Not paratroopers but a surprise attack all the same
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068014/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJXaRTIG9o
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068014/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJXaRTIG9o
Sure, but I wanted to make the point, that at least in the second half of the war the Germans could have build zeps with the necessary capacity if they saw the need. And under the right circumstances a thousand men (let´s say ten airships) dropped at the right place might can make a great difference.
As soon as they crossed no man's land they would be lit up by searchlights and hundreds of AA guns. Five to fifteen minutes later any aircraft that mounted a machine gun would be scrambled.
In short, its an interesting idea but not very practical.
But as I pointed out above they did built them with enough payload to carry a company iotl: See L 59 (LZ104) and L 57.No, this is still not happening. The OTL Zepp design was limited to the size of the building sheds they were housed in. The design was also prone to excessive flexing of the metal fuselage. This means that they can't expand their present design to gain additional lift capacity without making a larger, slower and extremely vulnerable target.
Granted.Who said they'd only be used on the Western Front? There are plenty of targets on other fronts
Which means a long, slow trip over enemy territory in what was not, after all, a stealthy craft. Six engines apiece by 1916, apparently. It's hard to see a successful outcome.Pick bridges or factories or whatever, all well back from the front, so no large numbers of troops handy to defend them, and few other defenses as well.
maybe they could play a useful role in moving troops around isolated parts of african colonies where there are fewer forces anyway?
You just don't "park" a zeppelin like a pickup truck while you load/unload it, some infrastructure is required.
This is from my copy of "The Golden Age of the great passenger airships, Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg" by Dick and Robinson describing how the Graf was handled. Early zeps were handled much the same way:
Yaw lines dropped from the ship's nose were drawn out to port and starboard by thirty men each, while twenty more on each side pulled the ship down with spider lines (called that because twenty short lines radiated like the legs of a spider from a block). When the airship reached the ground, fifty men held the control car rails and twenty held those of the aft car. With thirty men in reserve, the ground crew totaled two hundred men. The ground crew would then walk the Graf Zeppelin to a short, or ‘stub’, mast, to which the nose of the airship would be attached.
Googling the book turned up a Wikipage that should add a nice bit of reality to the "discussion" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooring_mast
Take a long look at the various mooring mast pictures and then imagine one of them on a submarine as one poster in another zep actually seriously suggested.