Tenshinai wrote:So until they get some advance light weight steam engines or something else they would not be able to position the balloon over any target.
A balloon really sucks in regards to moving by itself. Take a look at reality, you will not find powered balloons. Blimps and zeppelins yes, because they can be steered and controlled.
A balloon has nothing to keep it from "spinning". You need a shape that you can control.Now balloon bombs might work but that relies on air currents and those are not really understood at all or really known about at this point for any long range bombing and those would really not be accurate at all.
Complete waste of effort.
#####Steam engines are NOT necessarily heavy. Conventional Steam Boilers and the water to make steam are heavy, but they don't have to be as big as most people think of when they think of steam engines.
Compared to ICE, yes they are very heavy.A hot air balloon's heat source could double as the heat source to power a flash boiler for small -- Stanley Steamer sized -- engine of around 100 pounds or less.
No, the balloon´s heat source can not double as a heatsource for a flash boiler. 2 very different ways to apply heat. You might be able to use part of the heat from one source for the other, but it´s going to be ineffective to the point that it may be more weight than it´s worth.
You can work a steam engine heatsource so that it provides heating for the air needed, but not realistically the other way around.
And it´s probably not going to be a good solution either way.
100 lb or less?
You do realise that shrinking a Stanley steamer also makes it less efficient?
The 20HP Stanley needed over 70l of water in the boiler, and had a fueltank of almost 130l.
A standard Stanley boiler had over 600 firetubes, and as these were part of structural integrity(and needed for the rapid steam production, that was one of the reasons they could be run at very high pressure, it also means to get the performance, you can´t just drop parts of it.
And while the "engine" parts by itself are lightweight, the boiler isn´t.
And if you try to scale it down as much as you want, the performance to weight ratio goes totally craptacular.
There´s good reason the Stanley engine was never tried for airplanes.
For the balloon bombs I could not agree more. I was just mentioning them based off of the first post.
Now I do not know nearly as much as I want to know about steam engines but I do know that there are cars powered by steam and a car steam engine should easily be powerful enough to propel a zeppelin and with a zeppelin the power to weight isn't quite as important as you would just need more hydrogen or better yet helium to provides lift with a heavy engine.
Now a zeppelin would be quite useful for Charis I would think as they can have quite a long range and carry a useful payload. Not to mention they would be quite hard to shoot down with any form of modern weapons. Now they would not be ideal as bombers due to their payload but I would think they could do quite a bit of damage to isolated factories. Now factories in cities would most likely be off limits due to the civilian casualties but zeppelin bombers might be accurate enough for almost precision bombing. And with HE coming in they could be quite useful for battle field support. They might also be able to mount a breech loading cannon which could come in handy for engaging point targets. Now I am not sure about that and I would not want any cannon on a hydrogen zeppelin but with helium it might work
