Greater Prussian Balloon Company Catalog [DO NOT POST]

[Allanea]

GPBC Orbiculum Multipurpose Tethered Aerostat ~$220,000 - $750,000
GPBC Bubo High Altitude Platform ~ 20 million + payload

[Allanea]

GPBC Orbiculum Multipurpose Tethered Aerostat

An artist’s impression of an Orbiculum Aerostat Prototype (art by Imeriata

Diameter: 520 cm
Helium volume: Approx. 73 cubic meters
Operational ceiling: 500 meters
Price (by variant):
Orbiculum: (no payload) $220,000 New Dornalian
Orbiculum-C: (communications mast) $250,000 New Dornalian Dollars
Orbiculum-S: (EO/IR + Radar Surveillance Payload) $750,000 New Dornalian Dollars
DPR: 100 million New Dornalian Dollars

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Background: The Greater Prussian Balloon Company, headquartered in Reichsburg, Reichskampfen, is a trans-regional company leveraging the existing infrastructure in different member states of Greater Prussia and the Capitalist Internationale to produce a variety of balloons, aerostats, airships, and stratostats for military, scientific, and commercial use.

The company is partnered with balloon and airship developers in Imeriata, where military balloon construction is an extremely well-developed competence, marketing consultants in Allanea and avionics contractors in the High Treefolk.

Its first offering is the Orbiculum aerostat, capable of lifting a variety of surveillance, scientific, and communications payload with a weight of up to 70 kilograms. The Orbiculum is brought into position on a trailer or light truck, hovering in position on a polymer cable, with its payload connected to a ground station using power and communications cables. In this position, it can remain airborne over 72 hours at a time before requiring a helium refill.

Orbiculum-C: In this variant, the balloon serves to hoist a UHF/VHF antenna cable, to a height of up to 500 meters, vastly extending the range of military tactical communications or civilian communications in remote areas.

[i]The Orbiculum-S surveillance payload

Orbiculum-S: This payload is a combination of a millimeter-wave AESA radar and a tilting EO/IR observation gimbal. This system is capable of identifying moving vehicles,, and persons at all weather conditions, day or night. From an altitude of 300 meters, it can detect a moving vehicle at a distance of up to 20 km, and an individual at a distance of 12 km. It is an invaluable tool for the protection of military and industrial facilities, airports and sports events.

Make all your orders at Allanean Defense Exports!

[Allanea]

Bubo High Altitude Patform
Bubo HAP (art by Imeriata)

Length 140 meters
Diameter: 33 meters
Payload: Between 250 and 450 kg (in equatorial conditions)
Cost: $20 million
Payload costs:

StratoWeb Digital Communications and Navigation Station ~ $100,000 New Dornalian
StratoView 200 kg EO/IR/radar observation package -$3,500,0000 New Dornalian
StratoTropic 450 kg Tropical EO/IR/RADAR Extended Observation package ~$4,500,000
StratoPlush: Plush toy, $15
DPR: $1 billion

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Background: As modern society has evolved, government agencies, military forces, and private corporations have required exponentially increasing amounts of information. Whether for military reconnaissance, fisheries enforcement, forest fire monitoring and prevention, or the collection of valuable agricultural or environmental data, the amount of information grew into megabytes, gigabytes, and then more and more. And the same technology that has created the need for data struggles to keep up with the need.

Aircraft and satellites are extremely useful as means of surveillance, but they are also necessarily limited. Satellites only pass over a given area briefly as their orbit takes them around the planet, and are fairly expensive to build and launch. A geostationary satellite is even more expensive to launch, and typically impossible to re-orbit once in place. Aircraft can fly over a target for hours, harvesting detailed information, but require extensive maintenance, and are comparatively vulnerable to ground fire. The expense of fuels for internal-combustion AWACS aircraft is also a concern, as is the environmental harm posed by them.

Solar powered drones provide a partial solution - they can remain on station for months, and do not expend fossil fuels when operating. Their downside is the relatively low payload weight, and, therefore, the relatively limited observation capability.

What if you could have the best of both worlds? A low-cost platform, capable of staying on-target for up to a year at a time, carrying a high-resolution optical and radar observation payload, using no fossil fuels - and yet providing more observation range than a typical AWACS aircraft? You can. The Greater Prussian Balloon Company has a solution.

Technology: The Bubo, nicknamed ‘StratoSausage’ by soldiers and airmen involved in the initial military testing exercises for its distinctive shape, is a stratospheric unmanned dirigible. The vessel is cigar-shaped (or, if you will, the shape of a very large flying hot dog sausage) 140 meters in length and 33 meters in diameter.

The chief elements that make the Bubo possible for our clients is the ultra-thin polymer skin and the flexible, high-efficiency, solar panel array at the top of the aircraft. This allows the generation of sufficient power for the four front-facing electric propellors, the rear-mounted navigation and rudder suite, and the payload housed in the underslung payload housing. (The power available for payload operation is 5 KW in non-tropical areas and 8 Kw in tropical / equatorial settings).

The four electric propellors, mounted in skeletonized, light-weight, carbon-fiber mountings, enable the airship to remain more or less geostationary in winds of up to 90 kilometers per hour, or to develop top speed of up to 80 kilometers per hour (naturally, due to the vagaries of stratospheric wind currents, this is not a good way for long-range transport of your airship - read more below about your airship’s logistics and transportation.

The Bubo/i] airship can remain airborne up to 1 year at a time before setting down for refueling. It can sustain up to 5 years of cumulative flight time before requiring serious refits or replacement. The [i]Bubo has its own SATCOM and integral inertial/GNSS navigation.

In its deflated and folded stage, the Bubo can fit in a FEU container unit, enabling it to be transported by land, air, or sea, and deployed in any area of the world.

The maximum payload of the Bubo varies between 250 kilograms to 450 kilograms (in tropical areas, where more sunlight is available). The regular non-tropical payloads produced for the Bubo/StratoSausage are designed in a way they are 200 kg or less in weight, and two of the non-tropical payloads can be mounted at once when flying in tropical environments.

Some of the payloads available for StratoSausage include:

StratoWeb Digital Communications and Navigation Station - This payload package weighs approximately 200 kilograms. It includes a GNSS station that augments the data received from commercial and military navigation satellites, as well as a telecommunications station, which can be either integrated into a civilian LTE/5G communications station or a military encrypted comms station. In a military context, the GNSS station can assist in scenarios where satellite navigation is partly disrupted.

StratoView This is a 200 kg EO/IR package with an integrated ground following synthetic aperture radar observation. It can detect boats, low-flying non-stealth aircraft, and ground vehicles out to a radius of 50 kilometers from the aircraft. At greater ranges, detection of items such as major surface ships is possible out to the horizon in good weather. The visual observation uses a rotating, five-axis multi-camera array and a processing computer.

StratoTropic Tropical EO/IR/RADAR Extended Observation package - This integrates all the capabilities of the StratoView, except that it mounts a more potent camera set, with a range of 75 km for the StratoView’s 50, with the communications capabilities of the StratoWeb, and can be used as communication and observation hub.

StratoPlush: This is a toy / collectable edition of the StratoSausage. Composed of child-friendly non-toxic filling and a cotton ‘envelope’, the StratoPlush is available for all our clients. One is shipped free with the purchase of every StratoSausage, or can be ordered separately for $15.

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