In January, DARPA successfully launched a Dynetics’ X-61A Gremlin UAV from the bay of a Lockheed Martin C-130A cargo aircraft. The program is aiming to demonstrate the efficacy of low-cost combat-capable drones that can be both deployed and recovered from cargo planes. DARPA envisions using cargo planes like the C-130 to deploy these drones while still outside of enemy air defenses; allowing the drones to go on and engage targets before returning to the airspace around the “mother ship” to be recaptured and carried home for service or repairs.
Various projects have been trying to bring them back for something like 2 decades.
So far there have mostly been cancellations, and "slippage" (e.g. Lockheed's LMH-1, originally planned to float out in 2017, is still nowhere to be seen 5 years later; Airlander is supposed to start shipping in 2025 but the last news is they're trying to find a new location to build a facility).
I should have been more clear, the idea of launching flying things out of other flying things is making a comeback, not necessarily zeppelins in general
> I should have been more clear, the idea of launching flying things out of other flying things is making a comeback
To make a comeback, it would have to have gone away. Launching pilotless flying things from piloted flying things has been very continuously a thing in the military.
(OTOH, recovering flying things to other flying things may be making a comeback.)
With modern missile technology one could argue that fighter jets are primarily drone launch vehicles. Sure the drone explodes instead of coming back, but still. Flies and navigates on its own, launched in air from a mothership …
Soon they’ll start landing back too I’m sure. Reconnaissance drones launched from a slower aircraft come to mind as a good use case. Or as command and control platforms for swarms of drones doing the work.
The recovery thing could potentially resolve another K-13/AIM-9B incident, but I'm not sure this will be worthwhile. If you have fuel to return you have fuel to chase the target longer and to go faster. Personally I only see recovery as a useful feature if your weapons are really expensive or you want to create air mines. Which the latter is really a terrifying thought. It wouldn't be hard to have a bunch of drones with explosives create a screen/wall and take out anything that comes close enough. Returning things with explosives on it is also rather dangerous. You arm them when sending them out and if there's a bug they may still be armed when returning.
Surely there’s going to eventually be drones that don’t go boom? Those would be nice to retrieve
A wall of floating drones that go boom if you come too close sounds like a terrifying likely future. Especially if they’re too small to properly show up on radar
A wall of floating drones isn't a feasible concept. Small drones have an endurance measured in minutes. And they have an operating ceiling far lower than most manned aircraft.
Lighter-than-air drones require significant power to maintain position in even a slight wind. They have very limited payload and can't carry much in the way of sensors. It's just completely unrealistic with current technology.
I would like to see the economics of that compared to disposable, single-mission drones. Those wouldn’t have to return to the “mother ship”, so would be able to penetrate deeper into enemy territory, or carry more weapons, or be cheaper to produce.
Also, with single-use drones, the C-130 could return immediately to fetch another load of drones.
⇒ I think this would only make sense for relatively expensive drones (but then, the US Air Force likely has a different idea about what is “low cost”. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder costs over $200k apiece)
This is a little tongue-in-cheek but also kind of serious. But isn't a single use drone also known as a missile? More seriously, the operational domain between reusable drone and missile must be very small no? Like maybe something that can fly into a building before blowing up.
“Missile” is an extremely broad concept (Wikipedia calls it “a guided airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight usually by a jet engine or rocket motor”), but I think most people think of a missile as something without wings (but quite possibly fins) where the target is known at launch time, life expectancy is calculated in, at most, hours, and that doesn’t cooperate with other missiles.
I wouldn’t see a dozen airplane- or (especially) helicopter-like drones that get launched with, say, the goal of preventing a piece of road to be used by the enemy, and that distribute themselves over the to be protected area and, Hang around for weeks as missiles.
Because they aren’t weapons, I also wouldn’t think of reconnaissance drones as missiles, even if they are rockets that follow a pre-planned trajectory and then crash. That’s getting close to an edge case, though.
Maybe. If I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile), I can’t tell whether those things that point out from the main body produce lift (which, I guess, is the difference between a fin and a wing)
I added “quite possibly, fins” because I thought of that missile, but could hav been more explicit, and yes, those may be wings.
Eventually the space between drones, missiles and mines will get populated on any coordinate in between. Pure forms will continue to exist, but maybe we can hope that mine use will drop, getting substituted by alternatives ("perching missiles" or whatever they would be called) that don't outlive their conflicts quite as much.
Yup. One place where this binary gets problematic is what's called "loitering munitions" - basically a cruise missile that stays up in the air for a while looking for targets, and when its sensors pick something up it hits like any missile.
Very similar devices developed from drones tend to instead get called "suicide drones".
One possible way to distinguish the two might be the level of communication with a controller or launch platform, but even then the line isn't quite clear - what about a CLOS guided missile?
My understanding is that a missile is usually about hitting the target soon. A suicide UAV can do surveillance, maybe launch secondary munitions, and hover around quite a while before delivering its main payload. You might even be able to recover the UAV for a second mission if you decide to not use the suicide charge.
What the US Space Force might be actually planning if they had unlimited budget, would be a permanent space station with unmanned drones and missiles in several sub-carrier types permanently hovering over a hostile country.
You control the sea, air, land, and finally space. You would have complete dominance that would render ICBM's moot.
I know this wasn't your point, but because of how orbits and the Earth's rotation works, you can't "hover" above any country that isn't on the equator. At best you can do a highly elliptical orbit that gives you maximum hang time above the target area -- but would also put you maximally far away from the ground if you wanted to deploy anything out of the station. Any realistic scenario involving putting things at specific places on the ground from space in a timely manner involves either flying it from the equator, or using a constellation to ensure persistent coverage.
I'm afraid that with rockets becoming more and more affordable, especially if Starship becomes a thing, the US army will do their own version of Starlink but instead of communications satellites it'll be weapons. It doesn't even have to be anything fancy, anything kinetic that can make it through re-entry will be able to do a lot of damage anywhere. Think a payload of tungsten or depleted uranium bullets, targeted to land in an area; I'm fairly sure they would impact with as much energy as from a gun, like the A-10 Warthog's.
you can, however, orbit 2 or 3 molynia orbit satellites that accomplish effectively the same concept of persistent coverage over a certain geographic area. The orbit would be calculated to put the long dwell time of the apogee of the molynia orbit of each satellite over the target area.
this is far more useful for anything that is sigint/communications based, or space based radar, than anything as a weapon.
Although not to the same level of accuracy as "hovering" over a specific longitude along the equator as in geostationary.
The constellation idea sounds even more effective than the "hover" idea of the GP. With a constellation you could achieve "coverage" over large parts of the earth and essentially attack any country at a moment's notice. I think military higher-ups have been aware of this potential since the days of the space race. It's a big reason why the weaponization of space has been a geopolitical taboo for many years.
There is a weird hole where nation-states would love something with the rapid, global deployment capabilities of a nuclear tipped ICBM, but without the nuclear payload for fear of a MAD type retaliation. "Prompt strike" I think is the term. The trouble is, you'd want to be able to deploy such a weapon, but also be very, very clear it's not a nuke, just like a single building sized bomb or something.
Perhaps that's a use case for some type of space based directed energy weapon if you could somehow minimize the atmospheric losses to maintain effectiveness.
In every Marvel movie I watched the Helicarrier was shot down before it could do anything useful. I imagine a real life version would suffer the same fate.
One of my favorite cartoons growing up was the japanese series "Space Battleship Yamato", where in the future the Yamato was rebuilt as a spaceship. Good memories! (I wonder, though, if I would still enjoy it, were I to re-watch the series)
Gravity. This thing is going to be huge, weigh many, many thousands of tons. Having it fly on vertical thrust is probably going to take more fuel than it can realistically carry, and certainly more than you can realistically supply it with. If you're going to do something like this, I think you need to look at lighter-than-air airships. Or maybe something hybrid?
I couldn't find what he was talking but found this interesting pdf that's more or less related to the topic. Clearly something close to what he's talking about is being considered and researched, at least as early as 2005. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports...
I think it's been raised in the context of a fair few sightings where there's supposedly been a very large craft moving silently and relatively slowly, e.g. the 2000 Illinois sightings (referenced in a great song by Sufjan Stevens). I was looking into this one a few years ago and found references to a private company testing blimp platforms for military purposes around that period, although I can't find it off the top of my head.
More recently, the object spotted hovering off Hawaii last year that resulted in fighters scrambling was also proposed to be a modern balloon-based drone, of which there are a few currently being developed.
Edit: here's a source arguing that the Illinois sighting was a regular advertising blimp
Good video on the subject, including the intermediate step that never left the drawing board - a 747 crammed full of "microfighters" as a flying aircraft carrier for manned fighters.
I miss seeing "the goodyear blimp" at the Portland air show. When I was a kid in the 80's and 90's, they'd always have the blimp come out and fly around the metro area for a week. It was so cool to see this absolutely huge thing floating around the sky, over your house, etc., with the deep droning mrrrrrrr of the multiple props. It was almost like an alien space ship (to us kids) because you never saw anything in the skies except birds and planes. Everyone would run outside pointing up at the sky when it was passing overhead.
As someone who grew up in Akron, Ohio, the Goodyear blimp is still a regular sight around here. I grew up in the 90s thinking blimps were normal everywhere, and it was only as I got older that I realized that it's really an Akron thing.
Fun fact: there are only 25 about "blimps" in existence right now (note this does not count rigid airships, but I don't know if there are any of those left).
It's easy to forget the role that airships played in the US military. These two were fielded as aircraft carriers during the interwar period. Non-rigid airships were mass-produced during WW2 as anti-submarine vessels to escort convoys (including the one that brought FDR/Churchill to Yalta). They were quite effective in this escort role, and I believe only one was lost in combat.
Then after the war the US tried dropping nukes [1] from airships:
>> The tests were to "determine the response characteristics of the model ZSG-3 airship when subject to a nuclear detonation in order to establish criteria for safe escape distances after airship delivery of antisubmarine warfare special weapons."[10] According to the Navy, the "airship operations were conducted with extreme difficulty.
I'm not as sure about that. From everything I can find, fewer than 10 of 134 were lost in weather. New variants of the K-class were fielded after WW2, and the navy didn't retire the class until 1959. This was one year after air-to-air missiles saw their combat debut in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Airships continued to see active surface until the entrance of anti-air missiles. It's hard to see at that point how they could compete with heavier-than-air aircraft which were much smaller and faster.
Airships seem really neat but it seems like nobody has been able to make the comeback with those.
For some reason the whole concept of an airship where it keeps itself in the air with creatively little effort seems like you should be able to something with that but they never seem to make it into a commercially viable product. Well outside some very specific uses.
An airship's lighter than air nature is one of their biggest drawbacks. An airship needs a large volume in order to make all of its heavier than air components lighter than air in aggregate. This makes for a huge sail area. So even modest winds make it difficult to control an airship near the ground.
When an airship is near the ground it doesn't really land, it moors. Even if it compresses or vents lifting gas to control buoyancy it's still a giant sail very close to the ground. A gust of wind can seriously damage the airship or mooring or cause it to spill cargo or passengers.
I love the idea of airships but they have a huge number of practical concerns.
Zeppelins look so surreal. So much work put into a now-totally-dead technology, making these huge, incredible machines, that were only favored for a very brief span of time.
Zeppelins still fly out of Friedrichshafen, their original home!
Those of you who lived on the SF Peninsula 10-15 years ago may remember seeing the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT. That company eventually went out of business and the Zeppelin was dismantled and taken back to Friedrichshafen, but I got to ride on one of their last Bay Area flights. It was the coolest thing ever.
I posted a couple of comments here in recent years with more information and links to my photos from the Airship Ventures flight and information about their current operations in Friedrichshafen:
A couple of years ago at a work event we were in the Goodyear Blimp (grounded, unfortunately), and back then it was definitely a blimp. Though I vaguely recall a rumour that it might have been a different blimp that they'd repainted with the Goodyear logo. No idea if that's true.
1. they get "free lift" but you need a lot of gas to lift a lot of mass, which quickly makes them extremely unwieldy as it leads to gigantic cross sections (and sheer stuff to move, positioning a lift bag the size of a sports stadium is not exactly great, and requires humongous engines)
2. they're so damn slow
3. even ignoring the tendency to get on fire, hydrogen is a pain in the ass, it absolutely refuses staying put and embrittles structural metals leading to accelerated fatigue
> We fly in aluminum balloons filled with jet fuel all the time.
Hydrogen ignites significantly more readily than jet fuel does, and protecting the gigantic volume of an airship's envelope (which is multiple times that of the payload) is a lot harder than protecting a plane's fuel tanks.
Not to mention the airship still need fuel tanks to move around, it's not a captive balloon.
Take a look again at the video I linked to and try and explain how jet fuel doesn't really catch fire and isn't much of a problem if it does.
Preventing an onboard fire is probably the #1 concern of jet designers.
Experience has gotten them pretty good at it. Damned good. Amazingly good. But never forget that jet fuel is not safe. It burns. It burns hot. It'll melt everything on an airplane it touches. It'll burn your wing off in seconds. The whole point of jet fuel is it stores a LOT of energy in a very small amount of weight.
Airlines have gotten amazing good at evacuations, such that I am surprised how well the general public is at them in emergencies.
Look at pictures of any crash where everyone (or almost everyone) survived and the fire damage to the plane is frankly astonishing.
Hydrogen zeppelins could be designed to nearly perfectly mitigate all fire risk; the real danger is weather related. (Ideas such as hydrogen can’t burn if oxygen isn’t present, fireproof bags, gondola suspended below so fire can’t reach it, emergency evacuation planning for when it does hit the ground, capability of venting, fire suppressions, etc).
Airplanes are safe in part because we've already made all the mistakes and learned from them. How many (deadly, expensive) mistakes would it take to get lighter-than-air craft to the same point?
Yeah, they'd likely be best used as "cruise ships in the sky" where they can take advantage of large swaths of empty space (you could have ballrooms in a zeppelin pretty easily as they wouldn't weigh much) and the speed wouldn't be a huge issue.
And you'd likely have to make them out of something other than metal, and it would vent hydrogen most of time.
For passengers sure, they are slow. They could instead transport cargo.
I think the biggest problem with them is mooring. It's a complex process, much more so than landing a plane, and requires lots of ground crew. It would have to be automated first.
For large airships, unless stored indoors (which is of course hard because of the size of the structure required) they are essentially permanently in flight. The Goodyear blimps, for example, are followed as they travel by portable (truck-mounted) mooring towers but must have pilots on board 24/7 even when moored, because a modest wind can easily blow the mooring tower over if pilots don't maneuver the ship "on the ground." In high winds mooring is simply impossible and the airships must remain aloft. The logistics of this operation are very complex, and the airship must be able to swing 360 degrees while moored to allow for maneuvering, which requires a huge area. The result is that the Goodyear blimps rely on a pretty limited set of mostly small municipal airports that they have experience with. Closed air force bases are popular since they're most likely to have a far corner of the tarmac that the trucks can easily drive out to but that has no structures or other aircraft use that the airship would interfere with. The Goodyear website has a picture that gives you a good idea of what this looks like: https://www.goodyearblimp.com/behind-the-scenes/img/emeablim...
Not pictured is the truck of helium cylinders that accompanies the blimp for top-ups, which are required as I understand it mostly due to leakage, as the pilots carefully avoid venting helium due to the high cost (it's an option for emergencies).
> For passengers sure, they are slow. They could instead transport cargo.
(1) applies triple for cargo, cargo which is fine with slow tends to be heavy. For reference, the Hindenburg had under 20 tonnes of useful lift, the ship itself weighted around 200 tonnes dry.
If you're happy with your cargo going under 200km/h, you're probably fine slapping it on a truck or five, or on a train with some point-to-point trucking.
It's hard to fathom how incapable airships are, they really aren't very good as you scale up, the use cases where they have any sort of superiority are extremely limited, leading to a very small market.
They're super ultra cool looking and everything, but their reality is absolutely dreary.
The closest thing to a viable use case for airship cargo is the one Cargolifter was aiming for, getting objects too big for roads to landlocked destinations. And the challenge that comes with that was illustrated quite well by Cargolifter: starting with a small craft and sizing up with experience is impossible because for loads fitting a road ground based transport will always win. (I'm sure that CL160 would have changed the economics of wind power forever, but they were too early for that use case to materialize)
Yeah, for cargo they're absolutely insane - maybe in some rare cases they could replace cargo/heavy lift helicopters - but otherwise they don't have much in the way of advantages.
Possibly better: don’t use gas, but enclose an aerogel such as aerographene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerographene) in a strong enough, airtight shell and pump out most of the air.
One of the engineering challenges will be to make this strong enough to withstand the air pressure without getting too heavy. That may require finding new aerogels. You probably also want an aerogel that doesn’t burn easily.
More airships crashed due to poor weather than fires, including the Akron (which was the deadliest of the airship crashes.) Or consider the USS Shenandoah, a helium airship that was torn apart by the weather. It didn't burn though, and most of the crew survived (29 of 43).
Perhaps with modern weather forecasting this threat could be effectively mitigated, but I have doubts.
Planes have numerous advantages, particularly in the early days when mass adoption was still in question: Foremost, they're smaller. This means when one crashes, fewer people die (remember, I'm talking about the early days; Tenerife doesn't count.) Because they're smaller, they cost less. That means fewer investors get hosed when there's an accident, and it's relatively easy for innovators to find funding for new airplanes despite the crashes. Because airplanes were so much smaller and cheaper, it was even practical for a one or two man team to fund and construct their own in their garage; an airship is a much more demanding undertaking. Because they're smaller, they're easier to store inside during bad weather. They're also faster, which makes it easier to evade bad weather and also means you don't have to anticipate bad weather so far in advance. They can land almost anywhere, even in some farmers field, but airships can only be moored in a prearranged locations. That gives an airplane many more options for dealing with emergencies, which contributes to a perception of relative safety.
Could some combination of a partial vacuum and hot air substitute for helium? Of course you'd need some ultra light superstructure to maintain the giant vacuum, but that's "just" engineering.
Air at 175C has about 40% the lifting power as the same volume of helium (or hydrogen). That is very hot, and requires a lot of energy to sustain. Lower temperatures will reduce the lifting power.
That's why thermal airships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_airship) are very uncommon, the lift inefficiency means the structural weight doesn't scale, and the cross-section makes them very hard drive and control.
I guess because airships were already out of fashion by the time the atomic age came, but a thermal airship where the heater is just a radioactive pile seems like a super simple design.
The enormous bulk of the airship is an advantage in this case, you can reduce the amount of shielding you need by keeping the radioactive stuff way off on one side of the vehicle and the people on the other. Of course it would still be a nasty cleanup effort if your airship crashes, and you have to deal with radioactive materials when landed or when doing maintenance. From a practical standpoint there are issues, but in theory the concept works.
A reactor powered thermal airship is a fascinating idea! I'm skeptical that it could work though. Some quick web searching suggests that 3 MW burners for hot air balloons is fairly typical. I'm not sure how light and powerful a reactor could be made, but wikipedia says the Convair NB-36H had a 1 MW air-cooled reactor weighing 16,000kg. That reactor definitely wouldn't work then, too heavy by far and not enough power output. But that was a prototype reactor in the 50s.
Also, shielding seems like a big concern even if the reactor can be built light. To stop neutron radiation you need light nuclei like hydrogen, making water or concrete (containing water) popular choices. These are heavy and bulky though, not conducive to airships.
That's why my consideration for shielding was mostly just distance. Certainly a concept for a time when people were more cavalier about radiation safety.
That’s where the vacuum comes in. Extract half of that hot air, seal the container, and you have 70% of the helium lifting force. (Math may be wrong there but you get the idea)
Really you don’t need hot air at all. If you have a massive vacuum contained by a rigid shell of some super light super strong material you’d be set. Density of air at sea level is around 1 kg/m^3, so 100 m^2 of material lifts 3 tons. Assuming one ton for material, one for propulsion, one for cargo, you end up needing a shell material that can weigh up to 1 kg/m^2 and can hold a near vacuum. Like I said earlier, “just” and engineering problem.
The good news is economies of scale are on your side: 10000 m^2 of shell can lift 3 thousand tons. At that scale your shell can be up to 300 kg/m^2. A bit more reasonable.
Cars/trucks, diesel-electric or electrified freight trains, diesel ships, jet planes, electrical wires, and pipelines, (and tracked vehicles, helicopters, nuclear subs, rockets, cable railways, etc. in niche roles), are practical means of transportation given our particular available resources, history of infrastructure investment, etc., but they are familiar and boring to make a speculative fiction story about.
Coming up with an alternative set of constraints where other kinds of transportation (zeppelins, space elevators, pneumatic tubes, conveyor belts, ornithopters, futuristic sailboats, teleporters, ...) are economically/physically viable is fun for authors and readers.
Definitely! There's a fun YA trilogy by Kenneth Oppel called Airborne that takes place in an alternate-history midcentury where heavier-than-air flight has never been invented and people cross the ocean in giant airships.
He also invents some other stuff like the gas "hydrium" (non-flammable, much more bouyant than hydrogen) as a plot element, and that also helps sell the overall practicality of airship travel. But yeah, it's a good read-aloud to kids or even just a quick one for yourself, similar to something like the Hunger Games.
Now I'm imagining some sort of steampunk multiverse tour guide character popping into our universe with a bunch of customers, like "And here we see the local-minimum zeppelin universe. Notice how, due to the fact that their flying vehicles are heavier than air, they've isolated them to areas outside their cities for safety! They call these 'air-ports.' Yes, like a regular port, but for the air!"
I dunno, in a hypothetical world where massive balloons had had as much R&D put into them as a modern aircraft, they maybe they can use the loitering advantage to make skyscraper landings possible. Anyway, these travelers come from a steampunk universe, so theirs are probably unrealistically capable.
If only Earth had, say, 1.5x the atmospheric pressure and two thirds the gravity. Lighter-than-air vehicles could be super feasible (but so would heavier-than-air ones!)
Zeppelins could be absurdly useful on Titan as well as the upper atmospheres of Venus and even the gas giants.
Actually wouldn't it be the other way around with gravity? Higher gravity would make planes less practical while airships don't care because their lift comes from buoyancy that scales with gravity.
That said, thicker air would also mean more lift from wings, wouldn't it? And more drag for the massive cross-section of an airship.
Two thirds the gravity, so thicker air and less gravity is what I meant. Gravity doesn't affect buoyancy, but it does affect the weight of the payload. Lower gravity means you lift more stuff with the same buoyant mass, right? And yeah, thicker air would mean more drag, but also more thrust from the engines.
Wouldn't gravity affect buoyancy? Since buoyancy is caused by the heavier substance flowing under the lighter substance and pushing it upwards, wouldn't higher gravity mean higher buoyancy, and therefore the lifting power vs payload would be a wash?
Totally. The tech that went into making them work at the time was incredible. Before polymers they were made from among many other things, cow gut. They had a ban on sausage making in Germany during the war to ration all the cow casing for use in the zeppelin program.
I had an opportunity to tour the Akron facility when I was an employee of Lockheed Martin in 2009. At the time, Lockheed was the owner after acquiring it from Goodyear. Visiting the hanger was one of the coolest work trips I have ever had the opportunity go on. It’s a large building, and pictures doesn’t do it justice. I wasn’t able to take any pictures for security reasons.
I had an opportunity to test an application I entirely wrote which controlled imaging equipment on PTDS (https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/p...). This was my first job out of college and it was amazing to see my code control behavior on such large machines. I coded my part according to design specs and had no idea if it would actually work. Fortunately, it did and was a nice development for my career.
It was co-written by Stephen Baxter, and if you're familiar with either his or Pratchett's writing then sometimes it's a bit too obvious who wrote which parts, which for me at least led to a certain amount of immersion breaking dissonance. Additionally I would say that the series goes steadily downhill after the first book, but is still pretty good overall.
If you find yourself in the SF Bay Area, do visit https://www.moffettfieldmuseum.org/ . Their docents are actual air force veterans with tons of stories. They are so happy to chat. I had a great experience.
Lived in the Bay Area for 26 years and only just now figured out Moffett Field is named for "Admiral William A. Moffett, killed in the crash of U.S.S. Akron".
I knew however that the dirigible hangars off 101 were for the Navy's airship fleet.
Hours and hours of my childhood were spend amassing Carriers in Starcraft 1, on moneymaps. My friends and I would build massive defenses (because moneymaps favor that sort of thing), then stomp the computers, inevitably betray each other, and have to try and wear down each others' defenses with wave after wave of carriers, battlecruisers, guardians, etc... Never learned to play the game properly, but it was great fun to throw around massive resources like that.
Take a look at Supreme Commander and the crazy expensive units you can mass build in it. Some of them are called "Game enders" in that if you let them get built, they win. This includes a building that generates infinite resources, a building that builds a nuke basically every minute, a flying UFO air carrier, and multiple giant walking killer robots.
Also the default unit cap is 1000. Also each and every bullet, laser, weapon, etc are simulated in real time, meaning if you are desperate and lucky, you can protect yourself from said nuke by having a plane fly into it and detonate it above your base, doing way less damage.
I struggle to play to a capacity to even beat the AI, but it's so much fun to just play around.
If flying aircraft carriers of this vintage interest you, "The War in the Air"—written by H.G. Wells in 1907 and published in 1908—is chock full of them.
> It is (like many of Wells's works) notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts—particularly the use of aircraft for the purpose of warfare—as well as conceptualizing and anticipating events related to World War I.
If you're in the Bay Area I can thoroughly recommend a trip to the Moffett Field Historical Society museum, which has all sorts of fascinating things relating to the history of the USS Macon which used to operate out of Hangar One right behind the museum.
That airships.net is a cool site, ty. My old man, was a huge, zeppelin, dirigible, nut. I never got the story out of him, why, but he would have loved that site. The entry on the "flying aircraft carriers" in particular was cool. The audacity of launching/recovering planes like that, amazing.
This reminds me of Amazon's patent # 9,305,280 for flying warehouses. IIRC, they were working on using them as mobile drone delivery hubs. I think there was talk of using them at sporting events and the like.
> The deep-ring design also accommodated a Navy requirement that all areas of the structure be accessible during flight; the 8-foot deep rings were large enough for a man to climb their entire circumference.
How did this work? Weren't they meant to be sealed and filled with helium?
Even if you could open a hatch on the bottom without too much leakage, was the plan for mechanics to operate inside the envelope wearing some kind of breathing apparatus?
Rigid airships are not full of helium (or hydrogen). The outer skin is for aerodynamics, not to seal the gas.
Inside, they have a series of gas bags affixed to the rigid structure that can expand or contract according to the pressure at altitude. At full altitude, those gas bags would expand to their full size and take up most of the volume in the airship, but there was still a lot of space around them (and inside the trusses) for storage, maintenance access, walkways, and so on.
The helium was in bladders (big balloons) inside the structure and the outer skin covering. There were many bladders together inside the metal and the outer skin.
I saw old footage, posted on yt, with three sailors lifted of the ground when Akron was landing, tragically, two could not hold on. I recall that, because I though to myself that today's news would not have shown all the gruesome details, specially with such sensational commentary.
Err, it would be pretty easy to shoot down as it would have a radar or visual cross-section that would be pretty big. And if anything flammable is used for lift, it's already an FAE bomb waiting for an igniter.
Zeppelins because way less interesting once AA cannons were developed or fighters could climb quickly. And that was 100 years ago.
The time between the first powered heavier-than-air flight of the Wright Flyer to the launch of these airships that can launch and recover planes was 27 years, 7 months, and 22 days. The rate of technological change in the early part of the 20th century was incredible.
It's a bit tangential, but the role of small disposable drones in warfare will only increase in the coming years. They're one of the more terrifying (non-WMD) weapons in terms of capabilities in my mind.
I believe weaponized drone swarms should be categorized with chemical weapons, cluster munitions, etc. A few thousand drones carrying shrapnel explosives and trained to recognize humans is basically a mobile minefield. It’s terrifying, really. I expect they will be used heavily if WW3 comes around, with devastating effect. Much like horse mounted cavalry encountering machine guns for the first time at the beginning of WW1. I’m not a weapons expert, so I could be wrong, but it seems so cheap and practical I can’t think of a scenario where it doesn’t happen eventually.
Chemical weapons aren't banned because they're effective, but because a) the way they kill is so cruel b) they kill indiscriminately.
Cluster munitions are banned by some countries (notably not including the US, China, Russia and India) because they leave UXO that is likely to explode later, killing or maiming civilians.
Just like the other examples (e.g. machine guns), I don't see drone swarms getting banned. Slaughterbots will be a documentary one day.
I've always wondered if we can have void ships (rigid vacuum bladders) with enough advances in materials science. Skip the helium shortage, dodge the hydrogen debate and have lift scale favorably with size.
Is there a reason airships end up being round? I would think more of a saucer shape would be easier to move through the air and less subject to crosswind whims.
As long as hydrogen is (ignorantly) banned, airships will never make a comeback.
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, using hydrogen as lifting gas, flew 1.7 million km safely. [1]. Built in the 20's, without polymers or hydrogen sensors or electronics of any kind.
The real problem, however, is not the lifting gas. It never was. Airships biggest nemesis is the wind. Luckily we have it solved today with radar and satellite imagery.
I'm not sure wind and weather are solved. Planes, ships, and to a lesser extent cars/trains are still lost to weather quite frequently. Yes, we can track it better, but people still have to go about their lives in inclement weather. Knowing where it is does not mean we never have to deal with it.
Also, as others have noted elsewhere, hydrogen is still an absolute pain to work with. It's better than it was, but that doesn't make it safe. In-flight fires are still a nightmare on planes - it'd be much worse if the only thing keeping you in the air is a massive hydrogen balloon.
All this is apart from airships being slow, unwieldy, relatively low altitude, etc.
From a systems point-of-view the main problem is that there is no redundancy in a single balloon. Once materials are designed that are lightweight, strong and cheap enough to design one of these with many small balloons, they would be less vulnerable, especially in warfare.
It seems to me that with enough bladders made of some kind of lightweight fireproof material that prevented the explosion of one from exploding the others, blimps could still be useful as floating aircraft carriers for drones or other types of aircraft. And equipped with modern laser anti-aircraft weapons I bet they would be less vulnerable to attack in certain military applications as well.
The caveat is that volume and surface area have a cube square relationship, so the smaller you make each lifting bladder the more weight you spend on material vs. what you get in buoyancy. Lots of small balloons are less efficient than one large balloon.
Also, it turns out that it's actually pretty hard to shoot down airships. They don't "pop" like rubber balloon, bullets tend to pass right through the thin skin. Missiles don't detonate because they don't meet enough resistance, etc... you get slow leaks that might eventually doom the airship, but only after its lifting gas reserves are depleted.
Obviously one would use appropriate munitions against such a target.
18th century naval engineers devised chain shot (two half-rounds of a cannonball with a length of chain between them) to wreak havok on masts, rigging, and sails of enemy ships, a target not unlike an airship.
The "flying ginsu" AGM-114R9X Hellfire missile was developed for other missions, but might be the harbinger of specific anti-airship / anti-aerostat munitions. Small bullet holes are one thing, large gaping gashes from a flying knife, and, say, some form of incendiary as an encouragement to hydrogen ignition, would be an entirely different matter.
Even tracer rounds from standard machine-gun fire would probably give a hydrogen-filled aerostat a bad day.
In January, DARPA successfully launched a Dynetics’ X-61A Gremlin UAV from the bay of a Lockheed Martin C-130A cargo aircraft. The program is aiming to demonstrate the efficacy of low-cost combat-capable drones that can be both deployed and recovered from cargo planes. DARPA envisions using cargo planes like the C-130 to deploy these drones while still outside of enemy air defenses; allowing the drones to go on and engage targets before returning to the airspace around the “mother ship” to be recaptured and carried home for service or repairs.
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/flying-aircraft-carriers-are-to...