Protection of Cities from Small Rockets, Missiles, Projectiles and Mortar Shells

TL;DR

This paper proposes a low-cost, inflatable hemispherical AB-Dome to protect small cities from rockets, shells, and chemical threats, while also offering various peacetime benefits like weather protection and communication enhancements.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel, inexpensive AB-Dome design that provides city protection and additional functionalities, with detailed theory, estimations, and a typical project computation.

Findings

AB-Dome effectively blocks incoming projectiles and chemical threats.

Construction is simple and significantly cheaper than existing systems.

The dome offers multifunctional uses like weather protection and communication enhancements.

Abstract

The authors suggest a low cost closed AB-Dome, which may protect small cities such as Sederot from rockets, mortar shells, chemical and biological weapons. The offered AB-Dome is also very useful in peacetime because it protects the city from outside weather (violent storms, hail) and creates a fine climate within the Dome. The roughly hemispherical AB-Dome is a gigantic inflated thin transparent film, located at altitude up to 1 - 5 kilometers, which converts the city into a closed-loop air system. The film may be armored with a basalt or steel grille or cloth pocket-retained stones that destroy (by collision or detonation) incoming rockets, shells and other projectiles. Such an AB-Dome would even protect the city in case of a third-party nuclear war involving temporary poisoning of the Earth atmosphere by radioactive dust. The building of the offered dome is easy; the film spreads on the ground, the fan engines turn on and the cover rises to the needed altitude and is supported there by a small internal overpressure. The offered method is cheaper by thousands of times than protection of a city by current anti-rocket systems. The AB-Dome may be also used (height is up to 1-5 and more kilometers) for TV, communication, long distance location, tourism, suspended high speed and altitude windmills (energy), illumination and entertainment (projected messages and pictures). The authors developed the theory of AB-Dome, made estimations, computations and computed a typical project. Discussion and results are at the end of the article.