UK gas storage down to just one week's supply????

[Mark]

I don't know why they haven't already.

I've wondered that too - we're very vulnerable to attack and seem to have very limited protection from drones....
However, a part of me thinks a small attack might not be so terrible, as it would focus minds more clearly on the transition away from gas....

[BritDownUnder]

I don't know why they haven't already.

I've wondered that too - we're very vulnerable to attack and seem to have very limited protection from drones....
However, a part of me thinks a small attack might not be so terrible, as it would focus minds more clearly on the transition away from gas....

Russians are too busy in Ukraine at the moment to get NATO formally against them. Their nuclear threats echoed by a few on this forum have been found to be hollow and their army is being hollowed out fairly thoroughly.

I don't know why there has not been a drone developed to take down high voltage power lines. In my mind it would be quite easy to land on a line and then attach some type of explosive to the line which is times to go off later and cut the line once the drone has taken off.

[adam2]

Hydrogen balloons trailing fine wires can destroy power lines. Used in the last war. Neutral Sweden complained that their power lines were regularly damaged thus.

[BritDownUnder]

Hydrogen balloons trailing fine wires can destroy power lines. Used in the last war. Neutral Sweden complained that their power lines were regularly damaged thus.

Operation Outward which I first read about in the Engineering Society magazine in Australia.

Apparently these balloons were intended to cause shorts to trip the circuit breakers but arcing had the effect of damaging and breaking the overhead wires and even causing the circuit breakers to catch fire. The Germans could not retaliate in kind due to the nature of the prevailing winds.

I like this quote from the British top brass about the nature of the balloon attacks on Germany.

"attacks of this nature should not be originated from a cricketing country" and a concern that the enemy might retaliate with similar weapons.

And some background.

Because there was concern over what could happen if a barrage balloon accidentally got loose, in 1937 the British carried out a study on the damage that may be caused by a balloon-carried wire hitting power lines.[2] These concerns were evidently borne out when early in 1940, the Air Vice Marshal Balloon Command, the organisation responsible for the barrage balloons, wrote that "Since the outbreak of the war, I have had constant complaints from the electricity distributors regarding the damage done in this country by [barrage] balloons that have broken away from their moorings". to which he added "...advantage might be taken of this to impede and inconvenience the enemy".