...If they had an in house logistics system that could not only provide heavy lift capability 24/7, but could also provide close in observation 24/7 so that the bad guys could be identified before hand. After all, aid going in with self protection forces, who know who's who, would go a long way to make providing aid work long term.

Sounds too good to be true? Maybe. Maybe not.

The hybrid dirigible blimp transportation system I designed is not anything more now than a design idea. Prototypes would have to be built and tested. The best mix of size, weight and materials, in combination with ease of both assembly and maintenance kept in mind, would have to be settled on. Then the flight control system would have to be tested. The idea here is that any particular dirigible blimp unit could be either a power module carrier, or a cargo carrier. The only difference being what shipping containers the unit carried. This could be done because every unit would have electrically powered, ducted fans, on gimble mounts, all alone each outboard side edge of the twin hulls; say at least six on each side. There would also likely be several on the double wings, front and back control surfaces (which also have vertical rudders across their lengths). The power modules would likely be either gas turbines, or perhaps even fuel cells, as well as dedicated fuel, shipping containers.

I personally don't think that there's much question that the unit's will fly. Whether they'll fly with the needed controllability, and durability, is the real question. Made considerably more complicated by the fact that I intend to link them together into trains. Using flexible links, strong but still lightweight, and also able to transfer power and control signals.

You don't see these links in the pictures because I was still considering, at the time, how that might look. From a practical standpoint, though, they would most likely have to be mounted on the front and back control wings, and would need to function as both connector, and shock absorber. Having their own gimble mounts on the wing, but able to work both in lock step with the wings, or not (to the best degree possible).

These are not trivial engineering issues to be sure, but I believe they can be overcome, and I think most aerospace engineers would agree with me. We just need to get the development work going. Be that as it may, though, let's then assume that we could have flying trains as viable logistics platforms. How does that then work in practical terms; especially in hostile locations such as this refugee camp?

What it does is basically give you floating islands that can move where you need them to move. A quite narrow island to be sure, but with a length of at least a mile possible, I should think that would provide for quite a lot of carrying capacity; and the real beauty of this is, you can resupply the chain by simply flying in smaller chains to swap out with exhausted fuel and personnel carriers. Your sensing equipment, and self protection stores could rotate on their own cycle rates, but the train as a whole would always remain.

That then gets us to the self protection aspect. First of course is that you could cruise at an altitude that would hopefully require more than a shoulder fired weapon, but even if you were in range of those as well, you could still protect the train, and with reasonable cost. You could do this with simplified drone aircraft that would carry only a claymore like mine. They would be capable of interlinking as both communications relay, and simplified sensor nodes. They would also be continuously recharged by tethered, flying recharge stations (the challenge there being to get a charge through-put rate of at least 100 or so an hour per station so you don't have to crowd the sky with recharg tethers). Moving in sync with the train they would just hover on station around it waiting. Anything that approached that couldn't pass IFF queries (subject to human override of course), that got too close to any particular mine would set the focused, direction charge, off. And since you would have thousands of them hovering around you, as a cloud, the chances of a warhead actually impacting could be reduced significantly; to what I think would quite acceptable risk levels.

These cheap defense units would be combined with the sensing ability of the dirigible blimps themselves, and that could also be quite significant when you consider the amount of flat, downward facing surface area each unit would have available for whatever phased array, or optically based kinds of sensors; the kind of side looking radar capability the military only has on comparatively small surfaces now (but for which they still get a lot out of). Imagine, if you will, what they could do if they could have such sensors that are more than ten times the size of currently flying platforms. Imagine the kinds of synthetic aperture applications they could utilize with linked trains such as these. And at the most basic level, just sensing movement, you ought to be able to know if a warhead is coming at you or not; from which direction, and which claymore drones, that are already near the approach vector, should be alerted.

By the same token, long term sensing by this kind of platform could allow you to become quite familiar with everything that is going on down below you. You need only combine that with quiet drones (which you have to believe are already in use somewhere, somehow) and you have one scary interdiction environment. I mean seriously. Combine quite drones with the ability to shoot just darts and you have very intimidating assassins; After all, can you imagine dark nights, limited vision and a hunter that may already knows your movement history, where you start from, where you are likely to go, and then the ability of it to fire a delivery projectile, quietly, that carries, say a neurotoxin that the body metabolizes before death, and a dart that dissolves as well. I think you get the picture.

In any case, what I am trying to suggest here is that all of this is quite plausible. It requires only the will to set it in motion, and to keep it in place. And this is a kind of project that we can do as an infrastructure, public works project, because trains of this kind, and the ability to produce them effort effectively, would be of tremendous value here at home as well. And again. This would be for the public good, not for the profit of anyone, or limited numbers, of persons. The way a truly public works project ought to be. Something we can also do with energy, and building specialized seagoing platforms (as with the Yen Tornado Turbines at sea producing liquid hydrogen, as well as producing the support structures for the floating islands we'll be needing very soon now).

Think about it. Talk to your friends about it. This would work.