Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)
neverwasmag.com
neverwasmag.com
How do you land a biplane on a Zeppelin? You fly up underneath it, match your speed with that of the airship, then hook onto a landing frame lowered beneath the aircraft and let it lift you back onboard.
I gave a talk about Zeppelin history back in 2008, and recently rediscovered the slides and audio and turned them into a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU
It has images of the biplane landing mechanism at 3m57s.
While by no means a proper simulator, it certainly makes a fun arcade and sci-fi shooter experience.
In the context of transportation planes seem to have significant issues dealing with loons wielding laser pointers. So unless you classify those as military technology you will have a hard time finding something cheaper and easier to get your hands on.
With the incorporation of superchargers and turbochargers in aircraft engines (and an overall increase in power), this drastically increased the altitude limits for propeller aircraft.
When the airships could still fly higher than aircraft, that reduced their vulnerability to direct attack.
They don't deal with rough weather well, though.
Originally they had wooden decks, boatloads of fuel, and no meaningful armor. Nowadays their made with ~70,000 tons of steel, and fire is still a major concern.
On 12 July 2020, a fire started on a lower vehicle-storage deck while the ship was undergoing maintenance at Naval Base San Diego. It took four days for firefighters to extinguish the fire, which injured at least 63 sailors and civilians and severely damaged the ship. After a lengthy investigation into the cause of the fire, a sailor was charged with arson but was acquitted at trial. Repairs to the ship were estimated to take up to seven years and cost up to $3.2 billion, so the ship was decommissioned on 15 April 2021 and sold for scrap.
Featured in Indiana Jones the Last crusade, game and movie: https://youtu.be/s0vNsH81YeA?t=119
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27AAlYlyvZs has the plane leaving the Zeppelin.
It never occurred to me to question whether that was historically accurate (it looks very straightforward in the movie).
The other nitpick is that the airship should really run up to its highest airspeed to allow the biplane to recover quickly when launched. So that requires coordination with the airship crew.
Which means on the wind, and modern hydro aircraft carriers do the same.
I'd bet they'd all be safe today by simply not moving into weather systems.
Airships have pretty surprisingly low service ceilings, and experience a huge trade-off in payload capacity (by weight) vs. operating altitude.
A modern airship can be made much lighter while also being sturdier and somehow structurally redundant. But its sheer size still makes it expensive. The only relatively operational development I'm aware of is Airlander, and it's still a prototype, since the US Army rejected it.
It will be safe but of less use than other aircraft/transport that can work in bad weather, or can wait out in a hangar or get in and out of a bad weather system quickly.
https://youtu.be/LyaYaFzSPac?si=hZ6HV0YuCOg-WUYT
Basically, the economics no longer work. Airships really can’t carry that much weight relative to their operational costs. They’re loud and they’re slow which isn’t a great customer experience. The amount of money you would have to pay for a ticket to make it economical would be more than a first class ticket on a modern jet, which would also get you there much faster.
(BTW all of Mustard’s videos are great. They have super high production value and are primarily about transportation technologies of the 50s 60s 70s and 80s. I recommend watching it on Nebula if you can.)
Comparing airships to first class air travel isn't the right basis. You want to compare to trains and ships at least. You take a ship or train when speed isn't the objective, rather experience. An airship experience with a few dozen passengers taking tours of beautiful scenery over the course of a coastal trip, or like a group hot air balloon, or something like that.
not sure if that's the case with HSR
"Match speed" seems like a thing that's really easy to write and much harder to actually do :)
As far as I have read this was not an easy process generally, however aborting and trying again would be fairly easy as you're nowhere near the ground and have plenty of time to recover.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/here-...
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/09/13/us-drone-swarms-ta...
I suspect that in light of the war in Ukraine were going to see a lot of development on this front.
Russia has the upper hand in the skies. They send out the drones, the Patriot systems shoot their load to get them down, the air defence is defeated and then the hypersonic missiles come in.
Sure, the UK/France have had some success taking down some of their Black Sea fleet but I think you are over-egging the pudding to claim 'destruction of the fleet', particularly when it is NATO shooting their very expensive missiles.
There is a long list of Western toys that you no longer hear about because they are not any more useful than any of the flying aircraft carriers. Things just get shot down all too easily. At the start they had those Turkish Bayraktar drones and they were seen as a serious weapon, nowadays nobody would send that junk into the sky. It is not just drones, things like HIMARS are now relegated to trash too. Remember Challenger 2, Bradley and whatever those French wheeled tanks were? Lancet FPV drones saw to them all. It was a complete waste of taxpayer money. And yes, I pay taxes.
This joke of sending F-16s has been going on for a while, with excuses about no pilots trained. They won't be deploying drone swarms with them, that is boy's comic fantasy stuff.
Neither side has the air superiority that NATO/USA/UK has when bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan. Things like the Baba-yaga crop duster drone are able to get some kills and NATO are able to FPV drone any tanks that Russia sends out into the open, but you never see Javelin or other wonder weapons these days, and they were designed for that job specifically.
Lives are lost in this conflict and at considerable economic cost. "Who started it" is not the point, we had that one a century ago with WW1. Why repeat the stupidity, for weapons fetish reasons?
Patriot is not used to shoot down drones.
> Why repeat the stupidity, for weapons fetish reasons?
It's a good reminder that Ukraine has no wish for this war.
Who is Ukraine anyway? They don't have elections and the people supplying the weapons tend to have residence in London and Washington. They certainly wish for war. In April 2022 'Ukraine' was ready to sign on the dotted line for a peace deal brokered by Turkey but Boris Johnson flew out and nixed the deal. This is documented, so, in a way, you are right, and on both accounts.
Challenger 2 tanks, for example, have only had one loss as far as i'm aware. They've mainly been used in a short-range artillery role, firing at field fortifications from 3km or so away, a role in which i've heard they are considered capable. They cannot operate in a frontline role, no tank on either side has or can.
HIMARS has singlehandedly caused a full russian shift in tactics, placing their fuel depots, ammunition dumps, and supply lines more than 100km away from the front line, which has contributed massively to their ongoing supply issues.
Yes, evolution of tactics of drone warfare has changed the face of the battle considerably, leaving some weapons less useful. They would also be useless in the hands of our own millitary. They have already been paid for, there is no "spending", we are literally sending kit that the regular army has had for decades to the frontlines. If it proves useless, then we can be glad that the ukranians found that out for us.
Yes, some equipment is lost in war. It's perhaps worth noting that a weapon used in combat and lost is a much more worthwhile one than something sitting in storage and brought out once a year for training. That scenario, to me, is "weapons fetishism", and contributes to inane cost bloat.
With HIMARS there was a problem with shooting down the missiles and taking out the launchers, but Russia got there in the end. That is why they are now using Vampire instead. They also ran out of ammo for HIMARS and had to switch up to cluster weapons, which resulted in the Russians bringing out their own cluster weapons.
The entire front is only moving one way, west. This has been at a cost of many thousands of lives, sent to this meat grinder that benefits only the arms companies.
After airships were seen to be impractical, the navy switched its planning to use seaplanes. Originally intended also to be bombers (hence the PBY designation for "Patrol Bombers") they proved their worth in recon and rescue roles in WW2. Their ability to operate from unimproved islands (via seaplane tender ships) was somewhat overshadowed by the unforeseen speed with which the Seabees could build new forward airbases, and by the enormous expansion in US Navy aircraft carriers in the latter stages of the war.
Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me. Cruise missiles like the JASSM-158C look a lot like an autonomous unmanned aircraft to me. DARPA has been continually working on this thing for a decade now, and their recent Integration Test Event 12 involved flying four of the already remarkably intelligent missile in formation to target. Not that they'll tell us exactly what went down here, but I rather expect that under-bids the magnitude of the mission and perhaps the inter-coordination of these missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158C_LRASM https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2024-04-3-lockheed-martin-co...
Ok, so, I've somewhat convinced myself that missiles are now basically their own aircraft at this point. If you can consider that, then we do have flying carrier aircraft: the Rapid Dragon system palletizes the missiles, & has them dropped out of C-17 or C-130 aircraft. Not quite up to par with the proposed Boeing 747 Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft (CMCA), but still pretty real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
More contemporarily, I can definitely imagine, say, an attack helicopter that can deploy it's own small swarm of autonomous drones.
Cruise missiles and (aerial) drones are both (unmanned) aircraft, and, yes, the lines between them essentially don't exist any more (especially since exoendable loitering munitions started being called “drones”, before which I would have argued drones are recoverable and cruise missiles / loitering munitions are expended in use and not intended to be recovered normally.)
But usually when we talk about an “aircraft carrier”, we are usually talking about something that carries and recovers aircraft (eepecially manned aircraft), not just something that launches but does not recover expendable munitions.
Other B-52s with air launched cruise mkssiles (and, heck, any plane carrying missiles) would be an “aircraft carrier”.
But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and probably even have fine motor controls to fly close & get captured by some kind of dock.
Grizzly to point this out, but also not all aircrafts in history have been designed to survive engagements. We don't say a Kamikaze suicide bomber isn't an aircraft because it doesnt land. We are however calling Ukraine's Aeroprakt A-22 based drone a drone, even though it's literally an aircraft airframe.
But in general that there's a lot of things that could potentially be seen as aircraft carriers, as drones and missiles start to behave closer on the spectrum to aircrafts than to pure missiles. The distinctions of intelligence & sensing seems pretty arbitrary, but it also seems IMHO that the behavior of this lower class of flying system has bent upwards to more resemble it's bigger historically manned/piloted counterpart.
And sure, carrying one, or a few small planes is possible. But real combat planes are heavier, they require more fuel, ammunition is heavy, especially if we want something beyond basic machine gun rounds. And of course we will need crew, including life support. Leaving the planes hanging under the belly is no good if we want to do basically any kind of maintenance, even loading ammunition could be tricky in this position. But an indoor hangar, and mechanisms for getting planes in and out is just more weight. Realistically we will end up with way fewer and smaller planes than any seaborne aircraft carrier can support.
There are suggestions of adding something reminiscent of ship deck guns, but there is no way we have weight budget for that with all the planes, and I doubt the frame of the whole ship is actually rigid enough to absorb the shock of firing a big cannon. I think some light machine gun placements will have to do.
We also got the suggestion of the whole thing flying so high that it would be out of range of land-based AA weapons. That sounds neat, but the higher we want to fly, the less lift we get per volume, and we already spend a good part of the lift on just the hull, engines and fuel, we can't actually go terribly high before the number of planes supported drops to 0.
But for all this trouble, we will get a fortress in the sky! A fortress made of balsa wood and paper-thin skin that is. Minor bullet holes is one thing, the helium leaks really really slowly. But say someone drops a fire bomb on top of the hull, helium rushing out might extinguish the fire, but not until there is already a pretty big hole for that helium to rush out through. Basically our carrier is really big, really expensive, and really easy to hit.
Although if you are going all in on scifi concepts you might as well make it an orbital aircraft carrier that launches scramjet fighters capable of descending from orbit and then boosting back up to dock.
Today, as several other comments have noted, cargo aircraft launching drone swarms are the most likely future development (along with further missile development). Cargo aircraft have vast capacity in both mass and volume. Drones which dispense with the need to support a human pilot, and can operate one-way / kamakazi mode (though return flight is an option), and often have limited top speeds and ranges, make far more sense than a lightweight (and typically limited-capability) manned fighter or bomber.
Another line of nontraditional aircraft carriers are those based on submarines, with the Japanese deploying several during WWII (these enacted the only Japanese aerial attacks on the US mainland, near Santa Barbara and along the Oregon coast), and I believe there was a Soviet study (possibly 941-BIS) to develop a large-scale submarine aircraft carrier. As with airborne aircraft carriers, submarine-as-missile-launch-platform (ballistic or cruise) is far more practicable.
Most canonically: 神風
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-1201
[2] https://nebula.tv/videos/mustard-the-largest-aircraft-never-...
Zeppelin used to be that because it can stay in the air more indefinitely while sacrificing almost everything else (speed, maneuverability, etc) but when planes beat it at even that, zeppelin usability just disappears.
Yuri Gagarin captains a huge, nuclear-powered Ekranoplan on behalf of the Soviets
Set on a sort of alternate Earth in a sort of alternate 1986, The Ekranoplan is so huge it has a runway long enough for Mig fighters on top.
When he is given the mission by the Russian Premier, he is told to "boldly go where no soviet man has gone before."
Since I don't see it linked, they also made an excellent video[0] on the real life soviet aircraft mothership Tupolev TB1/TB3 which is mentioned in the OP article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium#Solar_cells
Silicon solar cells are/were massively more effective, and came to light just before their popularization in the space race.
https://youtu.be/IjCylxs8hZU?feature=shared
They were largely successful too.
But the story completely confused me. I have no idea what’s going on. Maybe the novels have more detail?
Tom Cruise was supposed to do a live action adaptation IIRC.
Ha, yeah now that you mention it.
> Tom Cruise was supposed to do a live action adaptation IIRC
He already did All You Need Is Kill (Edge of Tomorrow), so I wouldn't be surprised.
> I have no idea what’s going on
I had to watch it a few times to figure it out. It's a human misunderstanding that a war is going on. The JAM are a machine race that seem to be conducting experiments to understand the biological components of the Earth machines.
No. Like regular aircraft carriers, you keep them far away from the battlefield. Their air wing flies in and ideally deploys weapons at range. (This works for the same reason staging rockets extends range.)
You're not going to fit an air wing capable of meaningful missions on an airship. They couldn't even carry an air wing (and supplies) able to fly defensive CAP missions just to protect itself.