Vickers Transoceanic Airship from Currell’s Card Models. The models are free as downloads.
The Airship page also links to some interesting historical docs on the background of the model. On the free models list page he also offers an H. G. Wells Land Ironclad, the historical R-101 airship (also a mooring mast, and (be still my beating heart) the rocket from the amazing silent Fritz Lang SF flick Der Frau im Mond.
The Register: Airships to deliver broadband to rural areas, anti-blog news and humor site reports.
ADSL: Airship Digital Subscriber Line. No word yet on snappy uniforms.
Goodyear blimp drifts into truck; cameraman injured (SF Chronicle)
The “Spirit of America” got away yesterday. Here’s a pic.
Somedays, I miss borrowing wire photos and running them here. But I’m trying to respect creators’ rights so, uh, no pic here, darn it.
While I’m referring to Blimp Week, I should link to the category page. Several of the entries associated with Blimp Week have become hit magnets on the site as well:
There’s a ton more interesting stuff in the category, including information on toy blimps, other blimp wrecks, the bankruptcy of Cargolifter, and of course, the Blimp Week theme song.
May I call your attention to the most recently posted comment under my Blimp Week chestnut, The Wreck of the Shenandoah: a genuine eye-witness account from one Robert McCoy.
Man, this internet thing just might work out.
Feedback like this is the obverse of this site’s magical ability to attract those it discusses into discourse. See also the recent comment under my Bob’s Java Jive entry, in which a The Seamonkees promote their appearance there on May 3, as well as some of the other comments under that entry.
Speaking of Tacoma, they have a heck of a scandal brewing; the Chief of Police shot and killed himself seconds after shooting his estranged wife in the head earlier this week. The reaction by city department heads was initially to circle the wagons and praise the dead man as an advocate for victims of domestic violence. Things are continuing to develop.
Here’s a P-I search on the name of the unfortunate woman, Crystal Brame. Oh, it’s, I don’t know, the sort of thing that Seattle media loves to report about Tacoma, I’d say.
lta-mail is an informational page on Hewlett-Packard’s website exploring a new intraoffice mail delivery system initaitive intended to demonstrate the many efficient ways that Compaq and HP are merging corporate cultures and adding value for shareholders the world over.
[A big TYVM to hot tipper Eric! Your prize is already lost in the mail!]
(And in contrast to the snarky tone above, I found this fascinating, and you really should read Josh’s explanation of how it works… hint: it’s computer guided, rather than hand-guided.)
“Using the artificial convection of my central heating, the blimp stealthily departed my office. It moved silently through the living and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully.”
I laughed, and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Then Viv came in to look worriedly at me, and my stomach hurt. Then I laughed still more.
Via email from Paul Frankenstein.
NYT: Big Blimp that apparently couldn’t is a story I noted in the Times just before we went to California in late May. I stubbed an entry on it here and forgot all about it.
The article details the mad vision, and apparent business failure, of Cargolifter AG and the company’s founder, Carl von Gablenz. Boeing’s investment of emergency funding into Cargolifter helped to inspire Blimp Week, in these pages beginning in spring 2002.
Attempts to visit the Cargolifter website via a Google search today failed. It would seem the endgame took place shortly after the NYT article was published.
60 years later, pilots’ fate still a mystery is the headline for this wire service aricle I saw in the sunday Seattle Times-PI joint edition.
To summarize, during WWII, a Navy coast patrol blimp returned from a short mission sans crew; the gondola of this blimp later became the gondola for one of the flagship Goodyear blimps.
Goodyear provides some pix and info on the blimp too:
Space.com’s Investigation Casts Light on the Mysterious Flying Black Triangle. Some Nevada-based nutball-science shop, the National Institute for Discovery Science, has been getting plenty of link with a recently released study concerning the contemporary “black triangle” variant of yoofo.
They theorize that said inky deltas are super-secret military LTA craft: that’s BLIMP to me and thee, English.
(Is it just me, or should someone tell NIDS that big purple triangles in a prominent graphic on the root page of a UFO site brings a certain Nike-wearing alienist death cult to mind?)
Well, Space.com summarizes some of the speculation from NIDS thusly:
“Among a range of NIDS observations, the group believes the BBDs are powered by electrokinetic/field drives, or airborne nuclear power units. These craft also fly at extreme altitudes, high above conventional aircraft and the pulsing of ground-based traffic control radar.”
To which, I gotta say, I am profoundly skeptical.
First, all of my reading on the US military and lighter-than-air aviation makes is absolutely clear: American military career people HATE the idea of LTA and fear it because of its’ failure (perceived or otherwise) as a military technology. Advocate LTA, lose your career. The idea that some portion of the Pentagon’s black budget is going to an LTA vehicle that operates with crew is just not realistic.
Second, although there are at least two serious, ongoing efforts to bring a heavy, cargo-oriented LTA vehicle to commercial service, it’s a hard sell, at least party because of military resistance to the technology. The military is the primary source of incubation and development capital for new aviation concepts, and without the brass and cash, both Zeppelin NT and Cargolifter are having hard times, uh, getting things off the ground.
Finally, I find the power-source speculation absurd, as well.
First, “electrokinetic/field” drives are unknown in practice, although apparently several patents have been granted on the idea; if I actually follow the theories the idea is based on, the effects only take place at the molecular level and therefore do not produce a propulsive or lifting force great enough to push anything around bigger than a molecule. But I’m no expert here, just a skeptic.
The alternative, nuclear power, while obviously a viable energy source, has in fact been considered, in one form or another, as a power supply for aircraft; but not for quite a long time. As I recall, the technology involved was not a standard reactor but rather some sort of ramjet, in the context of ICBMs, and was rejected because of the obvious problems in testing: what if the craft came apart while in flight?
The link above contains exhaustive coverage to the history of experimentation with nuke-powered flight; unfortunately some of the material appears not to have made the transition to HTML, including a lot of the non-rocket-and-space material; it additionally shows that reactor-based power-supplies were indeed the primary focus of the research. However, development was dropped in the early 1970s in the face of increasing public skepticism concerning the viability of nuclear power.
Obviously, the military has indeed kept using the power supply; so why do I doubt that a reactor would be at the heart of this secret airship?
Well, primarily because the culture of LTA technology development has always emphasized light materials as the basic design and construction principle. While a giant blimp can obviously offer sufficient bouyancy (as NIDS notes) to loft considerably larger loads than any other form of flight technology, I have a hard time imagining an LTA engineer opting for a power supply which requires a fuel and equipment density the likes of nukes.
Additionally, while the Navy’s LTA program was winding down in the early to mid sixties, some very large, and very ambitious, blimp designs were, um, floated. If ever someone was going to propose a reactor as the powersupply for a blimp, this would have been the time and place. Blimps, in the Navy, are not disssimilar to subs, just slower, easier to shoot down, and in the air. The Navy got its’ nuclear subs and carriers; it cancelled its’ LTA program altogether.
So, while the idea of a supersecret nuclear-powered LTA flying wing (I’m not even gonna bother taking on the form factor) is cool, and definitely entertaining, I’m gonna have to come down on the “uh – I don’t think so” side of the equation. YMMV, natch.
Metafilter poster GriffX cites the excellent article “Death of a Dirigible“, which alert and longtime readers of mike.whybark.com will recall cited as a part of my research links in my own account of the wreck of the airship Shenandoah published during the original Blimp Week, these many weeks ago.
Just kidding about the catch-up, you smart mobs out there!
