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This whole thing is so cool. What can you tell me about the tech level? Clearly there are space colonies now, but what was it like in prior decades?

Does it count if the verification comes centuries after the fact, or does it have to be known by the contemporaries?

Nice one. Keep 'em coming. I didn't think about the engineering units. I know there were engineering units, and the members were called Pioneers. My guess is that most pioneers were privates with shovels. Do you have a feel for whether skilled artisans in the army in the 1800s had private...

Thanks for clarifying the history of organization there. Wow, those are really good pictures. And they prove that the Intrepid had a tiny gondola, at least on some missions. I admit, I had my doubt that the illustration of Col. Small in the balloon was accurate, since the gondola looked small...

You know your stuff. All my reading on Civil War era ballooning led to just confirming what you wrote way back on February 20. Your total number was around 4-8 wagons for a balloon, and the number in the books was 4 (or 6 if they were counting the generator separately). During the Civil War, the...

Wow, John. What a cool book! Would you care to share anything else from there? I know that at least some of the time Thaddeus Lowe was the one flying the balloons, so it wasn't that Col. Small was always in the one flying. I know that in some balloons, officers would take turns going up in the...

I don't think there's a way to get 50% or more of Russia without having more Asian territory than Alexander had. Asian Russia is 13 million km^2, and Alexander's empire total was 5.2 million km^2. I got this from Wiki pages for Russia, European Russia, and List of largest empires.

Or "not native speaker". Gloss, that's a good teaser post, and it grabs the interest. What does the title mean? Most people here don't have Russian as any kind of tongue. Since you're asking for grammar comments, I'll add that you wrote "lead" when you either meant past tense "led" or present...

My mistake. I misread the article. There were more than one cannon.

Okay, here's my big summary post so far. There's information repeated from earlier in the thread, but I'm trying to keep it organized. In general All the balloons we've been talking about are hydrogen balloons. The lift of a balloon is proportional to its volume. For hydrogen, 1 m^3 of hydrogen...

Thanks for showing the cool gun. For those who don't want to read the article, I'll point out that it says the French were using balloons to carry people and mail out of besieged Paris, so that's really different from the recon and mapping missions we saw in other wars. Total of 65 balloons left...

The Civil War balloon units had a similar counting problem. I'll post my notes soon. That is a fantastic source. I'll have to give that a good look-over. Oh, that explains the 500 bottles of hydrogen that the Danish had during WWII, each bottle weighing 65 kg and holding about 5 m^3. I...

Thanks for the contribution That's pretty plausible. I didn't know about that practice in artillery practice. In the last couple days I've been reading a lot about the Union Balloon Corps in the American Civil War. For one balloon, they had one civilian aeronaut (occasionally called "captain")...

Actually, good point. Disregard what I said about bringing rifles up there, or having a mounted gun on the balloon.

During the US civil war, the balloons were a very popular target, so ground-to-air attacks would definitely be very popular. Snipers would do well at this, and at longer ranges you have artillery. When your target is a balloon, you don't have to work hard to find your target. The balloons were...

That's really helpful info, arctic warrior. I wasn't aware of the Danish Balloon Companies. Can you point me to a source of yours, or some phrases I can Google? Now I found this Wikipedia page, which might be what you're looking at: da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonparken. Then I found this...

Yeah, the more I look at it, the more I think the size of this company is really weird. Wikipedia says in one spot that a platoon has 15-30 soldiers, and another says 40-50. Either this is not the final size of the company, or they chose to call it a company even though it's tiny. Nowadays, it's...

Thanks. I can see that there's a lot of grunt work: sewing, hammering, tying, carrying things, and running messages. This is a really small company, isn't it? I thought a company usually had about 100 people.

I'm wondering how a military ballooning unit like the French Compagnie d'Aerostatiers or the Union Army Balloon Corps was organized. I think early flight was really cool, but I don't know much about it. The Wikipedia page for the French Compagnie d'Aerostatiers says that they were founded in...

This is an area of military insignia that I know very little about, so I'd like you to enlighten me a bit. It looks like a realistic ribbon. I was surprised that it's not handed out to support personnel who work further from Iran, but it looks like the Iraq and Afghanistan medals have similar...