<color><param>7F00,0000,0000</param>> > On Fri, 18 Dec 1998 gram_at_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
Received on Mon Dec 21 1998 - 13:46:29 GMT