21 Dec
1998
21 Dec
'98
5:46 a.m.
<color><param>7F00,0000,0000</param>> > On Fri, 18 Dec 1998
gram(a)cnct.com wrote:
> > facility. Even if you get a gas leak,
you're not going to crash --
> > a large airship doesn't have one gasbag,
it has a half-dozen or more
> > ballonets inside the structure separately
sealed apart from each
> > other.
> >From what I've heard, the reason why the
US military stopped using
> airships was because so many crashed in storms...
Of the four rigid (Zeppelin-type) airships in the
history of the US
Navy, two failed due to weather and one to human
factors:
Though forbidden to engage enemy craft
due to their supposed fragility, one blimp with its
radio out did
engage a German submarine in the Carribean rather than
let it get
away while they physically reported to base. The bomb
releases
didn't work (they'd never been used), so they
strafed the sub with
their one(1) 50-cal, and took envelope damage from
return fire. The
submarine fled while the blimp made it almost back to
base before
needing rescue. In the 1960s the crew was given
commendations (after
decades under the cloud of court-martial for
disobeying the order not
to engage the enemy) when Admiral Rosendahl (a
survivor many years
before of the Shenandoah) found in German records an
account that the
sub had been damaged by the blimp to the point where
it could not
submerge, made it back across the Atlantic but was
sunk by the Royal
Navy in the North Sea.
</color>Oh, new to me - interesting story - do you have the U number at
hand ? I would like to see if there is more information.
> Airships are (maybe) the single greatest thing to
have, see,
> touch, whatever. I love them - real ones, Zeppelin
stlye, not
> these baloons with engines - But they are no more
since almost
> 50 years (the NT doesn't count in my opinion,
since it is a
> kind of a bastard - but still the most impessive I
have seen
> until today) - I whish I could have lives in the
30's - there
> are a lot of old photographs with Zeppelin ships
over Munich
> (and of course also almost any other German city).
Remember, Hans, there were more than a few drawbacks
to living
where you are in the 1930s -- and other than DELAG
employees,
access to the big airships was pretty much limited to
the idle
rich, tickets were expensive.
Hmm. true (of course I would also want to be an ideling rich :).
But anyway, I just like to see one of this huge ships over my
head. In our Tram archives we have literaly thousends of old
pictures, and some with airships - I just want to see it ...
illogical, crazy, but I want.
With technologies developed since the 1930s, the big
ships could be
practical again. Aside from the use of helium rather
than hydrogen
(whatever the immediate cause, static electricity or
sabotage or
whatever, the Hindenberg burned because the US
government forbade
the sale of helium to Germany),
This opens again the discusion about export restrictions. I belive
any restricton just fall back on the issuing nation and common
people. Of course the Helium restrictions where made with war
in mind ... but the high time of manned airships (for war) was
already gone - I don't blame 'the Americans' or 'the US' for
the desaster - I just blame single minded, dumb or for personal
profile looking politicians ... And of course backwardness.
If a foreign 'bad' government wants somthing, they will get it.
A boycott will only help to find more inovative solutions (Regans
Star Wars is just a pice of crap compared to a lot of russian
ideas ...)
there have been lots of things
developed since 1937 to make airships that would be
better by far
than they were, many of them spinoffs of the
heavier-than-air
industry. Stronger, lighter materials both for
structure and
envelopes. Electronics and instrumentation
(considering how many
ships were destroyed by storms, such as two of the
four ships the US
Navy had, just radar is a big help, but things like
computerized
trim control and GPS come to mind). Lots of new art on
aerodynamic
design even at low speed, lots of that from the
automotive industry.
I could build a ship four times the strength and less
than half the
tare weight of the Hindenberg from the
Hindenberg's blueprints
today, but that wouldn't take into account new
structural concepts
that would improve things far more.
Have you already seen pictures of the NT ?
Gruss
Hans
<nofill>
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK