The

lighter-than-aircraft, built TCOM LP, will longer than a football field at

350 feet and seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp at 1.4 million cubic

feet.

 

"It's freakishly large," says a source close to the program. "One of the

largest airships produced since World War II."

 

The Air Force hopes that the extra size should give it enough fuel and

helium to stay aloft for as much as a week at a time at nearly four miles

up. (Most blimps float at 3,000 feet or less.) Staying up so high for long

is all-but-unprecedented. But it's only a third of the proposed flight time

for a competing Army airship project.

 

The Army's "Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle" relies on a more

complicated, hybrid hull. Blue Devil's complexity is in the hardware and

software it'll carry aboard.

 

Sensors will be swapped in and out using an on-board rail system that

connects pallets of electronics. Defense startup Mav6 is doing the

integration work.

 

In addition to an array of on-board listening devices, day/night video

cameras, communications relays and receivers for ground sensors, the Blue

Devil airship will also carry a wide-area airborne surveillance system, or

WAAS. These sensors - like the Gorgon Stare package currently being

installed on Reaper spy drones - use hives of a dozen different cameras to

film areas up to two-and-a-half miles around.

 

The footage can easily overwhelm the people who have to watch it (not to

mention the military's often-fragile battlefield networks). Already, 19

analysts watch a single Predator feed.

 

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a

conference in November that he'd need 2,000 analysts to process the footage

collected by a single drone fitted with WAAS sensors. And that's before the

upgrade to the next-generation WAAS, which uses 96 cameras and generates

every hour 274 terabytes of information; it'd take 1,870 of the hard drives

I'm using right now to store that much data.

 

That's where the supercomputer comes in. With the equivalent of 2,000

single-core servers, it can process up to 300 terabytes per hour. So instead

of just sending all the footage to the infantrymen, like most of today's

sensors, the airship's processors will crunch the information, adding meta

tags like location and time. Ground troops will query a server on the

airship, which will only broadcast the stuff they're interested in.

 

"People ask: 'With all these sensors, how're you gonna transmit all that

data down to the ground?' Well, we don't necessarily need to send it all

down," Deptula says. "A potential solution is to process part of the data

on-board, and only send what is of interest. That reduces the bandwidth

requirements."

 

Provided the Air Force can get the blimp in the air, and the gadgets on the

blimp. The first flight is scheduled for October 15.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Now if I only had a palindromedary tagline

[Shadow Hawk]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Now if I only had a palindromedary tagline

 

Add in the uses in military weather balloons, coolant for spacecraft, and such, and you see why we stored a billion cubic meters of the stuff... enough for five thousand 'Hindenburg' type airships.

(Hmm. Seems the reserve is being 'privatized' "to save money". So it isn't as large as it once was. And NASA is complaining about the costs going up.)

[SteveZilla]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Yeah' date=' it says "Bad Year" and has an underslung gondola. That's a blimp.[/quote']

 

 

[Hermit]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

New one up

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0776.html

 

Elan gives a stirring speech

 

 

"I don't know how you people manage to get up in the morning without sticking your head in the fireplace just to finally escape from it all, but you do. So here's to you, Common People!"

 

 

I love Elan. The guy has the light of goodness shining out of his every orifice and he just can't keep it from shining.

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

"The chance of Elan succeeding at any given task is directly proportionate to how much effort he is expending on achieving its inverse."

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I'm discouraged.

[Hermit]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0777.html

New one up

 

I'm betting the string gets cut in battle and everything goes south.

 

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I like how they're all named "Spartacus."

 

jg

[casualplayer]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I like how they're all named "Spartacus."

 

jg

 

Would have been funnier if it was "Spurtycuss," "Svartiqiss,""$p@r+!(u$" and all the various leet spellings and variations on a theme creative gamers fall back on.

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Apparently this isn't a game where you need to create separate usernames.

 

JG

[Enforcer84]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

He's in the Loo

[Greywind]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

I'm sure Enforcer will find him, then.

[Cygnia]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

#778 is up!

 

 

"Hold on...are we even sure we HAVE thumbs??"

 

[Hermit]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

Great googly mooglies!

[James Gillen]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

And you thought that helmets with no peripheral vision were just for style.

 

JG

[Tim]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

"Just wait for it."

[SteveZilla]

Re: Order of the Stick

 

"That's DOWN and wiggling." o.0