Any possible ways to have the XF-85 Goblin enter production in a reconnaissance or jet fighter role?

Archibald

Banned
it was an aerodynamic horror. The basic concept was completely flawed. Perhaps one of the worst fighter ever designed in the USA...
 
If You really want to use it, marry it with the Royal Navy's rubber landing deck system so it could land at any air field equipped with one or as an alternative it could give small carriers the ability to carry a point defence fighter!!! Think how many you could pack into even an escort carrier. You would need cradle type catapults to launch but again that was a mature technology used by the Brits up until the middle of WW2.
 
This gets me thinking, with the tech we got nowadays a modern parasitic fighter is more plausible?
Any actual attempts of that after this?
 
There were studies to turn a Boeing 747 into a flying aircraft carrier.

Would have used their own inhouse tiny fighter though. Not the Goblin.

I also vaguely rememder reading somthing about the Goblin trials.... maybe in Chuck Yeager's auto biography? Any who long and short of it was they eventually kind of realized the carrier aircraft turbulence was the retreival stickler..... but didn't have the funds left to totally redesign the hook/catch extension.

For a fictional example of a flying plane catcher the anime "Yukikazi" has some ginormous jet bi-plane thing that lands, services and launches the sci-fi shows jets.

Will find the images and post when I can.
 

All Rounder

Gone Fishin'
I think the XF-85 could be redesigned with landing gears, by getting rid of the intake which IMO was a massive hazard and having vents at the back and sides. This could free up space and allow landing gears to be added, I already gave my ideas on where the cameras could go if it put into a reconnaissance plane role. But I find it quite hard to imagine it fitting into a fighter role.
 

All Rounder

Gone Fishin'
This gets me thinking, with the tech we got nowadays a modern parasitic fighter is more plausible?
Any actual attempts of that after this?

Yes, but it's practicality has dwindled substantially since planes today move at twice the speed those in the 50s did. An F-15 would outclass a Goblin in every aspect.
 
The B-52 carried a decoy called the Quail. Not a fighter, but a diversion. Author Dale Brown transformed this into a totally fictional smart drone which is far more capable than a manned fighter in every way.
 
The B-52 carried a decoy called the Quail. Not a fighter, but a diversion. Author Dale Brown transformed this into a totally fictional smart drone which is far more capable than a manned fighter in every way.
Dale Brown does that with everything
 

Archibald

Banned
Nope, the XF-5U was a good aircraft with incredible performance and VSTOL abilities. The Goblin was just insane
 
From what I've read the Goblin was a delight to fly, it was trying to reattach to the mothership that was a nightmare...
 

thorr97

Banned
Easy! Just get the bugs on the J34's throttle figured out so that the thing quickly enough responds to the pilot's controls. That's what prevented the Goblin from being able to successfully hook back up with the trapeze. You also should more aerodynamically refine that trapeze so that it'd produce less turbulence for the Goblin to work its way through. Having the tests conducted using a B-36 - as originally intended - would've gone a long way toward that as well. The props on the 36 were much further away from fuselage as were those on the Superfortress. That meant the FICON F-84 had pretty much smooth air under the '36 as it maneuvered up to it.

Still though, in the end, you'd be left with a rather short ranged machine. It could deploy, zip around driving off the bad guys but then have to come back to its mothership for refueling, at the least, if not rearming as well. All of which is happening while the bombers are most likely still under attack. The small size of the Goblin just magnified this as there really wasn't much space for fuel and bullets in an airframe that small.

But, that small size also meant it'd be hell for the bad guys to get a bead on. So, tradeoffs abound.
 
I think the XF-85 could be redesigned with landing gears, by getting rid of the intake which IMO was a massive hazard and having vents at the back and sides. This could free up space and allow landing gears to be added, I already gave my ideas on where the cameras could go if it put into a reconnaissance plane role. But I find it quite hard to imagine it fitting into a fighter role.

Well, it was designed to be a fighter, and nothing else. It had practically zero endurance. The idea was that designing a traditional escort fighter for intercontinental ranges would be a nightmare wherein the "fighter" would be a huge whale of mostly flying fuel tank, no match for nimble enemy interceptors that did not require thousands of miles of range. So flip that around--make the fighter "escort" a parasite, deployed only for point defense of the bomber mother ship, and then it could have the advantage of speed and nimbleness by sacrificing every compromise a normal airplane requires in order to take off and land. Therefore half the horror someone like Archibald feels seeing the ridiculous thing is by design. These were early days of jet engine design after all; thrust tended to be anemic. So what we have is minimum airplane, just room for a pilot, some guns and ammo, wings and control surfaces wrapped around an engine for maximum thrust/weight ratio. I note from your statistics comparing to the later Thunderflash recon parasites that the Goblin had lighter weight/wing area ratio--which is probably mostly state of the art, the Republic plane being the later design following the trend of ever higher loadings corresponding to higher operational airspeeds. But in the role of defense fighter, the lower loading is good; it means it can lose airspeed maneuvering and still stay nimble, and it can be very maneuverable (if it doesn't fall apart structurally--but the compact form suggests it ought to have been pretty robust too). But it cannot have endurance! That violates the whole concept. The idea is, get dropped off, zoom over on your relatively powerful engine, kill the MiG bandits, then run home to mama for retrieval, refueling and presumably refilling the gun magazine. That, presuming it can do that, is all it can do. There is no point in putting landing gear on it; the radical cutback in parasite mass is due to it already being launched at full airspeed and altitude. There is no margin for takeoff and climb, it would run out of fuel before it got to intercept altitude. Recon also would require long range--if the parasite recon plane is not going far beyond the mother ship's line of sight, what is the point? Just put big telescopic cameras on the big plane; they've got to be lighter than a whole airplane and much less risky too! Clearly the Thunderflash had to go far out of the carrier bomber's line of sight, which given the really long distances one can see from a stratospheric altitude, means many many hundreds of miles.

Had the idea been to develop a parasite recon plane back in the 40s when Goblin was conceived of, the design would be radically different. You'd want moderate endurance then, so fuel tanks would be integral to the design; you are not aiming for combat maneuverability at high altitude, although some nimbleness would be desirable to evade interceptors. Speed is a virtue so the engine remains oversized, but so is stability to get good photos-I suspect flying Goblin was rather like piloting a bumblebee! Keeping it light overall is a virtue both due to the fact that you want to recover it to the mother plane, and to minimize overall size to make it harder to spot and track, but the recon mission suggests it would be good to have a second crewman to take the photos while the pilot concentrates on flying the plane. It would be wise to design optional landing gear, in case the mother ship gets shot down or disabled, but these could be simplified to be one-way drop-down gear (operated by compressed air or even a solid-fuel charge, or maybe just plain gravity perhaps with some springs to latch them tight) that are lighter, since we hope to avoid using them at all and we don't need them for takeoff, so no retraction mechanism. But we might omit them completely and write the plane off in such an emergency, with the crew bailing out (hopefully with the film canisters and any other recording media).

Overall it would wind up looking a whole lot more like a normal high-speed fighter/interceptor, which explains why just such an off the shelf design was adapted to the mission OTL.

I have always been a lot more charmed with the concept than say Archibald is; it is too goofy not to love IMHO! I'm also a big fan of airship-based hook-on airplane operations too, and my thoughts on and knowledge of the latter subject suggest to me that the basic problem of the OTL test operations was that the "trapeze" mechanism was too close to the airplane. The plane was going much faster than an airship, which eliminates the obvious problem of a high-speed plane trying to "land" on a 60 knot airship, but the solution is similar. Here, the problem is the airplane (mother ship I mean, meant to be B-36 in operations) relies on dynamic lift and is going much faster, 300-400 knots or so, 150-200 meters/sec, and so tremendous turbulence vortices are coming off it. The solution is distance--get the trapeze itself a good 50 meters or so away from the airplane, and the approaching parasite plane has pretty clear air to approach in. When hook on speeds match, as with the Naval ZRS rigid airships of the early 30s and their biplane Sparrowhawk fighter/scouts, then in clear air operations are a breeze compared to the daunting yet routine task Naval carrier plane pilots have landing at (nowadays) approach speeds over 100 knots on a pitching effectively stationary deck.

I believe carriers generally steam as fast as they can straight into the headwind, which can take some 25-60 knots off the effective approach speed, but the high speeds depend on strong surface winds which introduce new complications of turbulence, whereas modern heavy fighters probably need a lot more than 100 knots airspeed at landing, and of course little can be done to eliminate pitching. By the way one might imagine hydrofoils, honking heavy ones to be sure, combined with 20-30 knot water speeds, could dramatically help with the aid of very responsive foil pitch control, but I've never heard of such a stabilization project.

Anyway everything I've read about the ZRS experience with hook on operations says that after a few early glitches (in one case, the trapeze mechanism was bent by a hard landing and the pilot of the test plane, maybe not a Sparrowhawk yet, had to climb up and hit it to unjam it!) the pilots had quite an easy time, with no losses due to failures in that phase of operations. On the other hand the German aviation mandarin Udet once attempted to try it out in person, with a rig attached to Hindenburg, and reported it was quite difficult for him. Maybe the Germans placed the rig badly--it was off center of the airship hull for one thing, and perhaps in at a much more turbulent, more rearward station. But I also suspect Udet might have "thrown" the test, perhaps one reason he did it himself--neither Goering nor Hitler had any fondness for Zeppelins, and I suspect he knew what his bosses wanted to hear. Anyway the Americans had no trouble with it, and I think it has got to be less dangerous than conventional landings on seaborne flattops.

I am not sure just how far out of the main slipstream of the airplane a high-speed trapeze would have to go. In addition to going much slower, airships operate close to static equilibrium, meaning little to none of their lift comes from dynamically diverting the slipstream. (I know, dynamic lift can be significant, and a lot of people think hybridizing to rely on more of it is the way to revive semi-LTA, and a lot of current designs rely on it heavily. I happen to think it is a mistake to neglect the advantages of pure static lift myself, so I ignore that factor. To be sure, precisely during hook-on operations is when an airship mother ship would be most out of static balance, since to be in it after retrieving the planes, it would need to be light before doing so, or vice versa if in balance before hook on it will be heavy afterward. My point here is, any dynamic component of lift is relatively small on a traditional airship and the bigger the airship the more true this is--absolute lift goes up, but more slowly than the static component). So the turbulent layer around an airship is large mainly just because of its size, but just a few meters off has clear air. With a dynamically lifted airplane of a couple hundred tons, flying at say 350 knots, the turbulence is much worse despite its relatively compact dimensions. But anyway, at some radius below the fuselage, air should be pretty clear. An approaching airplane at the same airspeed should be able to hook on as easily as the Sparrowhawks did. Doing it much closer to the big plane is a recipe for disaster of course.

The hanging trapeze and cable would be a turbulence generator itself of course. And at high airspeeds, drag would be considerable and trail the trapeze far behind at a wide angle to vertical, also drawing it back into the turbulence cone of the big airplane. I would propose streamlining the heck out of the trapeze itself, the cable (giving a cable a thick airfoil like section can lower its drag dramatically, see "RAF wire") and also adding a propulsive unit just above the trapeze itself--a pair of well-controlled propellers flanking the bottom of the cable, powered by electricity from the big airplane or a light engine in the hanging assembly, with variable pitch that responds rapidly, to provide counter-thrust pulling the cable back forward and damping out any crosswinds or turbulence. Once hooked on, the assembly and parasite plane can be winched in, perhaps the thruster props will need to fight turbulence that might otherwise toss the little plane around until firmer, shorter lines or cranes can be attached to mount it rigidly and pull it in tight for refueling and rearming, perhaps swapping out the pilot with a relief.

I think had it been deemed worthwhile to proceed, the hook-on problems of the Goblin could have been solved in this fashion. With that fixed, my impression is that Goblin would have been able to serve its intended purpose, point defense of a bomber with a nimble, effective and fast short-endurance fighter, reasonably well as designed. We may not be sure of that since the test program gave up without solving the essential hook-on problem first, but it seems likely enough it would be doable to me, especially in view of later success with the Republic airframes.

The trouble was, the doctrine that bombers would need to be accompanied by fighter cover was abandoned, first of all, in favor of the hope that bombers could be made to fly fast enough, at high enough altitudes, that enemy interceptors would not be able to down them. Or at any rate, that enough bombers would get though to make the inevitable losses to interception acceptably low. Secondly, the variation on the hook-on theme of in-flight refueling was developed instead, which did enable fighter cover to go a lot more forward without compromising either by designing in hook-on operations (which clearly compromise both the fighter and the bomber, the latter being the bigger concern I believe) or by making them into mostly fuel tank. (That too was proposed, I believe an early postwar Douglas design, or it might have been the last Curtiss, was meant to have the endurance--and it was indeed a heavy whale, if not a blue whale than anyway an Orca!) It also greatly extended the range of the bombers themselves of course. B-47 and B-52 were indeed remarkably fast and very high-flying turbojet designs. The Soviet "Bear" although powered with turboprops flew in the same envelope, and with greater fuel efficiency (maybe somewhat slower, though by far the fastest prop plane ever flown, and with a much worse radar cross-section and identifiability thanks to those contra props--noisy too if that matters) and also eschewed fighter escort in favor of nimble maneuvering and high speed and altitude. Then of course ground-based SAMs were developed capable of reaching even the highest attainable altitudes, with rocket projectiles far exceeding any sustainable airplane speed, even of a plane designed at great cost to fly at high supersonic speeds like the B-70; at this point bombers could only hope to get through by a combination of stealth/deception and sheer saturation of enemy air defenses--which by the way a couple of early 1960s operations in the USA demonstrated were not nearly as good as was hoped. Or by going over to treetop skimming below-radar approaches, which some airframes designed for high-and-fast could adapt to and others could not.

Obviously against ground gun fire or SAMs, or on low-altitude below-radar missions, parasite fighters are quite useless. Wherever fighter escort might be most useful and practical, airborne refueling at the edge of the combat zone enabled standard designs to do the job without compromises in the design.

And of course the whole vexed (from a traditionalist like LeMay's POV anyway) subject of missiles on all scales was critical as well. It is not clear to me that nuclear strike bombers should have been retained at all in that role, once ICBMs were developed and deployed. Thank God the matter has never been put to the practical test. We have used both big bombers and fighter-bomber designs extensively since WWII, armed with conventional bombs or cruise missiles or other stand-off air-to-surface missiles, and missiles have taken over much of the role of air-to-air combat, Experience teaches it is foolish to design a fighter/interceptor with no machine guns/cannon, but the air to air missiles they must also carry are intended to be the first recourse, with guns coming into play only later in a dogfight. (Lack of guns cost Air Force, Naval and Marine pilots a lot of kill opportunities in Vietnam, but it would have been bad to have no missiles at all too). If we have a bomber today that fears it might need to run an interceptor gauntlet, it is clearly better to upgrade the same (conceptually anyway) air-to-air missile a hypothetical parasite fighter would need to carry anyhow, to give it more range and sophistication, and fire that, and forget about recovering it, than to carry a defensive parasite fighter. Hence schemes like Pye Wacket.

It would be cool to somehow game or freeze the advances of technology that closed the window on parasite fighters so firmly, but I have no clue how to plausibly do it. If it were done, I do think Goblin could have performed well enough in its generation to have the mission it was meant for.

It certainly is not adaptable to other missions such as strike or recon!
 
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thorr97

Banned
Note the differences in the trapeze designed for the Goblin to use and the trapeze designed for the FICON to use. The later was a truly streamlined bit of aerodynamicness. The former looked like a kludge of drag and turbulence producing struts and trusswork. Operationally, I could see some "stoops" being set up under the vast wings of the B-36. These could be as simple as hook on bars so that the Goblin's could just latch up and throttle down to save gas. Or they could be "wet" ones where they hook up and the trapeze mechanism sports a fueling connection. Thus at least they'd be readily gassed up without having to go through the full docking procedure in the main bay of the bomber.

Recently, in the past couple of years, I saw a design study to rearm and refuel strike drones - while in flight! This would involve a system fit into a C-130. The drone would come up behind the Herc and latch on to the trapeze mechanism. The rest of that mechanism would then extend to lock the drone securely in place. Then the fresh ordnance load would be run out and attached to the drone. Fuel topped off and with a fresh load of exploding goodness, the drone would be unlatched and sent on its latest mission.

Throughout the 40s and 50s there were plenty of proposals for "mothership" aircraft. Lockheed, among others, included such a capability in some of its nuclear powered "sea control" proposals. Those things were vast aircraft and sported a crew of dozens of men. The endurance of those planes were limited mainly by their crew's endurance. So, it made sense to not only have parasite fighters for the plane's defense but also have the capability to transport crew to and from the mothership. Pretty cool stuff!
 
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Throughout the 40s and 50s there were plenty of proposals for "mothership" aircraft. Lockheed, among others, included such a capability in some of its nuclear powered "sea control" proposals. Those things were vast aircraft and sported a crew of dozens of men. The endurance of those planes were limited mainly by their crew's endurance. So, it made sense to not only have parasite fighters for the plane's defense but also have the capability to transport crew to and from the mothership. Pretty cool stuff!

Links plz plz plz :extremelyhappy:
 
Jet-powered fighters flying from airship carriers? That would be so cool. How it could work, or be feasible, I have no good idea.

Well, it is not really on topic here, but I'm quite enthusiastic about it, and I think it could be feasible.

Consider this application for instance--develop a medium-sized airship to carry a single 1970s-'80s era high performance fighter like the F-16, F-15, current generation Mirage or SAAB, whatever-in the range of 15-30 tons TOW. A major strategic concern in case of the feared war with the Warsaw Pact was that the high-quality runways at least the American designs required (and while good competitors existed, the F-16 for one became almost ubiquitous, in the Third World's richer air forces as well as in Europe) could easily be trashed by early WP strikes, leaving the airborne planes with no place to land and any on the ground that evaded being blown up there, unable to take off. It occurred to me that if we had a bunch of airships, equal in number to the high-performance airplanes, that could carry them up in ready status and scatter them all over Western Europe's skies (practically speaking, hugging the west border of West Germany, pretty much where "forward" USAF NATO bases generally were--at modern supersonic fighter speeds, West Germany was practically one-dimensional in depth!) Launching any airplane from any airship is a breeze; assuming it is loaded up ready to go, start the engines on idle after the pilot jumps into his seat and straps in, and just drop it. At any modest altitude the pilot has plenty of time to gun the engines, and is gaining airspeed in a dive while diving into thicker air too; a big part of fuel consumption is avoided with this running start thanks to gravity.

Landing is the tricky bit. Not the only one of course--airships need to worry about deviations from static equilibrium. We can use dynamic lift to an extent, and a ship sized to lift say 20 tons payload statically (plus auxiliary mass of support equipment and crew--such an airship would want to carry reloads for the fighter, refueling, relief pilots too, and have some minor repair capability for quick fixes, and we need to set aside some mass for recovery systems) would be able, at attainable airspeeds for the airship, to hold itself down for a while without having to immediately vent lift gas, which one wants to avoid since one hopes to recover the plane later.

There are also methods of regaining static equilibrium. Suppose for instance that part of the lift gas is not helium but say steam or ammonia. Steam would be a poor choice in this case, since its heat would make the airships show up on infrared scans. So say ammonia. It is less effective than helium, but if we can condense some ammonia to liquid, due to the fact that we gain ballast weight no longer supported by displacing air mass at the same time as we reduce the other portion of displacement lift that counts to lift other masses, and so the volume we need to fill with ammonia to account for a variable weight is only that of the denser air that has that mass--pretty much; the remaining volume of liquid ammonia throws it off a tiny bit, but only by a tenth of a percent. So we'd use less ammonia than we would need for an ammonia balloon, by a considerable amount. (This is true of any substance that can be switched from gas to liquid state and back again by the way, but there is no sense in using a heavier molecule when a lighter one would do. We could use a heavy chlorofluorocarbon and would consider doing so if the task of condensing it were dramatically easier than condensing ammonia, but if that thermodynamic task is in the same ballpark, ammonia is the right stuff to use). After dropping a 20 ton warplane, we condense less than 20 tons of gaseous ammonia, using power to compress it and then cool it by air convection until it condenses, and store it in ambient temperature pressure tanks, or we could cool it further and store it in lower pressure insulated tanks. When the airplane comes back, we release the ammonia again, heating it since it would be too cool to provide full lift if we don't. Since these operations take time we still need to use dynamic lift to avoid surging up into the upper atmosphere, but it is temporary.

Now then, when the plane comes back it wants to be retrieved, since our premise is the WP has trashed all the runways it can land on in this zone of operations. Say it can manage to stay airborne and with some weak control authority at 200 knots airspeed near sea level. (That I think is higher than listed landing speeds, but on the other hand my retired fighter pilot father tells me it was a real pain in the ass to stay in formation with subsonic air refueling tanker planes with such supersonic aircraft as the F-105 or -106 and presumably F-16, even though the tankers could go much faster than 200 knots. They were still painfully slow for the fighters! So control is very mushy.) The airship can manage 60 knots; this is reasonable given OTL airship history, and also not likely to be greatly exceeded in operations. 80 knots might be a temporarily sustainable speed, it poses structural issues though and given the stresses involved in retrieving a 20 ton plane (albeit lighter now due to fuel consumption and expended ordinance) would probably be a bad idea unless these airships are fantastically strong. Well they might be but for the moment look at 60 knots. This is a 140 knot difference!

That is 70 meters/sec; kinetic energy of that relative speed difference is 2500 joules/kg. This corresponds to the potential energy difference between points 250 meters apart vertically in Earth's gravity field. Therefore if we have a hook-on trapeze hanging say 300 meters below the airship, and the airplane can manage to put its hook into the trapeze and it is secured there, the plane and trapeze arrangement can swing like a pendulum, tethered firmly on this 300 meter line, up to a point most of 300 meters ahead of the tether anchor on the airship and 50 meters below it. We could use a 250 meter line and it would swing closer to the nose (the airship will be some 200 meters long or more, and thus the anchor point some 80 or more aft of the nose--more than 80 if we want the line tension to pull down on the airship aft of the center of lift and mass, and thus bring the tail down and nose up for automatic dynamic lift--how far aft depends on calculations I haven't done) and all the way up to the height of the bottom of the airship.

However, presumably the airplane has other means of shedding velocity than merely swinging on the line--it can use air drag with air brakes for instance. We can probably get that line considerably shorter, and swing the airplane up to a point behind its nose and below the bottom of the hull. With a secondary line that might shoot forward from the tether anchor on a track and be reeled in briskly on a winch, the primary attachment can shift to this forward attachment point, and the airplane then winched into place and transferred to its normal station from which it hangs when on alert, where servicing equipment can check it out, fuel it up, and reload and attach ammunition.

So now the question is, can a pilot really plant a hook into a modest-sized triangle or hoop or other such "trapeze" at 70 meters/sec relative speed? I've thought of trapeze designs that can help enable this. I believe race car drivers commonly keep fine control at higher speeds, and OTL Navy/USMC pilots do more difficult things landing on carrier decks. Obviously there is some risk; if the pilot comes in too high he might smash his canopy on the bottom of the tether; too low or too far off to the side one way or the other and he misses.

There are a few workarounds here, if it turns out this is too much to ask of even Navy pilots. One could accelerate the trapeze, dropping it from its full height so it swings forward. Or use propellers, jets or rockets to give it a burst of speed up toward the airplane's speed to give the pilot half a second or so of easier targeting. We might also steer the trapeze to match the pilot's possibly slightly wavering course, using close tracking to compensate for deviations.

We might also lower the encounter speed by several tricks. The pilot could swoop down far below and to the rear to pop up in an outside look on idled thrust, arcing up on a parabola to lose speed to slow the encounter--at lower airspeed his control authority deteriorates more. Perhaps using some sort of flap like arrangements his plane can enhance its aerodynamic maneuverability at low airspeed. And we can install some kind of rockets or conceivably jump-jet lift for temporary weight reduction allowing lower airspeeds; if the maneuver is brief enough we might keep the fuel mass down, and the dry weight of suitable rockets (which might also supplement aerodynamic control) might be quite modest. If our main lift rocket is hydrogen peroxide/kerosene, we would consume mainly peroxide; oxidant to fuel ratios would be 7 or 8 to 1 and so only about 10-15 percent or so would need to be kerosene. I estimate about one ton could lift a 20 ton airplane for 10 seconds, less than 200 kg of that fuel. The engine installation could be as low as a quarter ton.

The tonnage of the kit needed to accomplish all this would be well below that of the airplane I'd think.

Someone might point out this an atomic battlefield; will not the airships be sitting ducks to be torn to shreds by even quite distant misses of even quite small nuclear warheads? I actually think not, not if we use pressure ship designs--blimps--with unusually strong envelopes. I believe a blimp can take a shock wave that does not exceed the maximum bursting pressure of the envelope. If we can use very strong fabric materials without taking up more than say 2/3 the total mass of the system, shock waves whose pressure has dropped below the maximum will roll right over it. The side facing the shock will crumple, until the helium inside (which has a much higher speed of sound than air, so it will compress as one uniform volume, maybe with some exponential gradient, but no shock wave) has been pressurized to the same pressure as the wave front; then it will just hold, as the wave passes around it. Until it does so the pressure gradient will shove the hull violently along with it, accelerating it, but the fixed denser masses of the interior structure-control car, crew/hangar spaces, engines and props--will anchor it. Exposed surfaces of these need to be hardened against the blast and all needs to be robust enough to stand the shock of the acceleration. But it will all be over in a 5th of a second or less as the wave passes at somewhat over the speed of sound in air; longer if it goes lengthwise in a nose-on or tail-on blast. Once the wave front passes, the airship is crumpled and slack, but if the suspension lines are strong enough and so is the hull material, it will reinflate to full volume and pressurized structure as the pressure of the blast wave falls behind the front. Indeed a strong shock wave has a suction phase behind it where pressure falls below normal atmospheric considerably, but if the hull is strong this suction phase will just make it super-ridgid with unusual high relative pressure. In that phase the volume is displacing less mass than usual and it will start to fall, but relatively slowly; as pressure returns to normal full buoyancy will reassert itself. It certainly would not fall during the passage of the shock front and after; the helium will then be displacing as much mass as before. Indeed if there are ammonia or air volumes inside, these will not be able to collapse as fast as the helium and will have internal shock waves perhaps, but that delays their compression and thus means the whole thing displaces more air mass and the shock acceleration will include a vertical rising component.

Now, blimps normally are not built to withstand relative pressures greater than a couple percent of an atmosphere, so to withstand a 2 atmosphere absolute pressure shock front it would have to have a hull 50 times stronger than normal--this would be hard to achieve without pretty heavy fabric. 1980s tech may not be up to it, I'm not sure we could do it today. But a full atmosphere overpressure is comparable to the worst blast pressures WWII armored ships at the Bikini tests could take before they started suffering serious blast damage; a full atmosphere overpressure capability thus makes a blimp as tough in this respect as a 1945 battleship! Greater pressures would be exerted by closer strikes, but anyway such an airship will not be burst by a Hiroshima-sized strike farther away than a couple miles, so such bursts could only clear maybe 10 square miles of area. Bigger bursts would kill more airships but are inefficient. Targeted strikes by nukes that come within a kilometer or so would kill the airship they are aimed at to be sure. As for traditional HE weapons, it turns out blimps can take a lot of damage. Concussion has to be pretty near to rip up a toughened blimp; blowing holes in it will cause the helium to leak away--but slower than one might think! Modern blimps often come home from excursions with bullet holes in them; lots of people like to shoot at them apparently, but they don't crash because although helium leaks fast through bullet holes, there is just a whole lot of helium inside. Generally crews don't realize they were shot at until they come to dock and maintenance crews find the holes. I would think that with fabric 50-100 times stronger than usual, it would be harder to make holes or rips.

I can also think of strategies to withstand overpressure greater than the fabric can take, by controlled emergency venting of the helium; this will leave the hull undamaged but depleted of helium. It will crash unless there are reserve lift gases aboard to reinflate it. But anyway the fall will be relatively slow and crew can bail out.

Airships can lend themselves to stealth operations, thus the enemy might not have any idea where many of them are. It would also be possible to make decoy airships with no payloads lifting a tenth or less what the real carrier ones do but having the same volume and appearance, and the same airborne characteristics, to dilute enemy attempts to shoot down the blimps. Since the enemy is supposed to be largely held back by the aircraft launched from the real carrier blimps in conjunction with ground forces the airship "bases" seem likely to suffer attrition no worse than the airplanes they serve, hence enough recovery ships are available for returning squadrons. Should the defenders retreat or advance, the airships can go forward or back with them, some hundreds of miles behind the front.
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Now then, this is an extreme application, but I do believe that had there been a more florid "Golden Age of airships" in the 1920s, in the 1930s airships would largely convert to hook-on platforms for airplanes, and if these caught on and airships kept a major role in merchant and military services, then in turn the possibilities of air launch and retrieval would enable certain advances earlier. Early jet planes for instance tended to suffer in operations at low altitude and airspeeds, and climbing to the stratospheric heights they were best suited to would take a lot of fuel, as would takeoff and landing. Airplanes, even prop planes, optimized for high airspeeds at altitude might be practical earlier if launched from and landed on airships. Jets in particular might benefit in early years from such air launching and therefore we might see commercial jet service earlier, operating from big rigid airships. Really gigantic airships might even take the place of the huge airport complexes typical of post-WWII airports. In this context Navy airborne carriers would start out as the equivalent of fast escort carriers, only able to carry a handful of warplanes, but able to proceed as an airship at twice or more the speed of surface ships and also able to fly over most land obstacles, taking shortcuts over low land. And in parallel with gigantic "terminal" commercial/military logistic giant airships, gigantic Naval versions kilometers long could carry large-carrier sized squadrons with some hope of surviving on a nuclear battlefield.

Airborne refueling of airplanes would generally involve hooking onto an airship; once secured the headaches and nightmares of airborne refueling as we know it would be replaced by the airship simply bearing the plane's weight until the fuel is loaded in, then dropping it.
 
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