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.
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