YES, IT’S AN AEROSTAT, BUT NOT A PARTICULARLY THREATENING ONE 😀
Hot Air Balloons and Trippy Drugs
Due to the massive scale of unemployment in 2050s New York, the NYPD has had to revise its operational role. While maintaining and upholding the law is still its primary aim, the police spend the vast majority of their time dealing with riot control and crowd supervision.
During the automation and unemployment wave, the government used FEMA and the National Guard to hand out food substitutes at set times and locations. This inevitably attracted a huge crowd, and with limited security resources riots often broke out.
Initially, the NYPD relied upon ground-based police for law enforcement, but because of the sheer number of unemployed, this became an unworkable approach (there were instances when the overrun cops used live rounds for crowd control, which led to the inevitable massacres and public outcries).
To deal with this problem, the Police Department started to use aerostat surveillance of all public gatherings. The aerostat’s video feed is sent directly to the NYPD’s central MI for analysis. If the MI decided a riot is possible, it calls in specilaized SWAT cars to control any disturbance.
Aerostats are aircraft which gain lift through the use of lighter-than-air gases or vacuums. The 2050 NYPD versions use internal vacuums to achieve natural buoyancy, and require no power to hover. They can be as small as an inch in length, and remain airborne indefinitely.
What an absolute unit 😀 Current 2020 aerostats are far larger than those in 2050, due to the need to use gasses such as helium for lift. Such aerostats are already in use around the world as “Persistent Surveillance Solutions”—great military jargon there—such as the TCOM 71M. Here’s a video if you want to see that bad-boy in more detail:
The 2055 NYPD Type-4 SWAT / Riot Hopper.
The vehicle is shown in a hover configuration, with the rear Dyson funnels oriented downward to maintain lift; the central main engine is directly behind the pilots.
It was studying the huge current aerostats that helped shaped the original Hopper design and adapt it for the Riot version above. I will go into this Hopper design more on the next page . . . 🎈