Page 9 - Airships News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Broken, where fighters have tried to shoot them down at lower altitudes using cheaper gunnery, you've had instances where hundreds or even thousands of cannon rounds have gone straight through the balloon, not gone off, in the sense that the rounds haven't exploded because the skin of the balloon is too insubstantial to trigger the fuse. and so they've just put tiny holes in them, which doesn't really cause them to leak at any particularly significant rate, and they've just continued. and of course, if it's over a civilian area or, say, the continental united states, a large area, you have to ...

A large area, you have to be very careful where you're firing cannon rounds because those will still come down somewhere. it is a difficult thing to solve with military equipment that isn't designed for it. does that mean we're going to have to look at new ways of defending or dealing with balloons, airships, otherthings flying at this altitude? because it sounds like it's possible we might see more in the future. it's not a technology of the past, but one that many countries look like they're developing. it may be that there will be more interest in certainly tracking the use of balloons and ...

And to discover that they are not as inviolate as they thought they were is a big deal culturally and, if you like, semiotically for the us population, and i think this is what is at stake here. it's quite clear that china has messed up. you know, somebody somewhere should have realised that this programme was ongoing at a time when both china and the united states were keen, bordering on desperate, to put a floor beneath a rapidly deteriorating relationship. nobody seemed to think that the discovery of one of these balloons, airships, dirigibles — call it what you will — might derail this...

And so they've just put tiny holes in them, which doesn't really cause them to leak at any particularly significant rate, and they've just continued. and of course, if it's over a civilian area or, say, the continental united states, a large area, you have to be very careful where you're firing cannon rounds because those will still come down somewhere. it is a difficult thing to solve with military equipment that isn't designed for it. does that mean we're going to have to look at new ways of defending or dealing with balloons, airships, otherthings flying at this altitude? because it sounds ...

That the discovery of one of these balloons, airships, dirigibles, call it what you will, might derail this. when the news first came out, the chinese response was to say that, you know, the united states is making a fuss about nothing. the commentators, newspapers plundered the cliche book to talk about this. and this, i think, is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding by china of what this means. nigel inkster is the former director of operations and intelligence at mi6. he says international law is clear that countries can act to remove flying objects like balloons from their airspace...