The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers”
airships.net
airships.net
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...
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).
This is an idea we flirt with, to varying success, over and over and over again.
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.)
I mean, it looks like a giant floating butt. Maybe they are embarrassed to release it.
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
Stealth Blimp: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Stealth+Blimp&atb=v269-1&ia...
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato_(1977_...
Like many modern computer games:
Mission brief: "You have a mission of the utmost..."
Me: clicks skip "Go in, shoot stuff, got it."
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?
You control the sea, air, land, and finally space. You would have complete dominance that would render ICBM's moot.
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.
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.
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)
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/p...
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.
Don't cruise missiles have wings?
I added “quite possibly, fins” because I thought of that missile, but could hav been more explicit, and yes, those may be wings.
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?
Edit: It looks like the Goodyear Blimp is still a thing! It's going to be in PA/SC/LA this month. Here's the schedule: https://www.goodyearblimp.com/news-and-events/schedule.html
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-class_blimp#Nuclear_weapon_e...
I think that means that we lost more to weather than combat, which was their downfall.
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.
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.
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.
Probably not likely with the looming helium shortage, lack of replacement gasses (?), etc. But I want my sweet 1920s art deco retrofuturist reality :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can likely be done quite safely, as the gasbag of the Hindenburg was very flammable and could have burned even if full of helium.
And hydrogen is basically free.
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
And you'd likely have to make them out of something other than metal, and it would vent hydrogen most of time.
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.
(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.
There are few other places where roads or boats have effectiveness reduced to the point where an airship becomes an option.
Imagine a zeppelin configured like a sailing ship of the skies, designed to travel mainly under wind power and rarely fire its engines
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).
Airships are huge and hard to manage.
We fly in aluminum balloons filled with jet fuel all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMZk-cHU6Zk&t=121s
We figure out why they catch fire, and fix it. The Hindenburg disaster has straightforward engineering fixes.
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.
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.
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).
Perhaps with modern weather forecasting this threat could be effectively mitigated, but I have doubts.
Not sure all can be mitigated, however.
Even in the early days, altitudes of 10k -- 30k feet were attainable.
Airships and blimps spend most of their time at < 2k -- 5k feet. That's pretty much right in the heart of weather, as well as ground-influenced winds.
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.
So this is a non-starter.
The fact that aerogels are also intensely friable under stress also works against this. You'd end up with a bunch of sand in a sack, falling to earth.
In fiction, alternative universes always have more zeppelins.
(It's actually one of the most common ways to visually signal "alternate timeline").
I'd imagine massive balloons are no more safe over the city than current aircrafts.
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.
Zeppelins could be absurdly useful on Titan as well as the upper atmospheres of Venus and even the gas giants.
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.
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.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21662645
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897492
Airships.net also has an article about the Zeppelin NT used in the Airship Ventures and Friedrichshafen flights:
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.
And didn't Riverworld have aircraft carrier airships? Or maybe just slaved / sibling airships? It's been decades since I last read that series.
I knew however that the dirigible hangars off 101 were for the Navy's airship fleet.
Like a hive releasing bees.
This was always my favorite way to play, just get 100 carriers and watch all the drones buzzing around.
Are you my friends?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_the_Air
> 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.
I wrote it up for my website the other day: https://www.niche-museums.com/105
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?
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.
Zeppelins because way less interesting once AA cannons were developed or fighters could climb quickly. And that was 100 years ago.
https://interestingengineering.com/meet-the-boeing-747-aac-a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTGBFY82Gik&feature=youtu.be
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.
Flying seacraft carriers.
Some new designs of airships shape the hull as an airfoil, so it generates lift, supplementing the lighter-than-air-ness.
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.
But there is? Balloons like this were made out of a bunch of bladders. What you see externally is just the skin.
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.
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.
We've come a long way in terms of lightweight and strong materials from the 1930s when these were constructed.