Will Airships ever be a mainstream reality?

[Frank Hipper]

The Navy used blimps for antisubmarine patrol in World War II. By 1945 we had a fleet of nearly 200 airships which were used for long-rage scouting.

And worse then useless they proved in the end, as they had no realistic chance at all of attacking a U-boat and would be spotted long before they could see a submarine. This meant that an airship cruising along with a convoy gave its position away when the shipping would otherwise be completely hidden below the horizon.

How many convoys escorted by blimps were successfully attacked by U-Boats in WWII?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Interesting story, at least 20% true: An above blimp at Al Asad (along the Euphrates in Anbar province) detached in gusty winds and starts floating towards Iranian airspace with it's classified cameras and other equipment on board. So two Strike Eagles get vectored in to take it down, lead rolls in, empties off every round he has, misses, and then over Gs the aircraft to avoid running into it. His wingman then rolls in, empties all of his rounds, and also over Gs the aircraft to avoid a collision. At least in the process of this goatrope he actually scored a hit and the blimp came down. Both aircraft are ground after landing for several hours for over G inspections.

Three cheers for the F-15 pilots, for their courageous dogfight with an unmanned, unpowered balloon over the skies of Iraq!

Guess they need to upgrade to Sopwith Camels then.

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode with the Wright Flyer. "Control, target is too slow to engage. Recommend we get out and walk."

[Broomstick]

How do we "make helium"?

Bombard lithium with protons.

Huh, by that logic we should make gold rather than digging it out of the ground.

I've got no idea how competitive it is if you don't burn it in technomagical reactors.

Completely not competitive.

Well, OK, I'm not a nuclear physicist - it may be that atom-by-atom manufacture of helium is cheaper than making gold or transuranic elements or antimatter, but even if it is, I can't seen this being practical for anything near the volumes of gas required by even one airship, much less a global fleet.

[Darth Raptor]

You're doing it to generate power, not produce helium. The helium is just a non-useless byproduct. And gold is a much larger, heavier and more complex atom than isotopes of hydrogen or helium.

[Broomstick]

1) At least in the United States, blimps ARE legally "airships" that is where they appear in the Federal Aviation Regulations.

Huh. I always thought that airship implied rigid construction.

Well, do keep in mind the US FAR's currnetly also define a landing space shuttle as a glider, not a space ship. Legal definitions may or may not match engineering definitions which may or may not match common usage.

It may be best to say that while all blimps are airships, not all airships are blimps. "Dirigible" and "zepplin" may change in meaning somewhat depending on context.

[Spin Echo]

How do we "make helium"?

Bombard lithium with protons.

Huh, by that logic we should make gold rather than digging it out of the ground.

Gold is a bit trickier as it's a much heavier element. Helium is easier because it's smaller

(Not sure if that link will work for everyone or if it requires subscription)

Well, OK, I'm not a nuclear physicist - it may be that atom-by-atom manufacture of helium is cheaper than making gold or transuranic elements or antimatter, but even if it is, I can't seen this being practical for anything near the volumes of gas required by even one airship, much less a global fleet.

IIRC, it costs about 5-10 times as much to make helium as it does to currently get it naturally.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Airships can however have much larger capacities than aircraft--the largest designs on the table today could have capacities well in excess of 1,000 metric tonnes (though none to my knowledge exceed 2,000 metric tonnes). They have the ability to cruise at speeds up to 110mph and ranges measured beyond ten thousand miles with those payloads.

Not bad potential--in a world where avgas has become prohibitively expensive. Airships can run on diesel engines very easily, in fact, it's better for them; and diesel is very cheap compared to avgas. Ultimately of course they could also run on small nuclear reactors much more feasably than aircraft could.

Furthermore the existing fabric skin we traditionally think of could be replaced with duraluminium for greater durability; there was in fact actually an aluminium airship in the 1920s.

[Broomstick]

Furthermore the existing fabric skin we traditionally think of could be replaced with duraluminium for greater durability; there was in fact actually an aluminium airship in the 1920s.

Fabric is lighter than metal. Despite the impressive carrying capacity of a large airship, you still want to save weight wherever possible

[Admiral Valdemar]

Fabric is lighter than metal. Despite the impressive carrying capacity of a large airship, you still want to save weight wherever possible

Mylar or similar composites would do. They are non-flammable, tough wearing and light. The skeleton would be the tricky part, though I suspect carbon-fibre or aluminium would be used.

For power source, I'd still rather go nuclear. The weight of diesel is still something that could be used for payload instead, so the one off loss of lifting capacity from a single fission reactor would be off-set by it being a mass not requiring replenishment or buoyancy alterations as it depletes.

If that's too horribly anti-environmental for you, there's always the solar powered concepts floated about. Have the top half of the ship covered in lightweight PV cells and electric drives. Quiet and efficient, though energy storage would be the niggle.

[Darth Raptor]

You're not going to sell a nuclear-powered, hydrogen-filled airship to the general public no matter how safe it really is. Not without a Duchess of Zeon style government "selling" it to them at the point of a bayonet.

[McC]

You're not going to sell a nuclear-powered, hydrogen-filled airship to the general public no matter how safe it really is. Not without a Duchess of Zeon style government "selling" it to them at the point of a bayonet.

I'd buy one.

[Zixinus]

Not bad potential--in a world where avgas has become prohibitively expensive. Airships can run on diesel engines very easily, in fact, it's better for them; and diesel is very cheap compared to avgas. Ultimately of course they could also run on small nuclear reactors much more feasably than aircraft could.

How about solar? Since airships are huge, they have a large surface area for them. Do airships fly high enough to be over clouds as well? Would also help efficiency.

Also, airships catch allot of wind. Can't we tap that?

The environmentalists would love it. And would actually make sense, as you don't have to pay much for fuel (although may be off-set by maintenance costs).

I've heard going to the moon to get more helium; apparently the earth's magnetic field diverts helium given off by the sun and it ends up collecting in the dirt on the moon's surface. However, going to the sun would be so vastly cost inefficient, it's just not practical

You do realize that he was joking right? You can't get to the sun for helium, it has no sane possibility of survival. As for the moon, we aim to go there for Helium-3, an ideal fusion fuel, not because its helium. There is enough there to power the world with hypothetical aneutronic, direct-conversion fusion reactor for a few centuries, but not enough to fill more then a dozen of medium-sized airships.

If we have fusion technology, ordinary helium is a byproduct of fusing hydrogen- which makes a better lifting gas anyway.

Problem with that idea is that a fusion reactor uses only a few grams of fuel (regardless what isotopes you want) per day (varies with reactor power of course, larger ones use them up more rapidly), thus a fusion power plant produces only a few kilograms of fuel a day. It is still an option, just not a very good one.

[Coyote]

Airships have (potentially) so many advantages over current shipping it isn't even funny. Instead of comparing the volume of an airship and its payload (they are, admittedly, huge), look instead at payload mass to fuel vs. traditional shipping.

Potentially, a large corporation could dock airships right above their factories and load them on-site... then fly those airships directly, totally negating highways, docks, ships, rivers, etc, to the receiver and unload. The "slow" airship makes up for lost time by not having the cargo loaded on a truck, taken to a shipping point where it gets onto a ship/train, sent to another offload point, routed to a distribution center, and then to the final destination.

Zepps need more, and more specialized ground crew, true, but considering the number of "middlemen" that can be potentially eliminated, cost is offset.

Using solar arrays on top, and diesel engines to create a diesel-electric hybrid (an old technology coming up on its 100th birthday, see the earliest useful submarines) that burns rapeseed oil biodiesel, you have an environmentally sound ship that can take hundreds of trucks off the highways (and their resultant wear-and-tear on the transporation infrastructure, the safety issues of long-haul truckers, etc).

Zepps are vulnerable to high winds, but --like ships-- that's why we have global weather satellites and steer around them.

Even in the event of a major problem, a Zepp "crash" is a slow-motion affair at worst, potentially allowing for crew to safely evacuate or even ride the ship down to a controlled crumple on the ground. Considering that, and the chance that the cargo may even be recoverable, will cut insurance costs as well.

A Zeppelin has unlimited loiter time compaered to a plane. In hostile environment rescue, such as mountains, desert, or sea, a Zepp can linger over people in trouble for days, if need be, and provide a stable platform to hoist people up-- even provide a medical suite on-board if needed. A Zepp can also carry far, far more water or flame retardant than an airplane or helicopter, and with fireboat-style water cannons can battle fires in high-rise buildings with ease. Zepps would have trouble with forest fires due to intense thermal updraft, though, but delivering water bladders to a nearby site for on-ground firefighters (or deploying smokejumpers) provides alternate use.

Obviously, IMO, Zepps are under-appreciatead and under-used.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I wonder if the WALRUS project will ever appear again.



No, it's not Thunderbird 2.

And another:



Then you have the non-cigar shaped designs like the deltoid pumpkin-seed Aereon.

[Darth Wong]

Obviously, IMO, Zepps are under-appreciatead and under-used.

Besides, it would be theoretically possible to make a zeppelin in the shape of a giant penis. Then you could ask people if they want to ride a giant penis across the ocean. The advantages just keep piling up.

[Zixinus]

Zeppelins that literally take you out of this world (ok, planet):

http://www.jpaerospace.com/

They have already done borderline LEO.

[Patrick Degan]

The Navy used blimps for antisubmarine patrol in World War II. By 1945 we had a fleet of nearly 200 airships which were used for long-rage scouting.

And worse then useless they proved in the end, as they had no realistic chance at all of attacking a U-boat and would be spotted long before they could see a submarine.

Except blimps weren't used to attack submarines but purely for scouting. BTW, your other objection does not obtain, as planes could also be spotted.

This meant that an airship cruising along with a convoy gave its position away when the shipping would otherwise be completely hidden below the horizon.

The blimps mostly operated from coastal bases along the North American Atlantic seaboard, from Britain and France, and over the Mediterranean.

[McC]

Out of curiosity -- this is mainly directed at Coyote, but anyone should feel free to jump in -- how does one measure the targetability factor of an airship as compared to a freight ship or a truck? The Goodyear blimps, for instance, are shot at by people attending games. Expand this, and imagine what might happen if someone fires a RPG at an airship hauling thousands of tons of cargo and using hydrogen rather than helium. Whether the Hindenburg was downed due to its hydrogen or not, a RPG mixing with a hydrogen bladder will have major negative effects.

Sure, you can argue that the same RPG would be fairly devastating to any shipping truck, but your postulation suggests replacing much of the trucking/cargo ship fleet with an airship fleet of smaller number but greater carrying capacity. Does their inherently vulnerable nature not make them immensely target-prone, and to devastating effect if hydrogen is used?

I don't mean to rain on the idea -- I love the idea, personally -- but this notion was brought up by a friend of mine as a reality check, and it's a pretty good one, given the political climate the world is in these days, and the inherently scummy nature of most people.

[Darth Wong]

Out of curiosity -- this is mainly directed at Coyote, but anyone should feel free to jump in -- how does one measure the targetability factor of an airship as compared to a freight ship or a truck? The Goodyear blimps, for instance, are shot at by people attending games. Expand this, and imagine what might happen if someone fires a RPG at an airship hauling thousands of tons of cargo and using hydrogen rather than helium. Whether the Hindenburg was downed due to its hydrogen or not, a RPG mixing with a hydrogen bladder will have major negative effects.

Sure, you can argue that the same RPG would be fairly devastating to any shipping truck, but your postulation suggests replacing much of the trucking/cargo ship fleet with an airship fleet of smaller number but greater carrying capacity. Does their inherently vulnerable nature not make them immensely target-prone, and to devastating effect if hydrogen is used?

I don't mean to rain on the idea -- I love the idea, personally -- but this notion was brought up by a friend of mine as a reality check, and it's a pretty good one, given the political climate the world is in these days, and the inherently scummy nature of most people.

Good thing you never spent much time thinking about how much dangerous chemical cargo is moved across the country by rail, and how easily you could sabotage rail lines.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Unfortunately Coyote's idea would only work with extremely high-end cargoes of great value. Anything else simply makes economic sense to go all-rail, all-ship. Even airships will be less efficient than such modes of transportation; they'll just be far, far more efficient than aircraft and can more easily use alternate fuels. But they will allow us to retain some of the modern distribution system which would otherwise have to be abandoned, and that will certainly be worthwhile.

[McC]

Good thing you never spent much time thinking about how much dangerous chemical cargo is moved across the country by rail, and how easily you could sabotage rail lines.

I'm far less worried about this country (or even this continent) than I am about replacing trans-Atlantic shipping or truck-based shipping in less stable areas of the world.

Still, I think the comparison is somewhat invalid. In what way is sabotaging rail lines "easy"? Compare to someone -- anyone within the considerable eye-line view of a large airship -- simply shooting at it with little more than a hunting rifle. The former rarely happens, so far as I know, yet the closest analogue to the latter -- people shooting at the Goodyear blimps -- happens enough that it's not simply an isolated incident.

[Darth Wong]

Good thing you never spent much time thinking about how much dangerous chemical cargo is moved across the country by rail, and how easily you could sabotage rail lines.

I'm far less worried about this country (or even this continent) than I am about replacing trans-Atlantic shipping or truck-based shipping in less stable areas of the world.

Well quite frankly, if less-stable parts of the world can't even keep people from shooting down aircraft with RPGs, then I would imagine that security is so horrendous that you're probably just going to avoid them anyway.

Still, I think the comparison is somewhat invalid. In what way is sabotaging rail lines "easy"? Compare to someone -- anyone within the considerable eye-line view of a large airship -- simply shooting at it with little more than a hunting rifle.

You would need more than a hunting rifle to bring down an airship. And sabotaging rail lines is easy; they're thousands of miles long and almost all of that track is not only unguarded but is easily accessed. You can literally walk up to a rail line in the middle of the night and start hacking it apart, and then throw some brush over it to conceal the damage until the train is too close to do anything about it.

The former rarely happens, so far as I know, yet the closest analogue to the latter -- people shooting at the Goodyear blimps -- happens enough that it's not simply an isolated incident.[/quote]

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You would need more than a hunting rifle to bring down an airship. And sabotaging rail lines is easy; they're thousands of miles long and almost all of that track is not only unguarded but is easily accessed. You can literally walk up to a rail line in the middle of the night and start hacking it apart, and then throw some brush over it to conceal the damage until the train is too close to do anything about it.

The former rarely happens, so far as I know, yet the closest analogue to the latter -- people shooting at the Goodyear blimps -- happens enough that it's not simply an isolated incident.

[/quote]

It's slightly more difficult to effectively derail a train, however, as they actually run low-level electrical current through the track. If the current is broken it will automatically turn the signals red in that control block of track. You have to damage the track and rig a bypass to maintain the circuit.

Airships can suffer incredible damage and keep on going, when you think about it. There's been people who've died in airship accidents from the airship being ripped in two and their part floating off--and never being seen again. In a couple of other cases they managed to get it down in a non-fatal fashion.

The Dirigible, what we're discussing, doesn't pressurize the whole of the main body. Instead it's divided into a series of cells called ballonettes which are filled with hydrogen or helium, and several more filled with air which are used for trim. Each cell is independent of the others, so the loss of one doesn't compromise the others, and it would be easy enough to design them self-sealing with modern technology. The outer skin is simply a protective layer.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Furthermore the existing fabric skin we traditionally think of could be replaced with duraluminium for greater durability; there was in fact actually an aluminium airship in the 1920s.

Fabric is lighter than metal. Despite the impressive carrying capacity of a large airship, you still want to save weight wherever possible

The reason for a duraluminium outer hull is that it would prevent deformation of the aerodynamic shape due to high speeds, allowing the airship to go faster.

[McC]

Well quite frankly, if less-stable parts of the world can't even keep people from shooting down aircraft with RPGs, then I would imagine that security is so horrendous that you're probably just going to avoid them anyway.

Fair point.

You would need more than a hunting rifle to bring down an airship.

My familiarity with hydrogen's flamability is excessively limited, but I would think the concern of firearms would come not from the puncture power of the bullet, but from the temperature. Maybe I'm way off, though.

And sabotaging rail lines is easy; they're thousands of miles long and almost all of that track is not only unguarded but is easily accessed. You can literally walk up to a rail line in the middle of the night and start hacking it apart, and then throw some brush over it to conceal the damage until the train is too close to do anything about it.

That takes a lot of time and preparation, though -- well, more time than preparation. Railways aren't made out of flimsy material, and I would think that hacking that up is going to require some serious dedication to doing so.