Blimp mounted artillery

mounting heavy long range artillery on a blimp (floating at 20 km altitude) has several advantages:

* EXTENDED RANGE:

- In the statosphere, the air is so thin that shells experience
substantial less airdrag.
- the higher the point you shoot from in general , the longer the
parabolic trajectory is extended before a shell touches the earth
surface.
- bonus: once you are capable of really long range
the earth surface curves away from the shell , effectively
adding extra range

* EZ DEPLOYMENT

Large calibre artillery (like you find on naval vessels) produces a huge recoil and also need large hydrauloics to turn the turrets etc, making this size of guns unfavourable to be ground based (allthough in WW1 you had those huge sluggish railmounted howitsers).

Instead, the blimp itself takes the recoil by floating in transverse direction.

No turret hydraulics, the barrel is fixed to the blimp, but the whole blimp itself can be steered.

* OFFENSE

The overall goal will be to make ANY ground (infantery, tanks, bunkers etc.) or air based target (plane/helicopter/missiles etc) within 100 km from the blimp vulnerable for attack.

Basically three kinds of shells will be fired.

- UAV Balloon, they will serve as instant deployable reconnaisance target aquiring and missile guiding stations, floating anywhere 5-15 km above enemy lines. These UAV balloons establish communication with the mothership through line-of-sight laser communication, also the UAV can be used to relay communication to/from friendly forward ground troops.

Scanning the battlefield from above has the advange that you can also spot low-flying stealth planes (as opposed to ground based radar), In fact putting the engine exhaust on top of the plane (a strategie used by american stealth bombers to obscure infrared visibillity from the ground) makes it even more ez for a air based surveillance system to track a stealth plane. Also Tomahawk missiles can be tracked much earlier.

- The weapon of choice: LOSAT

The LOSAT currently is a anti tank missile with a range of just 5 km, but capable of defeating ANY tank (incuding the DU armoured m1 !!!). But what we do here is to fire the LOSAT from the gun in a sabot, to extend it's range to 100 km or more.

Let me clarify a point: the LOSAT is a very high velocity, kinetic-kill (mach 6) guided missile, using a depleted uranium "dart" for a warhead. The LOSAT does not use a shaped-charge warhead. The LOSAT doesn't have an explosive warhead.

Furthermore, the LOSAT is not a top attack weapon per se -- that's why they call it the Line of Sight Anti-Tank Weapon. However, fixed or rotary wing aircraft can use the LOSAT, and fire it at a steep angle into the top of a ground vehicle.

Since we fire the LOSAT missile-shell combo from the air, we might as well use the LOSAT to attack planes and helicopters.

- Lasly we have an antipersonel shell that dispenses an ungodly amount of cluster submunitions over a large area...

* DEFENSE

The high altitude from the blimp (20+ km) itself is a good protection against most missiles launched from the ground or planes, besides the missile delivery vehicles (planes or trucks) likely need to launch their anti-aircraft missile from within the 100 km zone from the blimp, exposing themselves to LOSAT fire. You would need much longer range missiles to attack the blimp from a safe distance . Now this is gonna be VERY VERY expensive to shoot down a lousy blimp with a huge rocket.

Also LOSAT fire can be directed to destroy an incoming missile.