AHC: Daring Dirigiables!


The history of the lighter than air ship is an interesting one. The first person to make such crafts popular was a Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin who in 1900 built the first design of a rigidly framed airship to be put to practical use. Yet he wasn't the first man to create such a craft, and definitely wasn't the first to make the attempt.

So your challenge is this - have someone, be they an individual, group of people, country, or company create a mass producible design for a rigid, or semi-rigid, aircraft before 1890. GO!:D

Links about airships
http://www.airships.net/dirigible
http://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-i/dirigible2.htm

PS:My title is misspelled it should be dirigible.
 
There's little commercial utility for lighter-than-air craft in an era when most investment was still being directed towards development and upgrade of rail networks and transoceanic steamers, so I think approaching this from the military angle might be a good start.

The French used stationary balloons on multiple occasions during the Franco-Prussian War for observation purposes, though without much impact on the outcome of battles. If this usage received a higher profile coverage by war correspondents due to more successful implementation of the reconnaissance advantages of the balloons, then perhaps in the aftermath of the war, development could be spurred in a direction that would lead to an onboard propulsion and steering system.

Germany would still be ideal in this case, as they had a decent lead when it came to lightweight gasoline engines in this era.
 
They might be of great use during the Scramble for Africa; much of that depended on getting to a territory to claim it first, and dirigibles would be much faster than marching. They would be useful at overawing African tribes as well. They don't need large numbers of troops, only enough to plant a flag. Romantic tales of dirigible-borne soldiers striking deep into the African wilderness could help boost their popular appeal.
 
OTL the airship flew as soon as the relevant technologies made it practical. Those early German gasoline engines? Installed on Zeppelin's early attempts.

Which were attempts. The Count had to make several, exhausting his own personal fortune and able to make more that finally convinced the military to go ahead and start funding them only with the help of a rather amazing flood of voluntary contributions from the public at large.

And in fact, Zeppelin was focused entirely on airships as military vehicles. The company got its funding almost entirely from military contracts. They did manage a small fleet of airships offering civil flights, true--these were not airlines in that they were not intended to convey passengers from point A to point B; rather they were thrill rides, airborne excursions. One bought a ticket on a Delag Zeppelin to go up into the sky, to see Germany from the air, to be able to say one had done it. In fact the Delag airships were military reserve, their crews were being trained up for military service and were reservists, and when the war broke out the airships were all put into military service at once.

So basically, OTL had all the speculative possibilities suggested--as soon as possible, which was not before 1890.

To meet the challenge, one has to advance the state of the art of metallurgy and engines by 20 years or so. (Or thirty, considering that serious commercial use of airships wasn't really in the cards until after WWI--though I do believe the state of the art as of 1918 was sufficiently advanced to start making passenger ships immediately--and one was built and used for actual air transport by Zeppelin, the LZ-120 Bodensee.

Of course if metals and engines suitable for airships are available for them, they are available for other purposes too--one has probably also advanced the airplane by the same interval.

As for airship operations to overawe tribal peoples--well, the Italians did it some years before WWI, in Libya. (Using the typical Italian preferred approach to the airship, the semirigid). They also pioneered aerial bombing.

The French attempted to enable their reparations airship, rechristened Dixmude, in North Africa, but it blew up one day over the Mediterranean. I've seen it asserted that the French program, being starved of funds, failed to maintain hydrogen purity in the gas cells, and these cells had something like 30 percent air in them--a recipe for sudden flamy disaster!

When the German Afrika-schiff LZ-80 made its epic voyage most of the way to East Africa from Bulgaria, it encountered rough flying over the Sahara and I believe moister parts of Africa too; the thermals boiling off the tropical land during the day made for a different kind of flying weather than pilots used to European or overseas conditions were used to.

It would be very easy for rather arrogant expeditions by colonial powers into hostile native hinterlands by airship to be brought to grief; just one story of how one was brought down in flaming ruin would give all the other groups a lot more confidence in defying them.

So that's a silver lining to the dark cloud of the world's general neglect of the potential of the airship in the 1920s; if the RAF had had them (in the sense of at least maintaining and using the handful they did have, instead of wasting them the way they generally did) and some had indeed started pioneering the Empire Route as planned I guess sooner or later several would have been diverted to colonial operations in places like Iraq (where the British did use airplanes precisely the way some posters here recommend using airships) and probably would have been brought to grief there.
 
Well, I'm pretty sure dirigibles aren't about to be used in war... Strategically speaking, I'm not sure of the sound nature of dirigible-based warfare. They're a little too volatile to be used to actually fight, I think.
 
In an observation and reconnaissance role, they aren't too shabby, especially for anti-submarine warfare once that rolls around.
 
Troop transport, not so much. It's far more economical to stick with rail and waterways since you'll need quite a lot of lifting gas to move men around in viable numbers. Otherwise, you'd have to break up infantry units and ship them to and fro in smaller loads.

The other thing hindering the usage of dirigibles as a replacement for conventional transportation is the huge infrastructure required to support them. You need mooring masts, hangars, stocks of pressurized gas, ballast, and ground crews (along with the rest of the airfield's accessory facilities) present wherever you want to land the dirigible, and that's quite an investment in its own right.
 
As naval patrol vessels they were pretty amazing; I still think the USN should have had ZRS airships operating during WWII. Also as strike aircraft carriers (small ones, but about like a small escort carrier); as convoy protection observer/carriers. And as logistic craft.

All roles they'd have been very good for in a WWII technology level timeframe.

I don't think they can do much of anything useful for anyone in a pre-1900 tech level timeframe.

There's this persistent idea that airships are some sort of steampunk airplane. A practical airship is actually contemporary with a practical airplane; at best a marginal airship has maybe a decade's edge on a barely flyable airplane. They use similar materials and technologies you see.

And when they fly, they have different capabilities and different roles.

I'm all for going wild with hundreds of huge dirigibles in the skies, but they belong in the 20th century, not before.
 
As naval patrol vessels they were pretty amazing; I still think the USN should have had ZRS airships operating during WWII. Also as strike aircraft carriers (small ones, but about like a small escort carrier); as convoy protection observer/carriers. And as logistic craft.

All roles they'd have been very good for in a WWII technology level timeframe.

I don't think they can do much of anything useful for anyone in a pre-1900 tech level timeframe.

There's this persistent idea that airships are some sort of steampunk airplane. A practical airship is actually contemporary with a practical airplane; at best a marginal airship has maybe a decade's edge on a barely flyable airplane. They use similar materials and technologies you see.

And when they fly, they have different capabilities and different roles.

I'm all for going wild with hundreds of huge dirigibles in the skies, but they belong in the 20th century, not before.
Dang it! Cherie Preist's Clockwork centuary was really drawing me in with that as well as the short story Custer's Last Jump which involves the battle at Little Bighorn involving airplane's as well as Custer and his men repelling to the ground on cables from a dirigible.
 
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