Zeppelins · 8:53pm Nov 11th, 2017
It is testimony to the vision of the Count von Zeppelin that his name has reached as far as Equestria.
It’s probably fair to say that the rigid airships that took his name have had a larger impact on fiction than they have on the real world. In a book on the history of aviation, they might get a single chapter, discussing how the experiments in the late nineteenth century led to bigger and bigger vessels, culminating in the LZ129 Hindenburg, able to carry over fifty passengers on a regular service across the Atlantic, before, for a number of reasons, the industry move on to building big aeroplanes instead.
Source: LZ127, Pinkie Pie
Yet somehow they have managed to capture the imagination of writers and filmmakers in a way that heavier-than-air flying machines never have. This began before air travel was a realistic thing. Future-gazing writers like H.G. Wells assumed the air forces of the twentieth century would consist of enormous fleets of airships (maybe with a few tiny biplanes buzzing around them) but few predicted the jumbo-jet. Maybe the most significant achievement of the zeppelin pioneers was just the vision they enabled. They never achieved the network of worldwide air travel they dreamed of, but they showed the world that such a thing was possible and within reach.
And today, eighty-years after the Hindenburg disaster, airships have no significant role in our transport system, but they continue to feature widely in cartoons and fantasy stories. No steampunk story would be complete without a zeppelin flight.
Why? Basically just because they are cool. There’s something about these huge ships of the air that makes them more appealing than the jet set. Maybe it is because this way, it is so much easier to transpose all of the naval tropes to this new dimension. You can have stories of long romantic voyages, epic battles against nature in the heart of a storm, and of course pirates.
It is, however, clear that Equestrian zeppelins stay airborne through a quite different mechanism to those in our world, given their tiny airbags relative to the size of their load. Of course there are plenty of possible explanations as I discussed in this old post: Helium Balloons.
And if you cant get enough of Battleship class Zepplins, theres the trick of building your structural material out of your lift material.
Cloudsdale Carrier.
Durandanas Cumulonimbus Megafortress.
Stratopolis Supercell. For when you dont want to be limited by mere nuclear power.
Still trying to work out, if its possible to use graphene to contain the hydrogen high pressure inflating gas, to build a low pressure lift envelope large enough to lift its own weight.
For those who can't see some of the images: They're encoded in Google's WebP format, which Firefox still can't display. Chrome can, of course.
Airships have a great romantic quality to them, and easily fit into a 'steampunk' cultural level of technology that makes them work really well for an Equestria setting.
Question for you: Using hot air in balloons has some obvious problems compared to using helium, but I'm wondering if off-hand you know the lift capacity of hot 'air' for, er, safe temperatures of heated air (i.e. hot enough for lift but less than plasma) vs that of helium. Also, would heating helium itself have any lift benefit? I'd assume not since it's been in use for a long while, and would require extra weight and storage of fuel to generate significant heat, and stronger containment materials, but I am curious. And I'm apparently lazy, so apologies.
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The lifting power is given by the difference between the weight of the gas and the weight of the displaced air. The volume of the air is proportional to its absolute temperature (perfect gas law), so if you can heat it to a toasty 125 degrees C, then the density will fall to 70-75% that of the cold air. Helium has a density about 4/28 that of nitrogen, so my quick calculation says it will have a lifting power about three times greater than the same volume of hot air. Heating the helium to the same temperature would only boost the lifting power by a few percent, as it is already so much lighter than air.
So fitting a furnace to your airship will probably not make it fly any higher, but it will add to the steampunk style.
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Safari can't load them either. Way to go, Google :P
One of the things that makes airships so cool in my book is their sheer size and low speed. Airplanes are indeed big objects, but when in motion they're typically far away and moving very fast. Airships are simply enormous, and move and hover in a manner that I'd liken more to UFOs than to any other type of manmade flying machine.
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Excellent, thanks very much for the info. So it would make more sense in almost every way to use helium over hot air. This seems intuitive, but it's great to have the science to strengthen that. There's only so much magic can do before it exceeds a reasonable level of immersion-ability, even in a world of magical ponies. It's either that or go full steampunk and bring a heavy fire-hazard infrastructure aboard to get 1/3 the lifting power. Hmmm. Hydrogen, though, might make things a little more exciting, given the danger...
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Yeah, airships look grand in any setting, especially if they're large. Place them in a low-tech setting like Equestria (barring all references to modern human tech), and they become a high-tech wonder. Almost like magic for earth ponies and unicorns. Pegasi would probably be unimpressed, but at least an airship would provide them good roosting in the absence of clouds.
I think they are also popular in fiction because they don't work so well in real life. They are fun to imagine about, rather than researching about jets and stuff.
And they are just bucking cool...
Initially i misread the blog preview as saying:
Speaking about Zeppelins, one uses Zeppelins in the Universe of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I read the 1st Volume of the Book of Dusk La Belle Sauvage and love it. ¿What is your opinion?
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Indeed. La Belle Sauvage was a brilliant epic fairy-tale adventure, with so many new elements to be explored in the next books. Looking forward to the continuation.
It struck me the other day that although we call it a steampunk world, there isn't much steam in it - no railways - zeppelin being the fastest way to travel from Oxford to London. Presumably that's because Pullman wanted a world which had somehow skipped the industrial revolution, and moved straight to 20th century technology, but kept a medieval society and government.
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Yes, it is a strange world. I cannot quite figure out its technology —— one would think that it would have heavier-than-air fixed-wing aircraft, but no.
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IIRC, several airships used heaters in the gas cells to increase lift. Even a small percentage of increase is significant for a large vessel.
Hydrogen provides more lift than helium, of course, and it isn't really that dangerous. Despite the spectacular-looking Hindenberg disaster, most of the people aboard survived! The big problem with hydrogen is that it's very hard to contain. It leaks out from containers that would easily keep helium in.
The best lift possible would come from absolute vacuum, if there was a material light enough and strong enough to resist the outside air pressure.
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I'm guessing the main use of a heater would be to give the pilot a way of controlling the lift.
If you were to design an airship today, there isn't really a case to use anything other than helium. Hydrogen only gives an extra 8-9% lift, which just isn't worth the risk and the extra measures you need to manage the risk. Helium is expensive, but would not be so significant compared to all the other costs of building and running a ship. Of course, back in the 1930s, things were a bit different. They would have used helium for the Hindenburg had it been available.
Building a vacuum airship - a large volume tank with vacuum-tight seals, able to withstand the external atmospheric pressure, but of no significant weight itself... Good luck with that one!
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Considering that normal atmospheric pressure can collapse a steel railway tank car... yeah.
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I was thinking about sexism in the world of His Dark Materials:
In the Magisterium (the Magisterium seems to be a theocracy —— the Holy Roman Empire is a literal Holy Roman Empire in that Rome is part of it, but its capital is Geneva —— with countries like Brytain in its sphere of influence) women can only go so far. In academia, Doctrix Hannah Relf calls herself Doctor Relf. Maybe, she must hide that she is a woman to be taken seriously, which might be why she refers to herself as a Doctor instead of Doctrix. We do not have very many references to female academics in Oxford except in Sofia’s College.
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Thank you, both—this gives me some options to play with. What I need will play a small but significant role for one large airship, and the idea of a vacuum containers for lift is really tempting: small spherical chambers (say, 1m across) significantly emptied and of course reinforced by unicorn magic... but ultimately this is still probably too complex for what I need and for what's reasonable. But then I don't really have to say anything if it isn't crucial to the story. There's no tragedy to deal with, only the possibility of it, and all of these methods have the same weakness (lose lift-container viability, lower or lose the ship), though with added potential trauma of fire for hydrogen.
Sorry for babbling. This empty white space is apparently my rubber duck. Or chicken.
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Oh when you said 'if modern airships were being designed today' I just had to dig through a ton of pages to find what you reminded me of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_HAV_304/Airlander_10
Took some time as I had forgotten what it was caled, but BBC+Google hasn't failed me yet