RavenCon: Airships and Zeppelins

Notes from a presentation by Iver Cooper--not exactly about Writing, more about the amount of research that may go into writing. "Zep" and "airship" are used interchangably her.

Airships had a length/width ration of 3:1 up to 11:1; the ratio 4:1 is about as efficient as anything.

Zep R38 broke in half due to turning too tightly.

Always land and takeoff upwind. This leads to having a floating hanger, on a lake, so you can turn the whole hanger to face upwind.

Zeps mostly used gasoline of coal gas. One exotic means of propulsion powered the Aereon, invented by Solomon Andrews. The Aereon cycles between positive and negative buioyancy, instead of remaining neutral; the rise and fall caused air to move over inclined plane airfoils, which allowed the pilot to glide (or "porpoise") without power.

An airship in 1852 might have a speed of 5-10 mph.

A non-rigid needs nose battens so you don't have your ship's nose collapse due to higher (external) pressure against the nose as you fly forward.  Rigids typically had multiple cells; non rigids usuall had just one.

The gas cells will expand with altitude increase; you put air ballonets inside the hull to take up spare volume and they can contract (or get squeezed) as the gas bags expand.

Hydrogen is flammable when it's 40-75% of the mix, with the rest air. So if you had 90% hydrogren, you'd be fine--as long as there were no leaks or diffusion.

Sources of gas bag ignition might be the engine, static electricity, or lightning.