Zeppelins?

Thanks everyone for the interesting responses.

There's an interesting airship firebombing raid in one of the Grantville anthologies. What I was thinking of was less effective than that but predominantly a psy-op. With guidance from Owl a decent bomb sight should be possible for something making it's run at perhaps 50mph. Above fifteen hundred feet(?) it should be effectiovely immune to rifle fire and someone would then have to invent an anti-aircraft cannon which might represent a useful diversion of the two or three Temple inventors.

Remember, aerial bombing is extremely inaccurate, while a zeppelin is a HUGE target, meaning that to have any chance to avoid being hit by groundfire, it needs to fly HIGH, which means that hitting anything on the ground with bombs are going to be wishful thinking more than anything else.

or land a small commando force by parachute. (Not sure how to get them back on board - steam winch and harness?)

Getting them back on would require the zeppie to stay SLOW and LOW for an extended period of time, that´s suicidal.

Quite possibly. Nothing in my commando training when I was an overly enthusiastic young naval officer said that suicidal wasn't sometimes necessary. And if it worked... alarm and despondency!

Ah well. Thank you for helping me think it through.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:What did that light aircraft use for fuel? Do you know hoe much range it had?

Don

Google is your friend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_aircraft

In answer to one specific question, the Bessler engine was a derivative of the Doble steam engine and probably ran on gasoline as the Doble steam car did.

The next question is how much aluminum will need to be used - virtually all the zepplins had aluminum frames - and without electricity, aluminum is extremely difficult to create. Chemical extraction was expensive and yielded little - making alumium one of the most precious metals prior to the 1880s (For those who don't know - the Washington Monument in Washington DC is capped by a 100 oz pyramid of aluminum - the largest aluminum casting at that date; at the time it was as precious as it's weight in silver. 2 years later, the Hall–Héroult process using electricity made aluminum much easier to produce and the price of aluminum plummeted, making the once-valuable apex nearly worthless)

Thje biggest factor that led to the demise of LTA was the effects of weather. The huge size of a practical airship means it is effectively a sail, which made ground handling very difficult. There are picture on the internet of airships standing "on their nose" on the mooring mast and at least one of an airship which is "bent" because it was caught by a gust of wind while being winched in or out of the hanger. Given the Empire State Building was initially designed to have an airship mooring mast on the top of the spire, you can only imagine the effects on the passengers when a gust of wind whipped the airship around 1400' in the air during boarding....

In the air, the situation wasn't much better. The R-101 was destroyed in the end by being caught in a downdraft and "blown" into the ground, while American airships USS Shenandoah, USS Akron and USS Macon were destroyed by thunderstorms and being unable to fly over or around them.

This is the real reason that giant LTA proposals never "get off the ground"; who wants their multi million dollar investment to be so totally at the mercy of the weather?

Theemile wrote:The next question is how much aluminum will need to be used - virtually all the zepplins had aluminum frames - and without electricity, aluminum is extremely difficult to create.

In the Ring of Fire series, the dirigibles are wood-framed. They're heavier than aluminum frames, but useable.

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:The next question is how much aluminum will need to be used - virtually all the zepplins had aluminum frames - and without electricity, aluminum is extremely difficult to create.

In the Ring of Fire series, the dirigibles are wood-framed. They're heavier than aluminum frames, but useable.

Timber framed heavier than air vehicles were the rule rather than the exception until the late 1920's.
Timber framed semi-rigid airships were common until Count von Zeppelin got into the business. Steam Powered airships existed since 1852.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Zeppelins are however sitting ducks at low altitude and a howitzer (read angle gun) will make a perfectly functional anti aircraft gun below 10,000 ft with the right sights and shrapnel shells. (Which is why they operated at up to and occasionally over 30,000 ft during WWI (that and the fighters ceilings were 20 to 25,000 ft) (for the non aviation nuts out there, an aircraft's ceiling is where it can no longer climb faster than 100ft/min).

Zeppelins are however sitting ducks at low altitude and a howitzer (read angle gun) will make a perfectly functional anti aircraft gun below 10,000 ft with the right sights and shrapnel shells.

And since they´re slow and BIG, they´re not nearly as hard targets as airplanes.

(Which is why they operated at up to and occasionally over 30,000 ft during WWI (that and the fighters ceilings were 20 to 25,000 ft)

And breathing becomes a longterm issue long before that height, meaning one more set of "technology" needed.

AirTech wrote:Timber framed heavier than air vehicles were the rule rather than the exception until the late 1920's.
Timber framed semi-rigid airships were common until Count von Zeppelin got into the business. Steam Powered airships existed since 1852.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Zeppelins are however sitting ducks at low altitude and a howitzer (read angle gun) will make a perfectly functional anti aircraft gun below 10,000 ft with the right sights and shrapnel shells. (Which is why they operated at up to and occasionally over 30,000 ft during WWI (that and the fighters ceilings were 20 to 25,000 ft) (for the non aviation nuts out there, an aircraft's ceiling is where it can no longer climb faster than 100ft/min).

Why waste time trying to make Zeppelins a weapon when they never were very effective as weapons in our time line?

What they would be good at is fast transportation within the EOC. They would also be great at hauling cargo where there are no rivers, canals, or roads.

Finally, think of the logistical advantage they would have in transferring supplies from the nearest port, to some point behind your advancing army. No longer would the number of wagons, and draft animals have to increase for every mile that you advance.

Hi TheEmile,

Actually Aluminum was more expensive than platinum, and the pyramid was exhibited at Tiffany's for month's because it was so expensive, NTM no one was going to be able to see it once it was in place.

L

Theemile wrote:**quote="Weird Harold"**[quote="n7axw"]What did that light aircraft use for fuel? Do you know hoe much range it had?

Don**quote**

Google is your friend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_aircraft

In answer to one specific question, the Bessler engine was a derivative of the Doble steam engine and probably ran on gasoline as the Doble steam car did.

The next question is how much aluminum will need to be used - virtually all the zepplins had aluminum frames - and without electricity, aluminum is extremely difficult to create. Chemical extraction was expensive and yielded little - making alumium one of the most precious metals prior to the 1880s (For those who don't know - the Washington Monument in Washington DC is capped by a 100 oz pyramid of aluminum - the largest aluminum casting at that date; at the time it was as precious as it's weight in silver. 2 years later, the Hall–Héroult process using electricity made aluminum much easier to produce and the price of aluminum plummeted, making the once-valuable apex nearly worthless)[/quote]

Theemile wrote:
The next question is how much aluminum will need to be used - virtually all the zepplins had aluminum frames - and without electricity, aluminum is extremely difficult to create. Chemical extraction was expensive and yielded little - making alumium one of the most precious metals prior to the 1880s (For those who don't know - the Washington Monument in Washington DC is capped by a 100 oz pyramid of aluminum - the largest aluminum casting at that date; at the time it was as precious as it's weight in silver. 2 years later, the Hall–Héroult process using electricity made aluminum much easier to produce and the price of aluminum plummeted, making the once-valuable apex nearly worthless)

If I'm not mistaken, there is modern chemical routes to produce Aluminium from alumina, but as they rely on very expensive catalysts that are slowly clogged by impurities, it is still more expensive than the old Hall-heroult process even with its roughly 33% energy efficiency. those routes are much cheaper than the old chemicals ones though because they dont produce 10x more dross than aluminium.

Isn't flight limited to birds and other aeronautical creatures in the Proscriptions?