So... these went out of use, pretty much.
But was it a right decision? If we used modern, lighter materials, could we make them smaller? Small enough for them to have length less than 8 meters and able to carry average family?
Think about the possibilities. They are quite fast, we can make them very safe (yea, I know about Hindenburg, but it happened literally nearly a century ago) and most importantly, they don't take the streets, so you get no traffic jams.
>>974583
mid-air collisions.
Would prbably be used to transport things and not people. There's a possibility that they won't need to be manned either, just plot a course here and there and voila supply lines.
If you're talking about a replacement for cars, helicopters are certainly a thing that already exists.
As ever, flying vehicles are expensive, fuel inefficient (for short journeys) and require extensive training to operate.
>>974583
BLIMPBOAT
>>974583
An 8-meter long blimp (assuming a length-to-beam ratio of 4:1, about as fat as you can get without totally ruining aerodynamics) would have a gross lift (equivalent to the displacement of a ship) of some 70.4 kg with hydrogen. So no, a manned blimp that size is pretty much totally out of the question. Although, with modern materials we might be able to build larger, historical-size ones with a greater payload fraction, though it might just end up being about the same (we have better materials now, but safety standards are higher these days too).
For helium, which is not practical for mass production but is obviously proven to work. To lift 250kg, a rough estimate for a family of 4, you would need just under 250m^3 of Helium.
>>974583
>Small enough for them to have length less than 8 meters and able to carry average family?
Hell no.
>>974583
>we can make them very safe
No, you can't.
I know, I know, you're SO much smarter than the hundreds of people that took on this task before, and you're never wrong, etc. etc.
Airships are inherently unsafe.
Check out http://www.airshipcenter.com/viewforum.php?f=21
For one manned blimp expect it to be 20 meters in length.
>>975946
>Airships are inherently unsafe.
That's bollocks. That's like implying fiat 500's are unsafe and therefore trucks are just as unsafe
>>975908
>No space between the number and the unit symbol
Please re-read the SI Brochure.
>>976076
Do you have any spare invites? My friend wants to use coherent system of units of measurement and i've already given out my invites.
Helium blimps are safer then aircraft
If the engines fall out you'll simply float with the wind until you bump into something, and even then damage won't be a lot because you're a big floating pillow.
When they near the ground, you can simply jump out.
This is because blimps don't crash, they sink. That is a 100% correct scientific statement.
They fly at perfect parachuting height, meaning you can jump out with a chute if something goes wrong, unlike airliners, tho fly too high and too fast to jump out.
Helium is a flame retardant
remind yourself I am talking about helium blimps, not hydrogen rigid zeppelins.
More people died in the MH17 crash and the Concorde crash then all airship crashes combined.
>>975946
all transportation methods are inherently unsafe
danger is part of life you low energy beta
but helium blimps are safer then airplanes.
I decided to calculate the total of registered airship casualties from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
And I calculated a total of 586 airship related deaths. This is including military airships used in world war 1 and world war 2, and also including deaths on the ground. The period is from 1900 to now, so in a total of 116 years, 586 died in airship accidents.
In comparison, 1088 people died in airplane crashes in 2014 alone.
>>976103
I'd wager that more people rode an aeroplane in 2014 alone than that entire 116 year blimp period.
Imagine if al qaida rams two zeppelins into the world Trade Center. Oh the humanity.
> hydrogen can't melt steel beams
>>974583
fucking death traps.
blah blah blah hydrogen helium hindenburg notwithstanding, they were too big to handle safely on the ground and winds, along with static electricity, is what killed the airship.
there's a reason why we only use hot air balloons recreationally.
>>974583
They're slow, they're more susceptible to going off course in bad weather, they don't offer any real cargo capacity improvement over other airframes and there's limited infrastructure to support them
That isn't to say they can't fill a niche, but they're not going to replace conventional aircraft anytime soon
>>974583
Surely these aren't real??
>>976091
nobody's gonna use up valuable payload on an airship with parachutes
Nuclear-powered airship that generates hydrogen by splitting water.
>>976139
The Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg were basically the peak in rigid airship technology. The only accident that happened was because of the flammable hydrogen, otherwise static electricity wouldn't be more of a problem than with regular air planes.
The Graf Zeppelin had a perfect safety record over 9 years of regular service.
>too big to handle safely on the ground
this is kinda true, but imagine what we could do with jet turbines on rigid airships. handling would be hugely improved.
>>976189
they are. be afraid.
Hey i've always wondered, why aren't airships used for rescue purposes?
Go over an earthquake/flood/disaster area, pick up survivors and treat them onboard as you pick up more, hover on spot for easy rescue.
also, what is/was the passenger capacity of airships? like what sort of plane has/had comparable seating capacity?
>>976922
>hidenburg class
Crew: ca. 40
Capacity: ca. 50 passengers for LZ-129 (later upgraded to 72), 40 passengers for LZ-130
So basically a midsized regional airliner.
>>976925
That... is low, I was expecting ~100-150
>>976928
The Zeppelin airships had accomodations like sleeping quarters and whatnot, since the trip across the atlantic took like 2-3 days. Also it was a service only for extreme richfags, so they'd prolly carry lots of baggage, too.
If you only had seats, basic commodities and little luggage you could easily go above 100 pax. Maybe not 150, but somewhere in between.
>>976933
Ah, that's more like it.
For my hypothetical rescue airship, one would need all the space but little in the way of fixtures/cargo or staff.
One could evacuate an entire village in a few trips. Hover over one rooftop, pick up people, shuffle towards the other, pick them, so on and so forth, provide some basic first aid on the ship itself, drop them at a camp, no major landing gear required, could dump them whilst hovering.
Anyone know what the downsides to my rescue plan is?
>>976936
Airships have difficulty controlling altitude. Basically they do so by losing buoyant gas (helium/hydrogen) or by dropping weight in form of sand or water.
When people boarded the zeppeling, they and their luggage was weighed, and they'd take off the equivalent weight which had been previously put on the airship to keep it on the ground. As they loaded it up, they took out weight.
To land, the airships needed a huge number of people to simply weigh it down. This was rather dangerous, since the airship could bounce back up. There was this one time that three people didn't let the cable go and hang on while the airship takes back off, I think two of them fell to their deaths. It's all on film, pretty gruesome.
To descend onto the rescue area and then take back off would mean losing gas, then losing weight, then losing gas, then losing weight, and so on. You can only do that so many times before you run out of weight you can drop.
In fact, one of the main issues airships had since day one was their difficult handling while landing. Once airborn they could handle quite well, but maneuvering to land was pretty complicated. Hovering at one place could also be pretty difficult: If it's driving at full speed (I think they got to around 100-150km/h) the aerodynamics would help keeps stable. But if it were hovering you'd need to constantly counteract any wind there may be. An airship may be huge, but it's literally weightless, so any tiny gust of wind will move it around.
>>976956
That really sounds like a problem with having the bouyancy managed by a human, instead of a computer. Hovering could also be automated; obviously you'd have to have massive engines to get truly stationary, but a computer should still be able to do a much better job with typical engines than a human.
It also seems like landing would be easier if they dropped a water hose in addition to the cable, and just loaded up on ballast until it wasn't buoyant anymore.
>>976970
>you'd have to have massive engines to get truly stationary
Having massive engines is kind of a nicht-nicht with airships. The Zeppelins had extremely modern (for their time) diesel engines, which were very light for the power they generated.
I wonder how much you could do with modern technology in this respect.
Also, to manage hovering you need more engines than the zeppelins had, they only had engines on the side for forward or backward propulsion. When hovering, side winds would be a major issue, since the airship has a large area from the side which would cause wind resistance. Airships had difficulty maneuvering to land for this reason, since they had lots of trouble with winds.
Maybe the solution to this would be round airships with engines on all sides. That way no one side would offer more wind resistance than others.
I think your idea is probably viable, but it just needs so much developing that it doesn't offer enough advantages over helicopters. You can just get a bunch of helicopters to rescue many people, that would also be faster than one airship rescuing many people one after the other.
It hurts me that airships or blimps have little future, I wish it were otherwise, but I think that ship has sailed for ever.
In fact, I believe leisure-purposed lighter-than-air craft are prolly the best option. A bigass rigid airship as an air cruiseship would surely be interesting. But then again, seeing how few passengers they carry that would make tickets really expensive, and with fewer amenities than regular cruise ships.
Sightseeing tours could also be a great use for airships, THAT would surely be a better option than helicopters. I believe there are those kinds of services in Germany somewhere, but imagine a zeppelin tour of New York or something like that, floating around at just a couple hundred feet above the street, passing next to skyscrapers, and without the uncomfortableness and dangers of a helicopter.
>>974583
BLIMPBOAT
As commercial transport, I don't see them being viable- it boils down to being too slow, too big, too little carrying capacity.
If they do get used for transport, it'll be for eccentric rich people and small cargo loads that nobody actually cares about.
As remote sensing/communications platforms- I think they're actually a pretty good idea for a lot of purposes, even beyond what the US military is trying to rig them for.
An automated airship will probably have a much longer loiter time than any similar unmanned or manned aircraft we're running right now, and things like that could be especially valuable on the civilian side for getting way cheaper aerial survey, agriculture optimization, large scale/high detail LIDAR scans and all that.
>>976976
I think the fuel efficiency of airships might get people interested again. In the future, when fossil fuels are expensive as hell (which has been put on hold for at least 30 years, thanks to fracking), that might make big planes pretty uneconomical. Airships also lend themselves pretty well to other sources of power: everybody has seen solar airship concepts, and I think that a nuclear airship would be pretty viable, once the inevitable PR problem is overcame.
>>977039
nonsense. these things would be very competitive to china-europe trains, and easily beat ships
>>977429
I think what's more likely is that actual ships transporting people on the water are going to be more common.
Also, heavier than air aircraft are still going to be viable, all that'll happen is that they're going to run off of whatever is somewhat less expensive to produce. By their nature they'll still be too slow, too big, and have too little carrying capacity for their size.
>>977452
That only works if you manage to get space aliens to ban any tech made after 1930.
>>976956
>but it's literally weightless
No: "neutrally buoyant in air"
>>976976
A spherical airship would be terribly aerodynamically inefficient and I imagine very unstable.
>>977429
Airships are not particularly fuel efficient. Notice how far above the line they are compared to both ships and aeroplanes.
