[HN Gopher] Flying Circuses
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Flying Circuses
Author : miohtama
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-01-13 10:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| sam_goody wrote:
| I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the miltitary.
|
| There are many places where the airstreams can be estimated
| fairly reliably, such as off the coast during certain hours of
| the day. An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons
| on the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and
| drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them untouchable.
| Or they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it
| and landing somewhere inside.
|
| (In fact, in a Napoleonic siege - the attacker could setup rows
| of tethered balloons to heights that will allow them to rain
| arrows / bullets from the outside without caring about the winds,
| or the defenders could do the same to rain arrows / bullets on
| the besieger. Though not sure how often there have been sieges in
| the past two hundred years.)
|
| Of course, there is the issue that they need a safe place to
| land, but in many cases that is solvable - for example, to attack
| an island, boats can fish them out on the other side, and in many
| city areas there is enough area to regroup either past the city
| walls, or inside the city in a sparser area.
|
| And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one could
| actually create direction by flapping, which would be enough in
| some cases, etc.
|
| And that is without further innovations that definitely have been
| worked out had there been a will.
|
| I once heard it said that if the hot air balloons existed when
| the Romans beat the Greeks (as all the knowledge for it existed
| but not the application), the world would look different today.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| There were certainly military applications in the intervening
| time - the article only refers to the immediate 'balloon craze'
| period following the Mongolfiers' initial flight, after which
| the hype died down and they didn't seem to immediately catch on
| for any practical use. But I know with certainty from family
| records that one of my ancestors, a British Army officer, was
| involved in surveying parts of India from the air in the late
| 19th/early 20th century. Still a far cry from the battle
| scenarios you are proposing, but it is reasonable to say in
| fact that the military did find a use for balloons
| eventually...
| ghaff wrote:
| Japan tried it against the US in WWII. When I learned about
| this a few years back I was pretty shocked that it was such an
| obscure factoid that even killed a few people.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
| krisoft wrote:
| > I find it hard to imagine that there was no use to the
| miltitary.
|
| There is a long history of all kind of military ballooning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning
|
| > An attacking army was able to setup hundreds of balloons on
| the deck of the boat, and then float over the city walls and
| drop flaming "bombs" from a height they leaves them
| untouchable.
|
| If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy it/harass it
| much easier with just cannons. It is not enough to show that a
| thing can achieve an effect, but you also have to show that no
| other thing can achieve a comparable or better effect.
|
| > they could breach the walls of the city by floating over it
| and landing somewhere inside.
|
| They can, but that sounds like a recipe to be cut off from your
| friends and be easy prey to the enemy. And that's if they are
| lucky and do not drift off target. Not sure if that is a good
| idea.
|
| > attacker could setup rows of tethered balloons
|
| I think you are under estimating the amount of support required
| per balloon. The French Aerostatic Corps during the battle of
| the Fleurus had one balloon, and they needed 20 man to carry it
| to position.
|
| > And if one built fins, and the winds were low enough, one
| could actually create direction by flapping
|
| Balloons are huge, and they act kind of like a sail. Even in
| dead calm air, which itself is very rare, you would not get
| anywhere by human powered flapping because you would need to
| overpower all the air resistance. You are worse even in the
| slightest breeze.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > If you can park a boat near a city you can destroy
| it/harass it much easier with just cannons.
|
| Murphy's first law of combat: if the enemy is in range so are
| you.
|
| With cannons it's even worse, since the defender usually has
| a height advantage over a ship and thus has more range. And
| that's ignoring that you can put heavier cannons on city
| walls than you can put on ships.
| miohtama wrote:
| I took a balloon flight recently. There was a ground crew of
| two cars chasing the balloon to get us landed, or "fished
| down". The ground crew must move with the balloon which makes
| military applications less appealing.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Only if you want to recover or reuse the balloon. I can
| imagine most military missions would simply crash land and
| abandon it.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > float over the city walls and drop flaming "bombs" from a
| height they leaves them untouchable
|
| Field artillery spotting was also a popular application in the
| 19th century.
|
| https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-balloo...
| miohtama wrote:
| The article mentions about this. Balloons at the time were too
| much at the mercy of winds to be useful for military.
|
| Even today, or maybe even more today, balloon flights are
| risky. Landing is difficult, at the best, lethal at the worst
| you might get burned to crisp in power cables, end up in ocean
| or a mountain wall. Thus, most balloons can only fly very
| predefined, tested, routes to avoid complications.
| tetris11 wrote:
| > He hoped that these "new mechanic meteors" would not be
| "converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as
| is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science."
|
| The more things change, the more they stay the same.
| addled wrote:
| The most sarcastic children's book I've ever read was about
| ballooning: "Launching, Floating High, and Landing - If Your
| Pilot Light Doesn't Go Out", by Gary Paulsen (1979).
|
| I stumbled upon it at a thrift store a while back.
|
| Every turn of the 30 or so pages has a full color photo of a
| balloon being prepped, flown, or landed, accompanied by a short,
| large-print paragraph full of snark.
|
| The opening:
|
| "Hot air ballooning is using hot air in a bag to go up. Gravity
| brings you down. Every time. It's so much fun that many people
| only do it once. They get all the fun they need the first
| time..."
|
| There's not much info about it on the internet, what little there
| is points to a newer 1993 reprint called "Hot Air: Launching,
| Floating High, and Landing".
|
| https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14850023W/Full_of_hot_air?ed...
|
| The text is the same, but the pictures are by a different
| photographer. Maybe I'll figure out how to submit my copy to Open
| Library this week.
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