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New Type of Hot Air Blimp
An anonymous reader writes to let un know about a story up on the Experimental Aircraft Association site about a new kind of blimp. From the article: "Alberto, whose name pays homage to Brazilian aviation pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, is 102 feet long with a 70-foot diameter and uses hot air rather than helium for lift. Its innovative foldable frame (much like an giant umbrella) creates structural support of its hot-air envelope, and it has a fly-by-wire vectored thrust steering system. Alberto is a hybrid; a hot-air balloon with aluminum ribs that looks more like a blimp, but with a tail propeller that gives it directional control." The home site of the blimp's developers has a timeline, photos, and a video of the blimp in flight.
So RMS learned to fly?
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Just because you don't want to fly slowly at treetop level doesn't mean others don't want to, there's more to life than blasting from city to city always rushing...
Just because something is enormous unfolded doesn't mean it will be when it is folded...oh you have an umbrella? Where are you going to store that!? It would take up your whole closet!
Their patent is for hot-air ballons with internal frames which is much more new and innovative than 90% of patents out there (I'm looking at the company who's suing Nintendo for the trigger on the wii)
Stop being a hater for a single second and think about this, this thing is completely new. It's simple to fly, easier than hot-air balloons or blimps. Just think of the uses, replace a couple tour buses with this thing and you get the same maneuverability, better views, and little to no traffic on your tour. What other vehicle can do that?
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
This blimp isn't just a step forward for aviation, it's a major step forward in the development and construction of a viable space elevator. One of the primary problems that has plagued the space elevator proponents is the identification of a cost effective means of transporting the carbon nanotube teather from the Earth's surface to a proper orbit. This blimp and advances in carbon nanotubes could signal the beginning of cheap space transport for all mankind.
Mark this day on your calendar folks.
The fact is the booger is huge, there is no excusing this fact. Add this to the whole who the hell has that much space to store a blimp factor and the next who the hell will police the skies (as tickets get much harder to hand over when being able to pull over becomes a non option. The entire article is filled with it issues (namely size and practicality) that would make a helicopter although more expensive millions of times more practical. This is something like why drive your car to work when you can use this perfectly awesome toy wagon with new wheel design.
Did someone say cake?
Stop being a hater for a single second and think about this,
Word up playa. Representin' hot air baloons with internal frames against these clowns tha' be fruntin. Fa real.
FYI, there was a recent episode of Nova on PBS all about Alberto Santos-Dumont.
Seeing how helium is actually quite expensive (paid $70 for 300 cu ft. at a local welding supply if memory serves) it's interesting that this contraption uses hot air. I wonder what the economics of hot air look like; i.e. cost of fuel to maintain lift, etc.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
There are solar heated hot air balloons...
e.g.
http://perso.orange.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.htm
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Having just taken my parents to the Empire State Building in late September, I can tell you that whomever thought of the idea of offloading people across a small platform, at that height, in the wind that was there on the day I went, really, really, REALLY, needs to get themselves on some meds.
Fortunately, the idea was scrapped (second paragraph) long ago for the very reasons I just mentioned.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This will be the ultimate way to get around Washington DC. Plenty of free fuel....
A term of some use here is "dirigible", i.e. "something that can be directed". Term for lighter-than-air airships of the past was dirigible balloon, shortened to "dirigible" in common use.
As a young lad I read Doc Smith's stories (before learning that) and had this terrible image of his dirigible torpedoes being these explosive little balloons running around in outer space...
Oh, and the term "blimp", like "jeep", was a military term shortened in general use -- originally it was a "Type B-Limp Balloon"
There, I have just elocuted you.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
blimp: a term coined in 1915 as a friendly synonym for a pressure airship. The word is said to have mimicked the sound made when a man snapped his thumb on the airship's gas-filled envelope. It is not derived from the description of an apocryphal type of World War I British airship, the "Balloon, Type B, limp." There was never a "Type B" nor a designation "limp" applied to a British airship before, during or after WW I. The term most likely originated with Lieutenant (later Air Commodore) A. D. Cunningham of the Royal Naval Air Service, commanding officer of the British airship station at Capel in December 1915. During a weekly inspection, Lt. Cunningham visited an aircraft hangar to examine a "Submarine Scout" pressure airship, His Majesty's Airship SS-12. Cunningham broke the solemnity of the occasion by playfully flipping his thumb at the gasbag and was rewarded with an odd noise that echoed off the taut fabric. Cunningham imitated this sound by uttering: "Blimp!" A young midshipman, who later became known as Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, repeated the tale of this humorous inspection to his fellow officers in the mess hall before lunch the same day. It is believed that by this route the word came into common usage.
clarification.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
Well, in response to both you and the poster who disagreed with your etymology of "blimp", I went out looking for more information, since nobody bothered to cite any sources. The Discouraging Word ran a bit on the etymology of "blimp" a while back, which can be found about halfway down the linked page (sorry, there's no anchor there), under the heading "Shortt, Cunningham, and the bothersome matter of blimp". This posting pulls together a number of sources: the New Yorker, the Oxford English Dictionary, "www.blimpinfo.com" (which seems to be where the other poster got his paragraph verbatim), "www.bartleby.com" (The American Heritage dictionary), "www.m-w.com" (Merriam-Webster), "www.wordorigins.com", and "http://www.worldwar1.com/sfzepp.htm" (a personal website).
The conclusion drawn by The Discouraging Word is that the etymology is very unclear, but that more sources tend to weigh in on the otomatopoeic origin side than anywhere else. It is worth mentioning that the OED, perhaps the most authoritative source cited, favors the B-limp origin, by itself citing a 1939 issue of the periodical War Illustrated.
The post ends with "Hmm. Such a complicated circle we can weave with on-line sources alone. We can't imagine what we might find were we to venture into a library...".
There is one more proposal for the origins of the word, put forth by none other than the celebrated philologist and author J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien suggests that "blimp" comes from a compounding of the words "blister" and "lump". However, nobody seems to give this theory much credence.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.