• Lighter-Than-Air vehicles! Is this the first step toward Interstellar space ships?
    44 replies, posted
[QUOTE=OvB;38660425][img]http://i.imgur.com/Scdza.jpg[/img] Doesn't look half bad.[/QUOTE] oh no airplane inflation porn D;
That's what we need; more modern airships in the mainstream. We wouldn't need all these damn runways, just the right kinds of docks and hangars. Also, would it cost less fuel to drive?
[QUOTE=ironman17;38668943]That's what we need; more modern airships in the mainstream. We wouldn't need all these damn runways, just the right kinds of docks and hangars. Also, would it cost less fuel to drive?[/QUOTE] Not sure. All this airship talk makes me want to go build one! Now if only I had knowledge of Steam Engineering.
[quote]The airship in the hangar is being built to test various key components of a design that could one day contain a hotel, casino or spa[/quote] [img]http://www.zeitgeistgamereview.com/wp-content/gallery/just-cause-2-screenshots/just_cause_2_screen_02.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=shozamar;38668915]I always wondered why rockets don't use airship-style technology to ascend to the outer-reaches of the atmosphere without the need for all that fuel. I mean, obviously they'd need helium, but surely it'd be cheaper and, if done with a removable craft, reusable? They would obviously have to take some fuel to get beyond the atmosphere, but it'd be much less. But obviously there must be some huge problem with doing this that I'm stupidly blind to, as it'd have been done by now.[/QUOTE] The Space Shuttle, alone, without its rocket stack, weighs 2,040,000kg. To lift one kilogram of mass at sea level requires 974 liters of helium. That's 0.973 cubic meters. To lift the entire stack would require 1,984,920 cubic meters of helium. That equates to a round balloon 795 meters across, just to get off the ground. At an altitude of 10km, air is about four times less dense, which means four times more helium is needed to reach that height. Once it gets there, there's not much it can do, since just the shuttle can't reach orbit. For comparison, the Space Shuttle using its conventional booster stack reaches that altitude in less than a minute. In general, airships are a technological dead-end. They were useful at a time when large aircraft were expensive, unreliable, and beyond the means of conventional engineering, but nowadays there is little use for them when aeroplanes are much more effective at their traditional roles. It takes so much gas to lift a comparatively tiny payload that the cost is nowhere near as viable as conventional aircraft, and in general any airship big enough to carry a useful payload is too big to build feasibly.
[QUOTE=catbarf;38669159]The Space Shuttle, alone, without its rocket stack, weighs 2,040,000kg. To lift one kilogram of mass at sea level requires 974 liters of helium. That's 0.973 cubic meters. To lift the entire stack would require 1,984,920 cubic meters of helium. That equates to a round balloon 795 meters across, just to get off the ground. At an altitude of 10km, air is about four times less dense, which means four times more helium is needed to reach that height. Once it gets there, there's not much it can do, since just the shuttle can't reach orbit. For comparison, the Space Shuttle using its conventional booster stack reaches that altitude in less than a minute. In general, airships are a technological dead-end. They were useful at a time when large aircraft were expensive, unreliable, and beyond the means of conventional engineering, but nowadays there is little use for them when aeroplanes are much more effective at their traditional roles. It takes so much gas to lift a comparatively tiny payload that the cost is nowhere near as viable as conventional aircraft, and in general any airship big enough to carry a useful payload is too big to build feasibly.[/QUOTE] If you could get a rocket to the upper atmosphere with an airship, then the fuel needed to get into orbit would be a lot less and therefore the craft would be smaller. It's worth looking into (probably has been looked into) and seeing if we can make it viable.
How does this have anything to do with interstellar space ships?
Dibs on naming one of them "The Pandora".
[QUOTE=draugur;38659992]Second hindenburg time?[/QUOTE] Have you ever noticed how blimps use a different gas to float and a different "skin" to contain the gas than zeppelins did? Engineers learn from their mistakes.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cb/Led_Zeppelin_-_Mothership.jpg[/img] ???
[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;38660365]I fucking love Zeppelins. They're so Majestic in the sky. [t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/NH43901-enhanced.jpg[/t][/QUOTE] [img]http://images.mocpages.com/user_images/7711/1184742386ship-air.jpg_SPLASH.jpg[/img]
Fuck lighter than air, we need stupidly impractical giant rotors. [img]http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2012/10/2658-08-709962.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;38660504]Streamline Airship. Very futuristic. I like it, but I prefer the older styles, like the picture I posted.[/QUOTE] its like someone took a airplane and fed it a shitload
Reminds me of those hybrid airships Lockheed Martin experimented with a few years back. Those were heavier than air, mind, but the entire inflatable was a lifting body and if I remember my tour guide correctly they had a similar buoyancy regulation system.
[QUOTE=Kingy_ME;38669410]If you could get a rocket to the upper atmosphere with an airship, then the fuel needed to get into orbit would be a lot less and therefore the craft would be smaller. It's worth looking into (probably has been looked into) and seeing if we can make it viable.[/QUOTE] Except it's not viable because of the sheer size of the airship required.
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