“Moby Dick”

“What Is and What Should Never Be”

http://www.choosebooks.com/dis.....amp;ref=bf

For a moment I thought this was the Ben-Hur projection of the radio.

Rick

Classic rigid ships (the real Zeppelins) held their gas at 0 relative pressure in internal, gold-beater skin or rubber gas cells that could expand and contract without effecting the outer hull’s aerodynamics. Nonrigids (blimps) have an air-filled balloon inside the main envelope which is kept inflated with part of the thrust from the engines. As outside pressure rises, the amount of air directed into this sack is increased and vice versa to maintain the proper pressure which will keep the envelope taut, but not rupture it.

Theoretically, you could use this system rather than have the metal hull expand and contract (And it would be a much better solution from any angle!), but I don’t know if either they hadn’t invented it yet in the 30’s or if this is just another of MM’s attempts to create Rube Goldberg solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Sorry. Airships were the one thing I ever really nerded out over.

Apparently Lysenkoism infected Soviet aeronautics for a few years, until even Josef Stalin had to concede that, while not egalitarian, the laws of physics are absolutely inviolable.

That said, I’d hate to see the thing take a rough landing. The passenger area is like one giant crumple zone.

There is no way that that volume of gas could lift a two level gondola the entire length of the ship.

And to add insult to injury, it’s labeled “LZ II”. “LZ” was the designation used on Zeppelin airships (The Graph Zeppelin was the LZ 127, for example.). You know, ones that actually worked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMC-2

This is the only successful attempt at a metal-hulled airship, but there were plenty of plans for scaling the design up. And with airships, size is everything as weight of envelope only increases at the square while volume of lifting gas increases at the cube.