Blue Devil Set for April Compleation?

Mav6 has it's own blog that provides very transparent details into the inter-workings of the Blue Devil Airship. Just after the Wired article was released Mav6 posted this on their blog, indicating that work is still underway on Blue Devil.

Oddly this news came out a day before Wired ran it's story that I posted about before, yet the post on Mav6's blog is dated just after Wired ran it's story. Could it be that Blue Devil is going to be completed before the air force gets a chance to scrap it? It makes sense to me that when something is so close to completion, why wouldn't one just finish it. Mav6 seems to employ an Out of the Box prospective when it comes to deference work. Usually if a contractor isn't being paid, they just stop working, particularly when it comes to defense contractors. Yet this might be an episode of a company's love for a big fat blimp. How could one let something as trivial as politics stop them from achieving their dreams?

The reasoning behind the termination of the Blue Devil Block 2 comes from inflated operational cost predictions made by the Airforce's Big Safar. They believe that, because of it's slow speed, Blue Devil will come under attack often and require constant repairs to continue operation. The problem is that this is a completely assumed cost based off no real world experience flying blimps over Afghanistan.

How many weapons dose the Taliban have that can reach 20,000 feet? I can defiantly see rebel forces shooting at an enemy spy blimp all day long from their encampments as part of the evenings entertainment. But at 20,000 feet the chances of them hitting it are about as good as a rampaging drunk shooting an apple to shreds from 3000 yards away with a sniper rifle. The bullets will go subsonic before they reach the blimp, greatly decreasing accuracy. And even if they do hit, the impact force will probably be so little they might just bounce off hall.

Heat seeking missiles don't work very well, because the heat signature from the engines is too low, and radar tracking missiles, which I doubt the Taliban has more then a few of,  don't work well ether because the radar signature is too little. It seems more likely that Big Safar inflated the projected operating costs because of some type of unclear bigotry toads this particular airship program. They tried to kill Blue Devil once already, so it's clear they have a grudge.

It would be nice if both LEMV and Blue Devil reached completion at relatively the same time, that way LEMV's advantages could be exemplified as it would be directly compared to more conventional airships with the same mission.

US Airforce spends 140 million to kick rocks.

The US Airforce has just cancelled Blue Devil Block 2. I know I said I didn't care for it but, can I really say I'm happy about this? What's the possibility that LEMV gets cancelled as well thanks to budget cuts and delays? And why didn't the Pentagon get it's act together to not wast 140 million on a project that offers no new benefits over conventional airship technology in the first place? Did they not even look at our past history with airship technology to know that conventional airships are plagued with problems?

The Hybrid Airship design is the future for all airship technology. That's just simple logic. Without some system of ballast control, conventional airships just don't work. They are hard to control, they can't hover, they're giant wind sails, and worst of all they have a chance to lose ballast control and fall out of the sky like the Macron or the Akron, or they can just go flying up into the sky until their balloons pop and then they come crashing down. Hybrids solve all these problems by using the shape of the hull like an airplane to maintain ballast control, which is what gives hybrids the edge they need to bring airship technology to the next level and become a powerhouse of economic growth and market stability. 

The Navy knows all about the intrinsic difficulties with airships from experience, but perhaps that is the problem; branches of the military not sharing information as they should. The Airforce has little experience with airships, so perhaps they where looking to outshine the Navy with the largest blimp they could make. The idea that they, of course, would somehow overcome all the problems that the navy could not solve. Why? Because they are better then the Navy, in their minds. So why would they ask the Navy for help?

This lack of ability for the American military branches to work with each other is a long standing problem in the US, and very well could be the death of this nation if we don't somehow fix it. Why can't we all just get past our own egos and work together? This ego-centric-mindedness is the real killer of this Nation, as much like in public school the military is filed with the ideology that one must be better then someone else when they are right, and to be wrong is to commit the "sin" of stupidity. Yet in the end, the Airforce ends up looking the bigger fool which is regrettable because it was probably just the arrogance of one or two bullheaded generals that screwed this whole thing up in the end, and now the entire Airforce must take the blame for it.

Hopefully we will learn from this. It's time for airship technology to reach new heights, and that path is clearly laid out in the Hybrid Airship design, not in the old ways of the old world. We must work together to survive and we must work together to thrive. If we keep on trying to be better then everyone else, without realizing that we all have different skill sets and we are all individuals, we aren't gonna make it. Respect and peace is the answer.