this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Wow, whoever had that idea is genius. Cheap and hard to counter.
I see discussions of launching migs, but really, you'd want to launch smaller aircraft - prop planes, or maybe a small drone with a fragmentation grenade to poke enough holes in the hanging drone to disable it, something like that. And that's assuming you can launch anything like that into the airspace without risking it being shot down.
If it can find and approach the balloon close enough to set off a grenade, I'd probably want to target the UAV more than the balloon. If the UAV is still functional when the balloon is shredded, it could potentially just be deployed early and find a target of opportunity on the way down. Which leads to another point, if a hostile is detected inbound, they again could just launch the UAV and find something for it to go after - it wouldn't surprise me if there was a list of contingency targets along the projected route.
Is why I said looking holes in the hanging drone :)
That is the problem. Weather balloons usually fly between 18-37km above sea level. That is hard to impossible to reach for even a fighter jet, which have service ceilings of 18km. Simpler cheaper aircraft can not fly that high. With the guns range being somewhat limited, you basically need to fire a missile at the balloon. That however is too expensive.
Screenshot says they're flying at 5-7 km altitude though, which is a very different situation
When your balloon needs to lift 15 kg to 5 km, it suddenly becomes significantly expensive. According to the internetβ’, you need 14 cubic meters of helium, which alone would be like $700. You will also expect to lose half of them to random winds, so you need to launch at least 20.
Also, 15 kg drone is not that much destructive, it only carries 5 kg of payload, while Shahed typically carries 50 kg.
For this application hydrogen makes more sense.
Yeah I thought the same thing, but no. People who actually launch weather balloons swear off hydrogen like a plague, because apparently it explodes while you are filling the balloon.
That makes sense, although in wartime it would matter less. You can also generate it fairly portably with ferrosilicon and acid.
It's worth mentioning a football field or whatever of Mylar won't be free. Big balloons retail for hundreds on their own according to a quick search.
Your math seems off. A generic search says it costs like $500 to run a hot ait baloon on helium, which would be carrying significantly more weight eith 4-5 humans.
I get its not 1:1, but $700 for 15kg seems high.
700/14 gives a price of $50/m^3^ or so, and 14 m^3^ makes sense because air weighs around 1kg/m^3^ at sea level (where the helium is measured for trade). Unfortunately, some fucker named a cryptocurrency "Helium" so it's hard to find, but I did turn up this. Due to the situation in the Middle East it could even be multiple times that right now.
The "hard to counter" thing is arguable, because yeah, anything that's up there reflecting radar can theoretically be shot down (and probably by something cheaper yet). They might not be set up to detect and attack balloons right now, though. I mean, even NORAD famously wasn't for a while.
Shot down with something cheaper than a balloon?
Brother, handgun rounds probably cost more than balloons, and I can't think of anything cheaper, offhand.
A small arms round costs cents at scale. A big balloon like that costs hundreds of dollars, and the drone hundreds more. The bigger question is if a bullet would do enough damage.
For targeting the balloon, the eventual best weapon might just be a sickle-ish blade, either on a rod or rope. Melee weapons worked for most of human history, and if your target has airspeed zero, why not? If you're hitting the drone, you'll need something more heavy-duty; small arms, a small mine or a powered blade. I suppose just tangling it or lassoing on a drogue chute could work.
The obvious choice for interceptor drone is a small blimp. It's faster then an unpowered balloon, but still very stable and capable of extreme altitudes.
Bullets indeed do essentially nothing against weather balloon type craft. Bullets from ground level, even less so unless they're significantly larger rounds. Oh, and you don't want to be downrange of all those misses either.
Flak would probably be the "cheapest best bet" for ensuring damage to the balloons' payload, but the collateral damage from debris could be significant. They will probably use some small missile to do the job, which is the only way to be sure, really. However, that's not ideal from a cost ratio standpoint, which leaves them wide open to the fact that;
Those balloons are also probably cheaper than you estimate, when produced at the same scale as the rounds of which you speak.
Which means that when and if the Russians put something in place to attempt to stop the balloons, the Ukrainians can simply send arse-loads of decoy balloons to waste Russian ammo supplies.
It might be tens of dollars rather than hundreds, that information is harder to come by, but it's not going to be cents. It's a lot of area of material, even if it's cheap material, and hydrogen isn't free either (helium is much much more yet). Plus, the drone costs what the drone costs.
Shooting from ground level probably isn't going to be the solution, because a balloon can fly higher than any heavier-than-air craft. Maybe bigger AA guns could be developed, but it's going to get less mobile, and eventually there's a fundamental limit to muzzle velocity set by the speed of sound in whatever detonation. Plus, if you're using large specialty rounds and a lot of them per hit we're right back to cost.
How so? There's a lot of empty farmland in the area, and it's wartime. It seems like unless the Ukrainians (or Russians; this will be copied) can still steer and reliably detonate the drone it's no longer an effective weapon.
How so? You think Ukraine will stop where they are with those, seeing the success they're having? lmao
They'll be hanging over Moscow like party balloons given the right wind conditions, what with Russia laying into Kyiv with anything and everything they have.
Given that they're sticking Pantsir launchers on the roofs in Moscow, Russia are indeed expecting it to get worse yet.