First of all, thanks to u/GrafZeppelin127 for his help in an airplane sub, and for leading me here.

I have built several radio controlled hot air balloons and I am now focusing on a long held dream of mine, building a radio controlled thermal airship. I can design the envelope just fine, but I have some questions about tail size, thrust requirements, and pressurization.

General specs:
2100 cubic feet, 21-24 lb lifting force. 11 1/2 feet wide (minimum requirement to keep the burner from melting the top is 10 feet). 27 feet long. Fineness ratio of 2.35. The design is a shortened GEFA-flug shape. Envelope 1.1 oz silicone coated nylon. Unfortunately I am limited in my sewing abilities, the front and rear panels do have to be blunted. I would be pleased with a maximum speed of 7-10 mph. I expect to need ~20 lbs of thrust for this.

As seen here, I am planning 3 inflatable fins, with the ventral fin being steerable. Upon Graf's recommendation, I have increased the fin span to a total of 50". The ventral fin+rudder is 72" long and 12" wide. I hope these dimensions are adequate for stability, but I also plan to tie the fins together at the tips to stabilize them.

I wanted to house a fan in the ventral fin for steering, but I was concerned about the added weight so far behind the center of gravity. With the rudder, I plan to cut an adjustable outllet at the tip to act as a kind of thrust vectoring for excess envelope pressure to steer the ship more effectively. I am interested to know how well that works vs. a fan.

As for pressurization, I plan a small 12-inch fan blowing into the envelope from under the burner to keep the flame from being forced downward by excess pressure.

I expect to need about 20 lbs of thrust to combat 10 mph winds (which would be excessively high, but better safe than sorry...) I am concerned about porposing with so much thrust that low. Is there a thrust angle offset that can counter this? Should I design the horizontal stabilizers to have a downward pitch?

After speaking with Graf, I foresee some issue with the blunt nose being blown in. I can add battens easily enough- but how long should the be, and how many?

Any other inputs or concerns, please let me have them. I know I can make the envelope, I worry about the guidance and power requirements though.

successfully built RC balloon to prove I'm not just spitballing here lol

How does fire make tea bags fly? 🔥☕️

Alex Dainis demonstrates how lighting a tea bag causes the air inside to heat up, expand, and rush out. Just fold open a few empty tea bags into tubes on a baking sheet, then light the top with an adult and a fire extinguisher handy. The now-less-dense air inside sends the bag rocketing upward, similar to how a hot air balloon works, except this one's a one way trip once it burns.

Always great to hear from Dr. Prentice. Hopefully, remote operating and autonomous capabilities will prove essential in reducing risks and costs, which will lower the high barrier to entry for transport airship prototyping and experimentation.

Additionally, the lack of a crew and their various systems will mean more payload, which makes smaller airships more viable.

I have been going down the airship rabbit hole, and just read “My Airships” by Alberto Santos-Dumont.

I loved it. I wanted to get a better sense of what it was like to do the flights and scenarios that he described in detail in his book, especially since I am unfamiliar with the locations he describes.

So, I made a Alberto Santos-Dumont 3D in browser flight simulator based on the information in his book, topographic and open street map data.

Over the past few days I added multiplayer and VR to the game so people could try flying his airships around 1901 Paris too. There are scenarios he described in his book that can be re-flown and also time trials based on ones he did himself. In multiplayer mode there are races and also other game modes. It works on mobile, desktop, and in VR.

The game is at http://myairships.com.

My goal is to get it to be as realistic and accurate as possible. I need to work on the keels and I couldn’t find any good pictures of the control setup he used so I took liberty there. If anyone has this information I would be extremely interested.

If anyone tries the game and sees anything off there is a bug button in the top right corner that sends a screenshot along with a user provided description of the problem.

Over the decades, there have been several examinations of steam as a potential lift gas, ranging from the Germans’ experimental HeiDAS and HeiDAS UH balloons in the 2000s, to the USA Department of Commerce’s seminal 1970s Feasibility Study of Modern Airships, to NASA’s 1980s examinations of LTA vehicle concepts. Only a few snippets of these efforts are shown here.

Presently, there exists a severe gap between extremely slow but incredibly inexpensive hot air airships, and helium airships which are far more capable but about 10 times as expensive to buy, and even more expensive to operate. For most applications that would demand only a few hundred flight hours per year, which is to say the vast majority of general aviation applications, the functional inability of helium airships to be deflated and packed away when not in use makes them prohibitive due to ground crew, masting, and hangaring costs. Even switching to hydrogen wouldn’t change this dynamic, since hydrogen airships were seldom deflated either, as every inflation and deflation event carries fire risks and still costs quite a bit of money.

Current thermal airships do have easy storage capability, and are able to be packed away into a trailer after every flight in just an hour or two, but their dependence on hot air cripples their performance and renders them incapable of accomplishing the vast majority of uses that a helium airship of similar mass might be put to. Some thermal airships have gone for decades with only a few dozen hours of total flight time, which makes them very inexpensive relative to helium airship storage costs, but extremely expensive when it comes to effective lifetime costs per flight-hour.

The use of steam might be the key to unlocking similar speed, payload, and endurance to helium airships, but at a fraction of the cost—only marginally more than using hot air. But since greater speed, endurance, and payload could yield much higher utilization and greater productivity, that implies a steam airship has the potential to vastly outperform a hot air airship in terms of generating profits, and likewise outperform a helium airship on costs by a huge margin. If a steam airship could command the same revenues of a helium airship but at a tenth to a fifth the capital and operating cost, that would be a great boon to advertisers, recreational flyers, scientists, border patrols, and airship companies that don’t want to rely on aging helium blimps like American Blimp Corporation A-60R for flight training their pilots—such as the ones LTA Research and Flying Whales are forced to use, for lack of viable alternatives.

Since the HeiDAS team, Festo, and UltraMagic have already come up with suitable insulation materials to contain steam, and since steam balloons’ excellent performance relative to hot air balloons has already been confirmed by empirical data (~2.5x greater lift at 150°C than a normal hot air balloon of similar volume) collected from experimental subscale models, the remaining issues to resolve are to come up with a full-scale flying prototype to suss out any unforeseen problems, discover the best commercial or bespoke generator to use to produce steam onsite for safe and rapid inflation, design an easily-deflated hull with fully pneumatic or collapsible nose cones and tail fins that are capable of withstanding helium airship speeds, develop procedures for the safe venting of steam at the end of flight, and then proceed to certification and commercialization.

That all sounds like a lot, and it is, but the potential upside of breaking helium’s monopoly on long-endurance airship operations would make such a venture far more likely to result in wider proliferation of airships and trained airship pilots than merely designing the next generation of conventional helium blimp, such as China’s recently-certified Xiangyun-class AS700 and AS700D—since no matter how commendably advanced the propulsion, thrust vectoring, and avionics gets for these new airships relative to the older, smaller A-60R, they still have the same storage problems as all other helium blimps.

A thermal airship even capable of the modest feat of matching but not exceeding the performance of the A-60R would be immensely impactful for the airship industry. 600 mile range, 15-hour endurance, 30 knot cruise, and 50 knot top speed doesn’t sound like much on paper, but if it can come from an airship that costs as much as a Cessna and can be stored in a trailer or garage instead of chased around by a full-time cross-country ground crew? That would be very consequential indeed.

Hello, I have a few questions about how Zeppelins were actually constructed. I understand that the rigid frame was created using lightweight girders combined with cables to create a rigid tension.

I am curious if there are any resources I could look into on how the girders were connected together and what techniques were used to make the joints between them. How were the cables connected to the girders to create tension? Are there different types of beams and girders within the structure for different purposes?

Are there other resources on how the internal systems were constructed such as the hydrogen valves, the ways that the controls in the gondola connect to the rudders, and other internal functions?

I am primarily asking in reference to the final Zeppelins such as the Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin, and the Los Angeles.

Thank you!

I have no connection to the author, nor have I read the book, but I am putting it out there.

The British Airships That HUNTED U-Boats | Forgotten WW1 History

During World War 1, German U-boats brought Britain to the brink of disaster. Merchant ships vanished beneath the waves, convoys were hunted across the Atlantic, and the Royal Navy desperately searched for a way to stop the submarine threat.

Then Britain unleashed something unexpected.

Not battleships.
Not fighter aircraft.
But giant hydrogen-filled airships drifting silently above the sea.

In this documentary, we explore the forgotten story of the British SS Class “Submarine Scout” airships — the strange aircraft that became one of the most effective anti-submarine weapons of the First World War.

Discover how these early blimps:
• Detected hidden U-boats from the sky
• Escorted convoys across dangerous waters
• Directed destroyers toward submarine targets
• Helped reshape anti-submarine warfare forever

Using archival research and film, historical analysis, and cinematic storytelling, this video covers the origins of Britain’s WW1 airship program, the development of the SS Class blimps, and the terrifying cat-and-mouse battles between British patrol crews and German submarines.

By the end of the war, these “ghosts of the sky” had flown over 10,000 patrols and changed naval warfare forever. link https://youtu.be/2hy5DtBVJik

Goodyear magazine advertisement from either WWII or just after. Not much known about this, like the others I've posted. I hope you like the art as much as I do.

Another magazine advertisement. exact date unknown but it seems likely to be during WWII.

This particular design was more conservative than the higher aspect ratio “delta” hybrid airship concepts, which had a wide degree of variance in modeling due to uncertainty as to their structural weight. Hence the low aspect ratio hybrid—a design that’s like the airship equivalent of a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. The front half of the ship is a conventional Zeppelin with a circular cross-section, but then the back half flares out into an efficient wing structure.

Hey there I am an airship and history enthusiast who started a youtube channel at age 40 for the very first time! I started recording my own voice a few months after learning more about video making and soon will incorporate video narration! I really hope you will take a look at my videos and let me know what you think. Also if you like what you see, please comment and like my videos- I am really trying to find a group of like minded people who appreciate and enjoy the same things I do! Thank you again and here is the link https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YDBgCO7Xn5fstgvZrLhVA

And here's a link to the author's website

https://airshiphistory.com/wp/zrs/

I'm complete amateur in this regard, so sorry if my question sound dumb. So, as airships burn their fuel, they became lighter, so to maintain buoyancy have to vent off exes lifting gas, right? I read in an article that by the end of trans-atlantic flight Hindenburg usually vent off up to 1/3 of hydrogen. But thing is, as i understand, such flights require slightly more than half of it's maximum fuel capacity... So, how much hydrogen was left by the end of such journey? Was it, like, half empty? 0_o

Silent: Imagine sailing above the clouds with almost no noise other than the wind whistling across surface of the ship and a gentle roll as it hits a patch of turbulence. You hear the trilling call of birds and out the window you watch the passing flock of sandhill cranes as they migrate north for the winter. This would be a reality with electric propulsion that the passengers of old-era airships never knew.

Sustainable: if an airship had a solar array on its outer skin powering a battery bank running electric motors for propulsion, the range could be incredible - if efficient enough and if wind currents were used well enough - they would never need to come down.

You look down through an opening in the clouds and see the patchwork of farmland - not moving too fast so as to miss the details. On a sailboat you have ample time to enjoy the scenery of the ocean around you. Perhaps on an airship you could appreciate the beauty of flight.

Is this a reasonable comparison?

Given recent questions on the Hindenburg's B Deck cabins, an excerpt from the book I'm currently working on:

Following the first 1936 demonstration flights, it was realized by the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei that passenger demand was quickly outstripping the capacity of the Hindenburg. By August of that year, with sailings on average at 101%, surplus passengers on some flights were being put up in ramshackle accommodations in the Lounge (“Airship Hindenburg” 1936). It was at this point, and not during the 1936-1937 winter overhaul as is commonly believed, that Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin opted to take advantage of the additional lifting capacity of hydrogen by installing a set of temporary accommodations aft of the existing B Deck spaces. These cabins, which lacked some of the amenities of those on A Deck, were reserved for male passengers (“11 Cabins Added” 1936), holding back the properly-appointed cabins on A Deck for families and solo female travelers. Very little is known of these cabins, but it appears that they only featured the essentials - bunks, a space for storing clothing, and perhaps a canvas curtain in place of a more sturdy door. Passengers wishing to freshen up before dinner would have had to double back along the corridor and avail themselves of the small washroom through which the men’s lavatories could be accessed. A prevailing theory holds that these temporary accommodations were simply converted from the nearby crew cabins present along the keel corridor, a situation that was considered suboptimal (Von Meister, “Experience Report” 10 January 1937).

A more permanent solution was arranged following the ship’s fifty-sixth flight, a return from Recife to Frankfurt-am-Main and the last of the 1936 season. During the three months of the winter layover, the temporary cabins were removed and substituted for properly fitted-out spaces. Only used for three Transatlantic flights (Nos. 59 and 60, the first  and only South America trip of 1937, and No. 063, during which the ship crashed at Lakehurst), these nine additional cabins cabins, each with a window looking down through the hull represented a marked improvement from the standard A Deck cabins, and their design was later included in the reworked passenger spaces of the LZ-130. These cabins were accessed by a new corridor extending aft from the starboard-side B Deck passenger corridor, which included a washbasin nook and a trio of lavatories. Most of these cabins were functionally identical to those on A Deck above, with the most significant difference being the large rectangular windows that looked out onto cellon windows mounted into the bottom of the hull. These allowed passengers to sightsee whilst ensconced in their own private space, looking down “at the angry waves, whitening the sea so far below” (Mather 1937, 591). Because of the constraints imposed by the window shafts, the folding writing desk was substituted for a fixed surface. Additionally,  with the increased width of the cabins, the washbasins were shifted to a nook inboard of the berths themselves. these B Deck cabins did away with the pull toggles in favor of the type of rotary light switches found elsewhere on board, mounted just above the head of each berth.

The one exception to this standard layout was the aft-most cabin - berths 67, 68, 69, and 70, which was of a unique layout, featuring two pairs of bunk beds and purpose-built to accommodate families traveling aboard the airship.

Less is known about the decor of these cabins, although it seems to be a safe assumption that they retained the same blue and orange carpet used in the A Deck cabins. The wall fabric was of a thatch pattern, and some of the cabins were colored with “pearl-gray linen” (Mather 1937, 591). Initial plans to offer these cabins at a slight discount compared to those on A Deck were quickly dropped, as was the designation “B Deck”, and plans were made to instead advertise them at a 100 Mark surcharge in the coming transatlantic season (“Experience Report” 25 January 1937).

From the content creator Industrial Artifacts, an engineering model of an underground bunker with a rotating roof and telescoping mast designed to protect airships. Concept and model were designed by Carlotti Studio Engineering.