AHC: Building a flying city like Laputa or Columbia

What are the odds of building a steam-punk city in the sky like from Castle in the Sky/Bioshock infinite by 1900 CE? Can it be done?
 
If you define 'city' as 'ten zeppelins lashed together', then it's not only possible, it could have been done in the same timeframe as Columbia.

If you define it as anything more than that, physics usually slips out of its drunken stupor and demands to know just what you think you're doing up there.
 

Nietzsche

Banned
If you define 'city' as 'ten zeppelins lashed together', then it's not only possible, it could have been done in the same timeframe as Columbia.

If you define it as anything more than that, physics usually slips out of its drunken stupor and demands to know just what you think you're doing up there.
I was thinking of something akin to that, yes. But I was going to shoot more towards 40-60 zeppelins.
 
I was thinking of something akin to that, yes. But I was going to shoot more towards 40-60 zeppelins.

Even then it's not a city as much as an armada of Zeppelins. Not really "Columbia" :/ I don't don't think giant floating apartment blocks are even possible...
 
The only workable "floating city" design I know would be a tensegrity sphere envisioned by Buckminster Fuller.

He proposed airborne habitats created form a giant geodesic sphere, which might be made to levitate by slightly heating the air inside above the ambient temperature. Geodesic spheres (structures of triangular components arranged to make a sphere) become stronger as they become bigger, due to how they distribute stress over their surfaces. As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the mass of the enclosing structure itself. Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it.
He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. He calculated that such a balloon could lift a considerable mass, and hence that 'mini-cities' or airborne towns of thousands of people could be built in this way.

This is not necessary ASB but would require post 1900 technology pre 1900. So you would have to accelerate general technological development until the world would be unrecognizable.
 
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