Concerning
You couldn’t make this stuff up:
The emergency system, called Low Frequency Fall Back or LFFB and codenamed SUNFLOWER, used a “blimp” style tethered balloon or aerostat (illustrated) to lift a 1,500 metre long radio antenna.
So the communications with nuclear-armed submarines is a 1940s-style blimp baloon? Launched in 2003 and tethered to the ground with a wire.
I do have to ask, where are all the £billions on “defense” going? Certainly not on blimp balloons.
“The balloon would only be needed if all other failsafes have broken or been destroyed”, the source added. “Testing is to find the weak link in rehearsal – not on the day of the crisis.”
This is a last resort device. If they’re putting that up, we’ve been nuked and all the bases with comms are gone
Perhaps they should temporarily replace it with the BBC’s hot air balloon.
Or Nigel Farrage in his light plane.
Building a tower antenna just seems expensive. Why is a blimp that bad?
Maybe because it’s the second decade of the Twenty-First Century and the tech should be much more advanced than 100 years-old balloons. It doesn’t provide confidence.
It’s the third decade of the twenty first century. To me this tech sounds perfectly sensible. I don’t get the obsession with spending extra to make a product worse.
You are right: third decade! I’m so behind the times. I hear that the army’s going to start using bows and arrows as there’s nothing like saving a bit of cash. All does the same job in the end, I suppose.
It is British policy to use Trident as a second-strike weapon. Advanced technology would have limited use in such a scenario. That’s why nuclear warfare relies on the simplest fallbacks possible.
What does being old technology make it bad. If it works, then KISS is perfectly valid.
It’s not. In theory they should be able to quickly deploy a replacement - towers can be easily and quickly destroyed but not quickly replaced. Aerostats can be replaced as quickly as they can inflate replacements & deploy (if needed) new ground equipment.
They can also be deployed from a ship, not as easily done is putting a tower on a ship.
There are a ton of good reasons to use an aerostat instead of a tower.
