wuzak
Captain
How practical would a high altitude air ship be?
The "balloon" section would have to be much bigger, or the payload smaller, to get the air ship to high altitudes.
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The only value I could see is a ultra high altitude recon platform or a one way high altitude unmanned strategic bomber. Not sure either one would offer more benefit than it costs. I could see Japan using them in place of their balloon bombs to the US/Canada Northwest. I would think 20 tons of small incendiaries dropped at the same time could cause some serious fires in those forests.
Didn't the USN use them in the Pacific as well? Do I remember reading where a Navy blimp delivered spare parts to USS Hornet while she had the Doolittle Raiders embarked or am I tripping again?Also operated out of North Africa for Atlantic approaches to the Gib straits and also into the Med as well.
Didn't the USN use them in the Pacific as well? Do I remember reading where a Navy blimp delivered spare parts to USS Hornet while she had the Doolittle Raiders embarked or am I tripping again?
It must have been something to travel by zeppelin. Looking out the windows, down at earth, while slowly flying by...
They're slower than rail transport and barely, if any, faster than road transport, are certainly less fuel-efficient than the former, and are probably more labor intensive than either. Against ships, they have severely limited payloads (a single ship can easily carry tens of thousands of tons of cargo), are more labor intensive, and aren't enough faster. Against airplanes, they're simply too slow.
The USN used lighter-than-air aircraft for maritime patrol during WWII. I do know they operated off the US Eastern Seaboard, and over the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico.
I don't know if the calculations on fuel burn for pre WW2 airships included the massive use of hydrogen, it escapes and has to be released. By 1920s in Europe Trains went everywhere mass cargo needed to go. Many roads were unmetalled but making a docking station and shelter is no small task for a piece of kit that was massively expensive to build and run.They were faster than WW II (or before) trucks as there were no high-speed motorways in most countries.
freight trains seldom moved at high speed (anything close to passenger train speed)
However even a few large trucks (5 ton cargo) are a tiny fraction of the cost of a rigid airship and need a much smaller crew.
For moving cargo there is no comparing costs between a train and an airship assuming rails go anywhere near where you want to go.
An airship may be efficient in terms of fuel burned per ton/mile but since even a plane like the Ju 52 can make several trips while the airship is making one trip the return on investment of construction takes a long, long time and again, crew cost has to be taken into account.
Yes. But.
They are slower than trucks and trains if they fly along the roads/railroads. But they can fly straight from A to B (subject the weather permits) so there is a transit time advantage in many regions of the world.
Airship vs ocean vessel. The speed advantage is small in transatlantic but significant on the Europe-Asia route, for example.
Slower compared to aircraft, but cargo air traffic moves via hubs. In the pre-COVID-19 era, you could reach Bejing from Istanbul in 10 hours. And your 10 cbm cargo would travel for 3-4 days, probably.
I see an airship in the future (very distant, probably) as a vehicle for dry light expensive cargo carried across the distances of 2,000 km and longer over the areas with a poor rail network. Maybe even chilled or refrigerated cargo if electricity technology will improve so much that generator weight will not be an issue. Or battery technology?
Tustin Hangars | Tustin, CACool that those still exist.
We had two airship hangars in Tustin (Orange County, CA.) that finally succumbed to urban sprawl after all these years.
When I was a kid, I went there on occasion with Dad (they were part of the USMC's LTA base) and I was in awe of their size, especially from the inside.
I used to work at RAF Cardington near Bedford in the UK occasionally in the airship hangars built for the R100 and the R101, the hangars are huge and would make easy targets, each airship would need to be hangared and it would take huge resources to build the airships and hangars, materials and manpower. View attachment 593033View attachment 593035View attachment 593036
Greetings GrauGeist,The USN's K-ships were a success because they had a self-contained gondola slung under a large gas-bag (simplified description) filled with Helium.
They also operated in areas that had Allied air supremacy and were rarely challenged by Axis aircraft, though not impervious to a U-boat's defensive suite.
The other point with K-ships (or blimps in general) is their limited carrying capacity versus that of a dirigible.