I miss those big boys like you wouldn't believe
>>65330413
Play some Crimson Skies, you'll feel better.
>>65330413macon my beloved
i would give the entire world to serve on the macon or even the akron. even knowing that the akron would one day leave me for dead in the cruel atlantic i would go. if the genie said to me>you can fly aboard an airship buti would say "yes" before he even finished with:>it has to be the akron and it has to be her final flightand then the genie would look at me like nigga what but motherfucker you said airship. i don't care if i die horribly you said airship. you said be part of the most human invention ever invented. airships are the dumbest shit to ever exist and only something as retarded as a mammal with higher intelligence could ever invent them. it is for this same reason that they will never be invented ever again. there is a fleeting period in the development of civilizations in which the lighter than air ship can ever exist and we've already outgrown that period and motherfucker says to me>be part of the most human thing to ever exist and die in the most human way possibleand i don't say yes? motherfucker. nigger ass genie. let me go, damn it. let me go. i want to go.
>>65332216You can still visit one. Granted you'll need a specialized submarine, but still.
>>65331315crimson skies was way too good to not have any sort of followup
>>65332673I agree, though there was also that XBox game. I never did play that.
They almost came back in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to a company in New Jersey. Lot of good information and some stories, but I will not tell you folks until tomorrow.
Do you think it could have worked?
Just imagine kamikaze strikes on those things.
>>65330413You weren't even alive
>>65330413I think the Finnish are planning to test them out as drone motherships.
>>65332735I was promised a story
>>65334964Let's check: USS Akron had 8 engines, each capable of producing 420kW each, for a required peak power output of 3.4MW. Let's say for simplicity that you want that power coming directly from.solar panels. Best current values I could find say 5 m2/kW, meaning you'd need 17000 m2 of flight deck, which would require to cut the Akron like a hotdog bun and use the two halves together as a flight deck to achieve those figures.
use 'em for AWACS and anti-sub
So much more soul then modern aircraft. They were too based to live.
You have come to the right place, OP. I fucking love zeppelins.
>>65335074Hypothetically would a nuclear reactor resembling a submarines be able to power it?
>>65335220nta, but we had multiple plans for nuke zeps.
>>65335226Prolly for the better that never went anywhere, zepps were fucking flimsy crafts.
>>65335230They were more or less fine. The problem tended to be that they were actually -too- safe, and captains tended to get overconfident after so many flights without incident as a result.
And of course, despite hilariously few deaths compared to even a single airliner going down, people have gotta go MUH HINDENBURGH and piss and shit everywhere.
Fun fact, they tested to see how many Marines plus equipment the Akron sisters could transport, if they had to, say, rapidly reinforce Wake Island. The answer turned out to be about 230ish practically carried.
>>65335226I'm a tourist for /zep/ so I appreciate the info
>>65335259youhavetoeatalltheeggs.jpg
Got plenty more zep pics, but running low on the Akron sisters for now.
>>65335236Hindenburg was technically very preventable, I mean more like the USS Macon just fucking vanishing at sea and them never finding it again (just trace debris). They don't hold up well to harsh weather.
>>65335236Didn't at least 1 guy survive the hiddenberg?
>>65335814A number of people did, because the fire was in the gas bags carrying the gondola of the zeppelin, and the flames had not yet reached down there. As gas was venting/burning from there, the ship was descending towards the ground, and the survivors were those who jumped at the right time, and then absolutely fucking booked it as the flaming craft was collapsing around.People who didn't jump got trapped in the inferno.
>>65335806Roughly bull and shit on that account. Akron was brought down by a faulty early altimeter because it was the the latter half of the dawn of aviation itself (better models coming literally out the next year after), and Macon wasn't even below the waves when the fleet reached her. Macon herself was only destroyed due to borderline sabotage from Admiral Sellers ordering them over the most dangerous mountain route imaginable over the US and subsequently never allowing the resulting tail damage to be repaired (he was a man who notably started off on a screw frigate and especially despised aviation in all forms, fixed wing or LTA)>>65335814Basically everyone survived the Hindenburg.
Also, by the altimeter thing, I mean it read the air so wrong that they were about to hit the water while it was telling them they were over 500 feet above it.
In a zero visibility storm, as well.
Zeppelins had the unfortunate fact that large airliners weren't a thing yet over their heads, and that they were glorious. Nobody gives a shit about the 107/107 people dying on Avianca Flight 203. -Everyone- know about the 35/97 dying on Hindenburg.
>>65335849I may have mixed up Macon and Akron.That aside, I think zeppelins were realistically held back by their very limited lifting power, you can make that gargantuan gas bag, but it's just not going to carry very much weight for you.
>>65335899We know where both of them rest. The greatest limiting factor of zeppelins isn't even the zeppelins themselves, they scale almost infinitely better with size. It's the hangars to actually service them. The ships cost slightly more than a destroyer once economies of scale come into effect; and only carry more when larger. Macon cost less than half of what Akron did. The problem is that while you can keep them on a mast for a long while, eventually they'll have to come into the 'drydock' for overhauls, and that drydock costs an absolute fuckon and continues to be one of the largest standing structures on earth. While at the time that might've been arguably worth it given that there was no heavier than air transport that could match their capacity, but afterwords, a lot less so. Now if zeps want to compete, they need to bring more to the table, which the kinda do, but not enough.
Could you make a double hulled airship? An hydrogen inner layer to serve as lifting gas and fuel and an outer layer of helium to reduce the chance of freak accidents.
>>65335913Honestly an interesting concept. Quite frankly, hydrogen itself would probably be fine all by itself by modern safety standards in practices, though if we're taking period it'd be a real pain in the ass for crews to have to wander around the hull on an oxygen supply. Actually, a fun fact is that ludicrous amounts of Kaiserliche Marine dudes with undiagnosed lung conditions died refusing to put on oxygen masks, because those were for pussies. It took a top-down shitkicking from Peter Strasser himself before they gave that up and they finally agreed to wear them at what were ludicrously high altitudes for the time.
Oh, also, for the ZRS program, Schütte-Lanz (another large rigid airship builder of the period) actually applied, but only to prove that Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Shipyards stole their designs so that he could claim that he could build them in his existing conventional shipyards. If that was true was questionable. Personally, with what he knows this anon thinks that it was (sorta) plausible, but either way, neither of them won the bid.
If you happen to be a true autist like me, don't buy ZRS the book, just for the record. it's a modern New Zealander self-inserting as an Australian and a lot of it gets caught up in some real bullshit about him cuckolding an American zeppelin captain instead of, y'know. Plausible historical military fiction about weapon systems that could've been.
>>65335944Someday, I'll manage to shunt my way into the Goodyear archives in Macon to get the info of what this actually looked like, by the way. Someday.
>>65332689Its very good,try emulating it
