Airship Carvanning - Now in Full HD - Top Gear - Series 14 - BBC https://youtu.be/hGSqq6R5hm8
James's airship caravanning adventure hits the rocks as he drifts into Norwich airport's airspace while Richard, unsure of which caravan park James will actually end up in, undertakes a tour of the South East in the Lamborghini Gallardo! First uploaded 18/05/2010

Like some people want to retire to a yacht, I've wanted to retire to a solar-powered airship since before I entered the workforce.

I've been following Aeroscraft, SkyCat, Walrus HULA, HAV and all of the other players in the semi-rigid or rigid airship game for a long time now. I feel with modern meteorology, modern materials and other modern technology, we could make safe airships using hydrogen instead of less-buoyant, more expensive helium like everyone wants to use. The ignorant and semi-informed layman still misunderstands the Hindenburg disaster nigh on 80 years later because nobody feels any compulsion to look closer into it. There are low-hanging fruit to be grabbed in demonizing it and it was done by the Nazis so why pursue it?

  >>21233
Okay so how do you propose getting around the "strong wind/rainstorm can destroy the vehicle, and it can't outrun them" issue?

>>21233
Is there some mass brainwashing effect going on? I've heard six other people say airships are their retirement dream in the past week.

I think someone paid OP vid to enter everyones youtube feed, and they loaded it with some MK Ultra shit.

>>21235
Modern engines are a lot stronger than 1870s ones, airships can definitely power through storms. The only downside is that there would be more movement, kind of like a boat on a sea.

They can also outrun almost any storm, rise above a storm in some cases, or land and tie down before it hits. Losing an airship is more likely on the ground where the hangar roof might cave in.

>>21228
Needs better pitch control or stability.

>>21229
He should have brought an anchor with bungee cord. That way he could have landed facing into the wind, and then not gotten dragged along. The reason he did not do so here, I think, is that he would have been tangled up into the envelope had he been dragged downwind when facing into the wind. I need to watch the full episode at some point.

I think the basic concept is sound, it just needs to be implemented properly; but the lack of time, budget, and engineering ability is what results in such enjoyable to watch shenanigans and failures that made that show so fun.

>>21233
Agreed.

Is the short of it that the Doping on the Hindenburg outer skin was extremely flammable?

There is a science fiction book by Dean Ing, "The Big Lifters" where in one of the subplots the protagonists developed a ground laser boosted (for altitude boosts over the mountains) airship system that could pick up and drop off multimodal freight containers from trains. His goal was to get big rig long haul 18 wheelers off the roads. I think you might enjoy it.

>>21235
Like a fast yacht, a properly designed airship can outrun the weather, or it could fly above the weather.

I wonder what the gondola transport vehicle was adapted from.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-42037832
>The Airlander 10 - a combination of a plane and an airship - was seen to "break in two" at an airfield in Bedfordshire, an eyewitness said.

>Owner Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd said it appeared the Airlander broke free from its mooring mast, triggering a safety system which deflates the aircraft.

  Saw this neat video recently by an engineer who wrote a book on the R101. It explains why helium isn't/wasn't really viable as well as the...uh, interesting...gas bag technology the British used.

While every airship from their glory days seems to have ended in disaster, I still feel like modern technology and controls could rectify the problems. It wouldn't be cheap but it could be better.

>>21870
I'll also say that I think the aspirational design characteristics of many of these grand, intercontinental airships contributed to their grand failure.

If you design an airship that doesn't try to take over cargo ships' market share over the oceans, eliminate the need to go from London to Cairo to Karachi to Melbourne and back or even cross the Atlantic without refueling inbetween, equip it with carbon fiber, rubber, plastic and aluminum where appropriate, don't try to power it with locomotive engines, set it up with 4G, radio and/or satellite links to modern weather radar feeds and match that with historical meteorological maps of graded wind-risk areas, you could do a lot of good without leaving any given continent or going too far beyond the shore.

Instead of thinking it's a cargo ship or luxury ocean liner in the sky like they did in the 1920s and 1930s, think of it as an 18 wheeler (or RV) that doesn't need a road.

I'd love it if they designed one to be an extremely-high-altitude, super-long-endurance "Spooky"-style gunship

>>21872

As if that isn't already above our heads RIGHT NOW!

I'm also a member of the "retire to an airship" club. They definitely could be repurposed into an RV of the sky. Just a small ship big enough to house 3 people in relative comfort.

So, I'm doing a little research and I wanted to check with /v/ to see if there's any input here.

I'm looking at metropolitan areas that are not far apart as the crow flies but nevertheless isolated due to geography, whether that's mountains or impassable swamp. Two examples might be Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paolo, Brazil as well as Yaziva, Panama and Turbo, Colombia.

Both Rio and Sao Paolo are huge metropolitan areas and they're only 270 miles apart on the same coastline but it takes 7.5 or 8 hours to drive from one to the other thanks to the mountainous terrain and impossibility of a convenient coastal highway.

Yaviza and Turbo are the ends of the Darien Gap, the only break in the Pan-American highway. The distance between them is only 60 miles but it's proven impossible to build roads due to expense and environmental concerns.

What other examples can you think of?