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Zeppelin Flies Again
rakerman writes "The Globe and Mail reports Japanese firm buys first new-look Zeppelin.
"Makers of the revived Zeppelin airship delivered their first helium-filled craft to a commercial user Saturday, a Japanese company that plans to use the 12-seat craft for sightseeing trips and advertising." They call themselves Zeppelin-NT, or as the Germans say "Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH"."
This is a terrible day! What a tragedy! Oh, my God! Those poor people!
They should upgrade to Zep 2000 (based on NT technology.)
You lost a great opportunity to be quiet. Don't let those pass you again.
Sincerely,
Mr Blinky
Does that mean BSOD = Blimp Screen of Death?
(and as long as I have you here...)
I know a Zeppelin has to have a Captain, but will it have a Kernel as well?
ba-dum-DUM!
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
I though maybe John Bonham (deceased Zeppelin drummer) had been cloned or something.
Considering that the Hindenburg itself was *literally* flamebait, perhaps the mod was going all uber-meta and using the flamebait mod as a subtle show of recognition.
Then again, maybe the mod's just a dumbass.
"a Japanese company that plans to use the 12-seat craft for (...) advertising."
If they put light-emitting diodes on the sides for an electronic billboard, would that make it a LED Zeppelin?
Personally I'll never understand marketing folks. =)
Paul Lenhart writes words!
I think Microsoft has a solid claim for prior art on vapor technology.
Optimized for Internet Exploder...
Badabim, badaBOOM...
A communication breakdown.
Pilot: "Ah, look how nice and blue the sky is up here!"
Co-Pilot: "Actually we're still in clouds. That's a blue screen."
Pilot: "Hold me."
The NT has ribs--3 longitudinal ribs made of aluminum, spaced by triangular transverse frames made of composites. It is classified as a "semirigid," meaning that the frame helps keep the overall shape and distributes the lift, but the lift gas has to be pressurized to put tension on the skin, which contains the gas and also serves as the aerodynamic surface, as in blimps.
Blimps are nonrigid or pressure ships--all of their structure results from pressurizing the lift gas by means of air ballonets inside them. They have no rigid members.
The alternative is a rigid frame and stiff external skin; this approach frees you of the need to pressurize the lift gas. Generally this means a complex structure like the classic Zeppelins--but that structure was often, even taken altogether with its numerous parts of gas cells, netting, frame members, wiring, and outer skin, lighter per unit of lift volume than blimps, even the best modern blimps.
The big drawback of pressure ships, including semirigids, is that if you lose pressure for any reason you lose structure. On a semirigid it is not quite as bad, especially on the NT with its three ribs which pretty much would maintain the basic shape, but you'd lose skin tension hence get a lot more draggy. On a blimp loss of pressure is a disaster. Also, pressure ships are hard to partition so any big leak or rip will tend to spill _all_ the lift gas, whereas on the rigids the gas was kept in numerous separate cells and total deflation of one or several might still leave the ship airborne--I know of several instances of that.
The semirigid form does allow you to distribute weights all along the length of the ship which is important, and the NT version also allows elements like the props to be moved up along the width of the hull, kind of like what was possible on the old rigids. What is most "new" about the New Technology Zeppelin is its vectored thrust system. Modern blimps have used pairs of vectored props (though attached to the gondola, their only rigid element, rather than up along the hull sides which is clearly better) but the NT adds an arrangement on the tail tip that greatly increases the control available; this is possible because of the ribs.
Still a number of us wish they'd gone ahead and made a modern rigid while they were at it; such a ship would have enabled all this, freed them of pressurization issues, and given the crew access to the entire interior so if an engine gave trouble in mid-air someone could go and try to fix it. Happened all the time on the rigids! Fortunately modern engines are more reliable, but a major issue of the NT is that you need special equipment to get at the engines, mounted up high as they are, for maintenance, it restricts their operations.
I also think a modern rigid would have been as light or lighter, and very possibly cheaper to make and maintain. All they'd need to do to make the NT a rigid would be to devise some kind of very light aerodynamic shell to replace the skin, and then design some gas cells--just basically balloons-to fit inside the spaces betweent the frames. Well actually the frames are braced with wires so either the cells would have to contain those or else the structure would have to be redesigned to avoid running the wires there.