Stas Bush wrote:2000 / ~100 vessels in Astarian hands would be 20 balloons per ship, or a total of 40,000 cubic meters of hydrogen on every ship.
So every single merchantman he has is now some magic balloon launching doom ship? What was that about Astaria having no merchant marine essentially? Hmm? How can he somehow pull them all into port, outfit them with doom balloons, inflation equipment, and then sail all of them within range of Shepistan?
Operations operations operations, people.
Stas wrote:Any large bulker could inflate a large number of them at once on-deck.
Didn't I just say that? So why are we repeating ourselves?
Stas wrote:At about 1 hour, 10 balloons are launched from every ship, meaning 1000 aerostates.
That's only assuming Norseman somehow magically converts each one of his merchantmen into a balloon doom ship.
Also, it's pure bullshit that Norseman would even near his freighters to your "600" km limit - why would he be eager to get detected by your fucking radars or downed by your fucking BOMARCs, tell me?
Reliability of the flight path. You can launch from over a thousand KM away if you don't particularly care about hitting the right country; which isn't a problem with scientific high altitude flights; nobody cares if they end up in Poland or whatever when we aimed them at Egypt.
For a weapon, you need accuracy. Otherwise, you hit the wrong country and end up at war with them. A major MESS nation is right next to me. Oh lets end up at war with the MESS who is 1,000 times more powerful conventionally than us by sliming them too!
Shep, how long do you think the windward spread of spores can last at altitudes around 20-30 km?
Do you seriously think they will just "evaporate" somewhere?
Hey genius. Guess what's really prevalent at high altitudes?
Oh that's right! Lots and lots and lots of really high intensity UV radiation!
The earth's atmosphere blocks 98.7% of it. Guess what? at 85,000 feet and above, you're above 95% of Earth's atmosphere essentially.
Mother Nature sterilizes it for me. Of course, Anthrax is remarkably hardy, so I'd give good odds of a decent number of spores getting down; but for the other diseases; nope.
Stas wrote:The spore cloud gets trapped in the wind current and can traverse from 1000 km to 2500 km. Stop harping about "the BOMARC's insane range" - there would still be a huge fallout over Shepistan.
It'll take a while for those spore clouds to travel 1,000 to 2,500 km; and drift down. Long enough for the UV radiation at altitude to kill most of it.
However, the release of large concentration of anthrax over several hundred square kilometers would lead to multi-hundred thousand ilness cases. Even if we are looking at ~200,000 fatalities per release (a US estimate for rather small anthrax bomb attack against NYC), that's still a lot.
I've been to the world's first BioTerrorism attack site; the postal complex in Brentwood, where people were exposed to anthrax directly through physical contact and airborne contact. Out of 33,000 people roughtly exposed to it in some form or another, a mere 11 people became really deathly ill, and out of that, five died. Can someone do the math for me?
Even after they decontaminated Brentwood, they still found anthrax in parts of the building being used by people who weren't suffering any ill effects from it. Anthrax is not a magi-tech bioweapon. It's best characteristic is it's persistence; making it possible to put off limits large areas like mustard gas.
Also, it seems Shep bullshited about "detecting large RCS" of balloons: generally modern ultra-thin aerostate have an RCS of 0,001-0,01 m suquare RCS (of course, you can still down them, but not detect, track and guide a misseil to them at 600 km away). Polyethilene and hydrogen are tranparent for waves. Or am I wrong?
Hey genius; guess what's hanging from them? Oh right. Biological agent cannister gondolas. I don't think that Astaria has somehow produced magical stealthy gondolas.
Stas wrote:I've personally spoken to S-200 and S-75 operators who tried to down recon balloons at ~32 km - it was extremely hard and could be done only at close range. Many balloons were simply undetected.
The S-200 and S-75 complexes are essentially 1950s and 1960s technology. We've advanced a lot since then regarding signals analysis. Next you're going to say that because S-75 complexes can't detect a F-117; a S-400 complex can't.
The USSR had a less than 20% downing rate versus 17-24 km NATO recon balloons, and the worst part: their large cargo loads were giving MORE RCS than the balloons themselves, which meand the rockets locked on the small cargo load but failed to hit the balloon. If they hit it, often they went straight throug, since several MKM thin hull would not be enough to set off the explosion hahaha.
Oh hey; if the missile locks onto the cargo load, then that means the cargo load is essentially destroyed; or shredded to such an extent it's no longer combat capable.
Secondly, you're under the impression that we still use contact fuzing or radar proximity fuzes solely on SAMs. This is 2000, not 1970. Modern fuzes are laser/IR based, allowing for destruction of low RCS targets, etc, and in general much improved reliability of proximity detonation.
1) Which radars of Shepistan are capable of detection of 0,01-0,001 m square RCS targets at ~600 km?
More like 1m2. Remember. Gondola? Unless you've magicked it so that the Astarian BW containers and their control systems are transparent to radar. Oh hey, can I have some of that nice radar transparent bullshittum?
3) Which missiles are capable of adequately homing on such an object? Which radar is capable of guiding them against such objects at altitudes over 30 km?
Hey genius. BOMARC has it's own active radar in the nose. And it's command guided via a datalink with autonomous attack capabiltiy. All I need to do is command it to "Fly to x area, turn on your radar at y, and radio back to me what you see, so I can process it and then radio commands to you on what to do -- go autonomous or continue commanded flight"
Secondly, the higher something is up, guess what? The further you can see it!
Really, if Norseman wanted a reliable delivery system, he wouldn't have launched 1,000 balloons. He would have launched a few cruise missiles from the decks of his freighters -- not a lot in each wave; 10 maximum. Why? Because that way you can slip through the cracks of the radar system.
It's happened with carriers in Wargames, the enemy waits until the carrier is recovering it's aircraft, then launches a single missile on the same vector as the incoming aircraft; and the operators on the carrier miss it until it's too late. You can't do that with four digit numbers.
4) Impacting debris from proximity explosions would pierce the balloon, but that would simply cause it to slowly lose altitude. Thus, you are forced to expend more than 1 SAM per balloon.
Wrong. The entire balloon will be shredded by high velocity fragments from the controlled fragmentation warhead on the SAM.
Modern SAMs have the ability to control their warhead's detonation so that they can spray the fragments or shaped charges (yes, some use shape charges) in the direction that causes the maximal damage to the target.
48N6 Shaped Charge example
You can see how the Fakel 48N6 SAM has a directional warhead which is aimed in the direction of the target to maximize lethality.
Adding insult to injury, unlike earlier primitave Fragmentation warheads, which were just randomly designed and thus produced a whole spread of fragments, with most of them being too big or too small, and thus inefficient, today's controlled fragmentation warheads are designed to produce the majority of their fragments in an optimum size for maximum area coverage balanced against maximum damage to the target.
So the balloon will resemble something even more swiss-cheesed than swiss-cheese itself.
Yeah, right, that's because I'm sick of Shep and his bullshit excuses to have Shepistan soldier on. I want Shepistan to die and any collateral would be accepted. It's just too much to be left alive.
So you just essentially attacked a MESS nation with a bio-attack. Real smart of you, Stas. Plus, all those balloons being blown off course will land all over the place.
Here's something grim -- If steve's retarded retcon goes through; it means that you only have vaccines and stuff against the most popular Shepistani strains -- NOT against CSR strains.
Congratulations, You just wiped out about 25% of the world's population conservatively, and collapsed the game back probably 25-50 years -- more like 100 years when my fail safe shows up and launches it's missiles into a world slowly collapsing.
For someone who is such a fucking mad dog; I took great pains to ensure that my bio-attacks were controlled so that they would not boomerang -- why do you think I chose to use Cruise missiles and SRBMs, along with bombs dropped from Tu-22Ms to attack Astaria, instead of simply sending 20 agents ashore into Astaria to insert cannisters of Super Smallbola into the ventilation systems of several major sporting venues?
