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The Age of the Airship Returns?
Popular in Victorian and Steampunk fantasies, airships and zeppelins evoke a certain elegance that most modern travelers don't associate with the airplane. Some companies are capitalizing on that idea, and a need to move cargo by air in an era of ever-increasing fuel costs, to re-re-introduce commercial zeppelins. Popular Mechanics notes four notable airship designs, all with specific design purposes. One craft in particular, the Aeroscraft ML866, is being funded by the US government's DARPA group. It looks to combine the best elements of the helicopter and the zeppelin. "The Aeroscraft ML866's potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht's buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says. It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. "
So does this mean that the DoD isn't developing anti-gravity technology in Area 51? Or does it just mean that DARPA isn't privy to that knowledge?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter_AG
he wants his world of tomorrow back.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
(sorry, had to be said)
Table-ized A.I.
We are now falling int love with airships, and our cheap helium is about to end?????
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've heard arguments that the Hindenburg blew up because of the paint and not the hydrogen, so maybe we should re-evaluate whether or not hydrogen is actually safe for this application? On Earth, it's certainly much easier to get hydrogen than helium.
As long as it isn't using fucking HYDROGEN, Sign Me Up!!! R101, Hindengerg -> http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=309
Cool.
Airships have their issues, but I recall reading somewhere that a blimp large enough to carry massive amounts of cargo can do so for the fraction of the fuel spent on ship-based transportation. Ships have to keep expending energy to push through water, but an airship needs far less power to keep a course through the air.
I see a couple hurdles though.
The first is designable around -- damage to the hot air or helium part due to lightning, or tears due to other factors. Having multiple "balloons" might help this situation, so if one is ruptured, the airship still can stay up, or descend in a fairly graceful fashion.
The second is a bit harder, but sort of related to #1. There are people out there (in most areas of the globe) who wouldn't mind taking potshots at an airship. It could be a drunk hillbilly who is playing with his new 30/06, or someone who has a RPG and is hoping to knock the thing out of the air completely. Oddly enough (and I have little or no aerospace expertise), I wonder if, even with major damage from a missile hit, a well engineered airship still can land gracefully (assuming the gondola isn't what is damaged.) Could an airship fly high enough so the chance of getting hit by ground fire be minimized?
Lastly there is a third problem. There is a ton of air traffic already. I wonder how hard it would be to factor in large, slow vehicles into the aviation corridors without impacting takeoffs and landings of jets and prop based traffic.
About every 10 years or so, someone proclaims the return of the airship. The problems with airships are the same they have always been - high susceptibility to winds and difficult ground handling. Those problems are essentially insoluble - it's *lighter than air*. The combination helicopter/blimp had been tried at least half a dozen times, all unsuccessfully.
The hydrogen/helium thing not an issue. It's not going to use hydrogen. Whether that's what got the Hindenberg, or not, flying around with tens of thousands of cubic feet of exceptionally flammable gas, with a HUGE range of fuel/air ratios at which it can sustain ignition, isn't going to happen. It's a *bad idea* and wouldn't pass the laugh test for FAA certification.
Brett
That's no airship, it's Thunderbird 2!
Oh, the humanity!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
= Hindendicer: explodes and chops all in one step
Table-ized A.I.
This was on The History Channel's "Shock Wave" program last night. Four stripped helicopters were placed around a dirigible and connected to what amounted to aluminum sewer pipe. The thing got caught by the wind and folded pretty quick injuring 3 and killing 1. Total loss, program ended.
http://www.piasecki.com/pa-97.htm
The trouble with blimps is that they don't compete with aircraft, since they are too slow. They compete with trains and trucks, but don't have the carrying capacity to do that, while they do have the maintenance cost of aircraft. So altogether they don't make economic sense and they likely never will.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It was only about 40 years or so I read about this system. Of course, this was the Mad Scientists Club in Boy's Life magazine that competed in a balloon race and handled the buoyancy problem in this advanced manner. Maybe some of those Boy Scouts grew up to fly like Eagles and design airships.
(P.S. I also read Arthur Clarke's original short story Sunjammer in BL, before he had to go and change the title to the far less elegant The Wind From The Sun title, after some other author also used the same original title in another story that same year.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have been reading about the return of the Zeppelin (mostly for cargo carrying) in the science magazines ever since I was a small child. Popular Science or Popular Mechanics have seemed to have an article on the subject just about every year... for many, many years. So pardon me if I am skeptical! I will pay attention when I actually see a commercial version fly overhead.
And it lifts better too!
Of course vacuum would provide the best lift of all in the atmosphere. So why is it that my beautiful 21" crt monitor, which is little more than a big cube of vacuum, is so damn heavy?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Interesting that your drunk hillbilly would select a cartridge that's now 102 years old in design. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The golden age of balooning returns!
I've driven past Moffet Field, in California, which NASA uses part of, and seen several airship hangers. The ships I saw were not advertising or such, but appeared to be actual "workhorse" ships, whether for cargo or research, I don't know, but it seems airships have been around and doing useful work with almost no attention, so it is hardly surprising to me that more uses are being considered.
A very interesting use is being worked on by a company called JP Aerospace (http://jpaerospace.com/). Their idea is to build an airship-to-orbit system. Not in one go. It would involve transferring from a ground capable airship to an extreme high altitude airship.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I'd have thought they'd mostly be competing with long-distance shipping, where speed of delivery isn't necessarily critical. If the developed world is going to try and cut down on carbon emissions and pollutants (which ships are great at even though it's largely ignored), or at least try to make it look as such and start taxing the use of cargo ships much more highly, massive heavy-lift airships might become more cost effective if a few problems are figured out.
After reading this and brushing past the initial skeptical views expressed above through historical references (ie: The Hindenburg), I have two questions: 1) Will it run Linux? 2) How expensive will it be to ride in one from location X to location Y? I mean, if it's going at 222kph, and a person is not in a hurry and/or not willing to spend too much money on airplane flights (especially international ones), would it be a cheaper and stable alternative to riding a Boeing or an Airbus? If it isn't, it's going to be a tiny market to cater to.
The picture on the website looks like a giant pokemon. But besides that I used to prescribe to popular science 7 years ago and I recalled an issue stating the same vision.
Shouldn't all comments referring to the Hindenburg be modded "Flaimbait"?
I know what you did last summer. Just kidding, I don't work at the NSA.
Think how crushingly heavy it would be if you broke the vacuum!
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Vertigible#1154238348
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Balloon_20Notions#1154531591
Lastly there is a third problem. There is a ton of air traffic already. I wonder how hard it would be to factor in large, slow vehicles into the aviation corridors without impacting takeoffs and landings of jets and prop based traffic.
I was about to post a similar comment, but you beat me to the punch!
In the age of the airship, there were far less air traffic, so coordinating between different types of air vehicles wasn't that difficult. Now with tens of thousands of aircraft in the air over the continental US at one time... yikes.
sounds to be pretty close to 'spinning tops of doom'...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Not agreeing or disagreeing with you. It's just lots of people here appear to be regularly quoting Mythbusters as a scientific authority, when I doubt they are.
;) ).
Mythbusters is a TV show for entertainment. You often can't present a sufficiently rigorous experiment in the time you are given for that slot, especially in an entertaining way.
It's hard to make it entertaining if you have to do the experiment in the say 16 different possible major combinations/scenarios, and also had to present it in 10 minutes or so in a way where your TV series will get another season (or even won't get cancelled midway
Some of their myth busts are fairly conclusive, but other ones are a bit dubious - doesn't look like they tested enough cases, or explored certain things enough.
Nope. BIG AIRSHIPS ROUTINELY CRASHED, only the others didn't crash in such a spectacular and public way as the Hindenburg.
The reason is very simple, if you have a very big and very lightweight structure it will be intrinsically fragile. Of course, if you build them with modern advanced materials they would be stronger than they were in the 1920s, but they will still be orders of magnitude less safe than heavier-than-air machines.
dugg for the 'noticket' tag.
One of them looks like Thunderbird 2.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think one of the best marketing directions for this ship(if it works) would be a kind of "Sky Cruise Ship." Lots of people would probably pay to be able to take slow cruises over land and sea. think of the great views as you cruise over the Caribbean and then later over South American jungles and then on to Hawaii or Alaska. Nice trip, I think.
I'm thinking, why not cover the top and sides of the blimp with solar panels and propell it using electrical engines? That way, the cost of fuel would be kept at practically zero making it even more economic. And if you fly above the clouds - which I would expect - you never risk running out of sun as long as you make daytime trips. Of course you would need batteries which add some weight, but so do fuel tanks. If you make use of trans-oceanic winds to do most of your propelling for you hardly any power would be needed except for keeping the course, and those batteries would not even have to be that big to allow night-time flight as well.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
I'd gladly spend 12-24 hours on a zeppelin if it was more like a train. Lots of leg room, a sleeper car, a dining area, etc.
Plus, they'd probably have much larger windows. You'd really feel like you were travelling - not jammed in a metal tube being uncomfortably jetted across the sky for hours.
I think we've all gotten used to getting somewhere in a few hours - but I have yet to find anyone who actually likes the experience, unless they can afford to go first class. And even that's monotonous.
De Beers used a Zeppelin for exploration work
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2868528
You can save on fuel, sure, but isn't there currently a world-wide helium shortage? http://www.photonics.com/content/news/2007/October/19/89406.aspx Helium isn't exactly something we can easily produce ourselves like a biofuel or solar electricity.
Is written about in detail on my blog:
http://blog.myspace.com/khanz
Most of societies problems would probably be solved by mass production of Zeppelin houses. This may not seem realistic or reasonable to non-visionaries or cynics, but I really believe it, and have plenty of rational observation to back up this claim. Since the entire skin of the zeppelin would be cheap solar panels, the electricity used in the zeppelin (including lighting, heating, transportation, television) would mostly be environmentally friendly (and free!), and since the very nature of a vehicle by design is to be mobile, everyone would be effectively living "off the grid" which would translate into other environmental benefits, and better and more reliable power in the case of emergencies. Speaking of emergencies, Zeppelins are pretty much earth quake proof, tsunami proof, and brush fire proof, and with a reasonably good weather report, you could probably avoid most tornadoes and hurricanes by simply flying somewhere else for a while. In addition, zeppelins are slow, and, do not carry much momentum, so "traffic" accidents would probably be very rarely fatal for anyone involved, and with the wifi/gps/radar navigation system I have in mind would probably be extremely uncommon anyway. By removing cars and housing and the entire electrical grid out of the equation we have essentially solved global warming, traffic fatalities, homelessness, and maybe eventually even poverty altogether.
Now the biggest benefit though of living in a TRULY mobile home (and a home that was FREE to move, and could move over water, land, ice, and mountains!), is that in the event of a war, you could easily just fly somewhere else. In fact, at some point this evolutionary step from living in huts on land to yachts in the sky could prove to be the end of war completely. What's the use in fighting over land, when you live in the sky? The only thing to bother with of value on the land is going to be fruit, meat, vegetables, and water, and I think that those can be had fairly cheaply still, and will probably become even cheaper if our society chooses to make this transcendental step forward.
Myself personally I've been a fan of many places on the planet, and would love to be able to flit hither and thither with the comfort of my own bed, computer, closet, shower, and toilet immediately with me. I'd most especially like to do so while not paying rent, paying for hotels, and while having my own kitchen and fresh produce. I also would like to surf the internet, lounge in the hot tub, take a nap, play violin, or play mario kart while my home travels between Hawaii, Oregon, New York, Alaska, San Diego, and Ireland on the free power of natural sun light, and automatically by GPS auto pilot, and radar and wifi collision avoidance. Further, I'd like to enjoy the sunset and sunrise at all of these locations from a spot in the air, and maybe even on the top of my zeppelin on the sun deck that I have planned there, amongst the clouds and fresh perfect air free from the pollutants that rule our current carbon based economy.
The most frustrating part about this whole zeppelin utopia that I've created and have already been living in in my own mind, is that it's entirely feasible. Not just feasible, but almost childishly simple. It's a simple matter of running some numbers, running some computer simulations, and building/buying a factory and changing everybody's world, for the better. No more commutes, no more traffic, no more pollution, no more housing bubbles, no more traffic accidents, no more corporate slavery, no more censorship, no more war, no more poverty, no more stress, and probably eventually no more misery or suicide or prescription drugs like oxycontin (sp?). Just 6 billion happy people living with their families in luxury liners in the sky, with free electricity, internet, and water, drifting along in the sunshine from organic fruit stand to organic steak house to Irish pub for a night of
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
If this highly educational infomercial doesn't win over investors en masse I don't know what would... ^_^
np: The Orb - A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld: Peel Session (Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld Deluxe Edition (Disc 3))
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Even small advertising blimps really stick out for many miles in decent weather (which is all that the blimps fly in anyway). In fact, it's a really cool experience to be flying in the same patch of sky as one, it's like swimming in the ocean near a docile whale.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
That's why they made the Hindenburg with hydrogen - the USA has most of the world's helium and they weren't giving any to the Germans.
No sig today...
Wait a minute, I've got the best idea ever - a hydrogen filled airship with fuel cell driven propellers. They'd float really high when they started, and descend to their destination as they used the fuel. No excess weight, no tricky landings, and totally environmentally friendly. All we need to do is calculate exactly how much fuel we need - that's totally predictable, right?
As soon as I finish my feed-mayonnaise-to-tuna-fish project, I'm working on this.
This sentence no verb.
I recall reading something about what amounted to a flying aircraft carrier. A zeppeline-like airship that launched biplanes.
The USS Akron (ZRS-4) based in Lakehurst, NJ and the USS Macon (ZRS-5) based in Sunnyvale, CA were helium filled rigid airships developed by the Goodyear-Zepplin Company (a joint venture of the Zepplin Company of Germany and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company) for the United States Navy. The airships were designed for coastal patrol and had the ability to carry and launch five small biplanes.
More info here
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Because it is too small to have much lift. Depending on how it was built, you might need weights to keep a 21 meter monitor from drifting off.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
- The US is far and away the largest, if not the only, producer of helium; and
- we'll probably be out of Helium within 10 years.
As Helium is used, it must be recovered. If it simply left to evaporate, being lighter than air it will rise to the highest level of our atmosphere and there be stripped of by the solar wind. So once it's gone, it's gone--and there appears to be a finite supply, as we have only been able to extract it from natural gas deposits that have had the further advantage of being proximate to a radiation source.There are different estimates about how much more of it we have, and the Moon is a possible supply. But I sure wouldn't want to attempt to build an airship industry around it. By the time airships became feasible again, we may well be out of Helium by then (or in enough cheap abundance to make it the lift medium infeasible).
--
$tar -xvf
In addition to cargo and other utilitarian applications, airships could also provide pretty fine luxury leisure travel. Air cruises would be cool, because rather than endless vistas of just water you can travel over land at altitudes low enough to have a view. I'd take one over a sea cruise any day.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'm the "this guy" mentioned above. I guess I should clarify what I wrote in my blog post. The ban on selling helium to the Nazis WAS based on military priorities. The presence of the swastika had nothing to do with the ban (other than making sure there wouldn't be an exception made). Eckner admired the Americans and was less-than-thrilled by the Nazis (although he accepted their funding). The economic realities of the day meant he had to place the swastika on his airships, thereby "dissing" those he admired. Sorry for any confusion.
In the 1980s, my dad worked on a project for the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation. It was called the PA-97 Helistat. There are some pictures and info about it on the Piasecki Aircraft website. It was designed to lift heavy objects using a derigible and a few helicopters. Unfortunately, the helicopters motor frequency became resonant with the flimsy frame structure and it fell apart, killing one pilot. One thing that has always intrigued me is that the German version of wikipedia has a lot more info about the Helistat than can be found anywhere else: link.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Why would a hydrogen airship need to be manned? and include a relatively heavy control center? They move slow enough that they could be controlled remotely from a base station, or a vehicle driving ahead. Avoid flying over heavily populated areas and a fire would simply mean loss of equipment, not lives.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
what about wind ?
a lighter then air thing has lift aprox proportional to volume, and surface area is ~~ the cube or square root of volume
In any event, a lighter then air vehicle has a problem with wind - for instance, when landing or docking
there is also a speed of compensation problem: how fast can you change x cubic meters of He when you hit a pocket of air with diff density
there is also a flying above the weather problem: you lift is less, the higher you go; everyone who has any expeince flying knows height is your friend
icing on a large surface area
run way space if a serious percent of traffic ?
rj
It's in EVERY OTHER issue of PopSci or PopMech.
:-(
There are always beautiful artists renderings. They will be logging the Yukon, or carrying water-purification to South Asia.
I was a mad fanatic of Oswald Bastable, and Moorcock's Warlords of the Air. I wish the Chilean wizard, O'Bean, were as real as the next chap. But I fear 'tisn't so.
I wanted to start my own dirigible run from Africa to India: "Trans-Imperial Air Safari". Instead, a few intel agencies will use this for eavesdropping and sub-orbital comms stations.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
is that it's getting incredibly expensive as well.
You use traffic fatalities per year and total astronaut deaths. Sure, the odds of dieing in a space craft are higher than on the road, but your numbers are significantly off.
I'd recently read that the world's supply of Helium is running out, with no real plans for any substitute.
So would the price of helium then become too expensive to run a ship like this?
Don't forget vertical airships: http://www.airship.org/
The 30-06 is still one of the best general purpose rifles around. In hunting, it easily handles powder and bullet combinations from a 150 grain deer round to a 220 grain round suitable for moose and large bears. There are now sabot bullets in the 95 grain region that make the 30-06 a good varmint rifle. It is a favored hunting rifle for reloaders because the cartridges can be fire-formed to custom fit the rifle's chamber, the brass is thick enough that they can be re-used multiple times, and the wide selection of powders and bullets allows custom tailoring of rounds.
In my experience, rural rednecks who know enough to acquire a 30-06 rifle are very unlikely to have it in hand when they are drinking. The redneck rule in southern Oregon is: no beer or other alcohol until the day's hunting is over; no handling of any of the guns after the drinking has begun. Break the rule and you find that none of the good old boys will hunt with you any more. My impression is that this is universal throughout rural USA and Canada, and probably world-wide. There would be fewer rednecks around if it wasn't for centuries-old customs like this one.
City-bred rednecks are another story: they do drink and shoot simultaneously. But they generally aren't savvy enough to buy a 30-06. They want something more macho like a .300 magnum to go with their huge fourwheeler that they don't know how to drive.
About a pound of lead shielding might have a bit to do with it.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
I think it would be a fun and elegant way to travel. Smoother and much more quiet than traditional aircraft... I think it could be like luxury train trips where the transportation is part of the enjoyment of the vacation.
Maybe not for a business trip, but for pleasure I would LOVE it as an option. Especially if it were priced right.
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
People blame the public school system in the USA for everything. It will never please everybody and neither will having multiple private systems. American parents blame everybody but themselves and their children and that is a BIG problem. The culture has also degraded as well.
American kids want to consume, play games, play sports, watch TV AS ADULTS; not much different from their parents. TV has done so much harm and gets next to no blame.
Letting people choose school systems will not stop the complaints and sadly while test scores might get better (not much when you average everything) the core problem there is the focus on narrow minded measurements and "accountability". Education is unlike everything else and should be modeled around the human brain's development not how to run an organization or train employees. (Either system could do that; however, parents think they are expert educators and will send their kid to McDonald's school because it offers daycare, free food and makes them feel they are good parents.)
Einstein didn't think much of school, but he did make it thru the system and it did still impact him (do you really think he'd be all that much smarter if the system harmed him? one could think it helped him since he came out so well. The brain is not understood so you can't really take a solid position either way.) The USA did quite well before and had public education (with some of the big inventions involving help from former german students.)
Teachers today are thought of as daycare, therapists, and pseudo parents-- parents freak when their kids stay home and not buried in home work or calmed down with drugs. They want their morals taught but none of the morals they disagree with or that make the kid hard to manage. Bad parenting is far more common than Americans will admit and teachers have to deal with it. Most parents are divorced and both parents work, which doesn't help. There is also no more community outside perhaps a weekly church activity. My relative's kids hardly even visit friends, can't bike down the street, go to the park alone or be left in the house alone at double the age I was when I was allowed to do so. The dangers are no less real than back in my childhood.
The local high school around here used to have a shooting range in the basement; a gun in the locker was normal. A bad kid who needed a smack got it without a lawsuit; and parents had authority over their children. Children now also have diminished responsibility. In addition, we teach a lot of useless information (which grows in volume each year) we want them trained and not educated-- heaven forbid them think for themselves (because that makes them hard to manage in school and at home. Hell much of pre-school is just training them to salivate at the bell.)
A well supported student doesn't even need a school system.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Since anti gravity won't be invented any time soon, I prospose someone should design an aiship in the shape of a Klingon Bird of Prey. I will then fly it over the ocean to terrorize Finnish whalers and save the future.
I've always had a soft spot for these things. A few thoughts:
Classic airships were terribly difficult to operate given the technology of the day. Landings were particularly difficult thanks to the strange concept of the mooring tower. Perhaps classic-era zeppelins could have been safer if they used a winch-down technology similar to helicopters on modern destroyers. In heavy seas, the helicopter cannot land conventionally. A cable is dropped to the deck where it is secured in a winch drum. The chopper pilot applies full throttle as he is slowly winched out of the sky. If the deck rises, he rises, and likewise falls when it falls. This prevents him from getting smacked into splinters by an unpredictable wave. For a zeppelin, a few mooring lines dropped from the air could leave it secured against errant wind gusts while it is winched down. Of course, we now have computer-aired control systems and could use rotating thruster pods like modern ships for three-dimensional maneuvering.
While hydrogen is probably still our best modern fuel, I'm curious as to what kind of unobtanium would be required to create vacuum airships, ones that don't just use a lighter than air gas but completely evacuated containers to create buoyancy.
Final thought: I hope they put more thought into this than the Germans who came up with Zeppelin NT. I'm still waiting for Titanic ME.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Here is where we'll land!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Both have been featured in countless articles for decades. My money says if and when, they'll probably be announced in the same week, since they've been tied together in the waiting room for so long. I'll believe them when I see them. If I actually see fusion, it'll probably burn my face off, but then at last I'd be able to mumble through the scars "Finally!"
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If the atmosphere would just behave itself and lie there docilely, or at least move all in the same direction at the same time, airships would make sense from an engineering point of view. But since the wind is not this cooperative, it is essential to build an airshipstrong enough to withstand the atmospheric equivalent of a rogue wave, and strength is the enemy of lightness. Size magnifies the effect of shearing forces. Also, travelling through the air faster than a stately drift causes vortexes and standing waves on the surface of the structure, a poorly understood phenomenon that is counteracted in "heavy" aircraft by just making the surfaces strong. Again, strong is the enemy of light. To make matters worse, the vortex patterns are speed dependent. In simple terms, a fast moving airship will tear itself apart. That is why blimps have a top speed of not very much, and rigid airships (the rigid part is about keeping the envelope from collapsing as speed increases) have a top speed of not very much more.
Maybe one day when fluid dynamics is better understood and strength to weight ratios have improved enough to get the safety margins into the right zone, the age of the airship will truly return. We are nowhere close to either of those at the moment. The concept art shown here for the Aeroscraft in particular is just stupid. Look at the massive concentration of weight right at the stern. There are good reasons why the most successful airship designs place the engines below the craft, in the middle. This contributes to stability and reduces stress on the structure, which otherwise would have to be heavier. Also the lozenge shape may look good on a magazine cover, but it reduces volume of the lifting gas in relation to surface area. Less gas is the same as more weight.
I have a lot of trouble believing that the designs shown have been subjected to any kind of serious engineering analysis. This is more about convincing gullible people to go take a flyer on a grand venture. See the pretty pictures and send your money here thanks.
To be sure, Zepellins really are back, at least a small number of them. They fly low and slow over Berlin. The design is very traditional, a stubby cigar shape with a nacelle underheath to which the engines are attached. These aircraft are not really good for much other than the spectacle, which in my opinion justifies the effort but this is a far cry from commercial viability as a mode of transportation.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Unfortunately, Helium stocks are now declining. There won't be enough even for future scientific uses and users will need to start to recapture and recycle the stuff rather than let it disappear. It actually goes to the top of the atmosphere and is lost to space. It's made in the nuclear processes in the Earth by the decay of uranium, but only very slowly.
They should use some other lighter-than air gas or mixture of gasses.
Although I'm quite sure the scarcity of this element will be totally ignored by people out to makwe a buck until it's all been frivolously used up, in accordance with human nature....
Seems like they might have enough space on the top for solar panels. Now I'm not saying store the energy in batteries just use it went light is available backed up with more conventional generators.
See Residual, Inter-deme Transport Requirements:
Seastead this.
>"helium is twice (?) as heavy as hydrogen, so it has half the lifting power"
Nope.
Lifting power comes from the difference in density between the air and the gas in the balloon.
Air has a molecular weight around 15 so the difference between hydrogen and helium is the difference between 13 and 14, ie. not very much at all.
{nb. yes, it's a VERY simplified explanation}
No sig today...
And that's unfortunate because? (yes, I know it's hydrogen that is flammable, please don't steal my soul)
In other news... FOLLOW THAT CHOCOBO! *buak*
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
H2indenberg was not the only airship disaster. R101 had 8 survivors 48 dead when it crashed. Modern instruments and safety techniques would have prevented the crash. Hydrogen is cheap and renewable, a comparatively simple multi cell system with nitrogen buffering between hull and gasbags coupled with Davey Lamp style gauze would eliminate the fire risk from non catastrophic incidents. The main problem with airships is constantly repeated newsreel footage of that over exited reported screaming "Oh the humanity!". The RFC (the predecessor to the RAF) were only able to shoot down zeppelins with machine guns after the introduction of incendiary ammunition.
Nevil Shute's "SlideRule" is a good historical/engineering novel about the early days of airship research in England. Read it last year and recommend it.
Almost as old, and more effective for long range/aerial targets. The .50 BMG. Quite stunning, really, if you compare the work of John Browning to EVERYTHING that has happened since.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Also buy into Norman Spinrad's balloon/bicycles
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
This is not off-topic, this is a great essay on what's wrong with America these days.