Aerostat

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Community Entry: Aerostat

An aerostat is any device, vehicle etc. that can maintain zero bouyancy with the air, and are generally in the present day intended to remain in a static location, typically by some form of anchoring, however the meaning may have changed over time to include vehicles utilizing electrostatic technologies to generate lift and propulsion. This includes large vehicles like airships, but in the book the term is reserved mostly for small, autonomous devices. Security arostats, despite being small, can carry advanced weapons and surveillance tools. We encounter them in several places:

• In the Leased Territories, where police-operated aerostats keep watch and record any criminal activity for use in punishing the offenders. These are smart enough to listen for signs of a crime using audio and radar, and can hit a suspect with "tagger mites", which track a target's movement and relay it to the aerostat's owner.

• On the boundary to Atlantis/Shanghai, as the Dog Pod Grid. This is an array of security aerostats programmed to fly in close order drill as a fluid fence against vagrants and unwanteds entering Atlantan soil.

• In the L.T.'s Green Belt, to actively discourage vagrants from sleeping there. They seem to sense light in the infrared spectrum, and thus were foiled by a quick-thinking Nell, who covered herself and Harv with a foil blanket and managed to spend the night unmolested.

In the real world, anchored aerostats are frequently seen to advertise commercial activity, but are also used along national borders and coastlines to carry early warning radar, lidar, and infrared systems which can detect invaders, smugglers, or illegal immigrants, over the horizon. In this respect, they serve the same function as the Dog Pod Grid and other police aerostats in the world of the Diamond Age.