Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Look! Up in the sky!

The United States military is apparently working on a giant spy blimp.



Two blimps, actually: The Air Force wants to call theirs "Blue Devil" (pictured above), while the Army wants their own blimp called the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV (pictured below).



The Air Force wins the "cooler name" round, obviously. And it's probably not a good idea to plaster "U.S. Army" on the side of your spy blimp. I mean, sure, the bad guys are going to notice it -- it's a fucking blimp -- but at least you have a chance of someone thinking it's from Goodyear or something. "Hey look... is the Super Bowl in Fallujah this year?"

The Wired.com story is great, but even better is the comment battle over whether a blimp is easy to shoot down or tough to shoot down. The consensus seems to be that it would be easy for a first-rate military with advanced air defenses to bring one down, but that's exactly where you wouldn't use one of these things.

Of course, when I saw this, all I thought was... "Hey, cool! They've got a blimp!"

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