Steel Rain, the amature way...

I have a big passion for anything related to old-fashioned balloons/blimps, especially it's potentials for low-budget lo-tec millitary application.

Look at what these radio-amatures did:

http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/

A glider dropped from a high altitude blimp and controlled by a laptop, capable of gliding tens of kilometres....


Now combine that with another fine piece of lowtech:

http://www.armyppt.com/weapons/6.htm

Ah yes, The Claymore mine, cheap, nasty and punctured a fair amount of vietcong in it's heydays....

Now, picture 10 of these small claymore mines strapped on the belly of the glider and sequentially remotely detonated.

A Claymore, properly aimed and detonated can have a lethal zone of a circle with a diameter of 50 metres. Now imagine 10 of them daisy chained. Packs quite a punch to enemy troop concentration and is a whole lot cheaper than USAF cluster bombs and don't need an expensive jet to transport it...

Bonus: the glider is small and can be made of wood and plastic, making radar/infrared detection and anti-air missiles defense rather useless....For the unit replacement cost of one sophisticated Predator UAV (with landing gear, propulsion and hellfire missile etc..) one could build maybe 20-30 or more?! gliders and wreck havoc over a large area.

When a squadron of these babies fly over your convoy, you better grasp your umbrella, coz it's gonna rain steel and the weather will not improve any time soon...

Initially Claymores were developed to combat soft targets, later versions with slightly heavier steel balls can puncture light armoured vehicles as well (or helicopters should we choose to do a fly-over) , but offcoase we could also use the glider to transport some shaped charge explosives to target the turret of a tank......


there are many more tactical uses for Blimps, how about having NO bridges at all in your country ? This would make crossing the Euphrate or the Tigris a more difficult job, instead one would have mobile bridges suspended on large blimps, which can be moved quickly to deny crossing the river to approaching enemy or be placed at another spot at night to do an unexpected hit and run tank attack in the flanks....

At some point your adversary will realize the danger of these balloons and make it a priority to shoot them out of the air. However it would take an expensive plane, expensive manhours to dwon one silly cheap balloon, also if you have like tenthousand even cheaper dummy balloons/glider mixed with the real ones, it is going to be a very costly bussiness....