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Games That Could Have Been
Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."
We're quoting Mythbusters as an authoritative source now?
O. M. G.
Mythbusters is *entertainment*, not science! While their antics are somewhat entertaining, they are just that: antics. There is no rigor, no carefully thoughtout experiments, no theory, and no reasoning. While they may prove something empirically (and some of their questions lend themselves well to this) their methods make it impossible to generalize to answer the question with authority.
That summary of their analysis isn't that good -- it skips the important admissions of where what they tested differs from actual Hindenburg design. It does include that they used hydrogen-air mixtures instead of hydrogen. It also includes that the doped cloth (doped in an intentionally more-reactive mixture than was actually used on the Hindenburg) burned faster than undoped cloth, but this doesn't really address the question of why it was on fire in the first place, which was the real problem.
If the skin of the Hindenburg was really painted with thermite, then it would be fairly safe -- thermite is tough to ignite (though, once burning, is very hot and difficult to extinguish).