London to Sydney by airship in 1926

One must be careful to match like with like when comparing fares. Ocean liners carried both highly expensive first class passengers and poor 3rd class migrants and made money from both. For an airship the buyer would be comparing the journey cost with a premium for the relative speed. The comparison thus must be with first class ocean liner charges (including the extra spent on board ship for the comparatively longer voyage) and with good second class for officials and commercial travellers sent abroad or returning. Adding a certain extra for the cachet of an air journey and the value of speed and the numbers are quite plausible. The key difference is that ship passengers are not weight limited but space limited. Two cheap passengers do not make one whole expensive one in an airship but cramming in the steerage peasants was just as profitable to a shipping company as the first class ones with all their rooms. Unlike aeroplanes overnight stops or en route breaks are not necessary. An on journey stop need only be to set down/pick up passengers, fuel, water and stores. 4 hours should be more than enough and 2 seems possible. Having enough trained manpower at each landing point would probably be the tricky bit. You could easily get cheap day labour but that is not the quality needed for the task in all feasible weather. Mooring towers were one answer to that.

Re radar, the need to identify storms to allow avoidance may give a commercial impetus to radar development.
 
If you've got an R102 type airship capable of lifting five tons of freight and fifty people (roughly another five tons) you have a viable radar platform. Assuming they're not scrapped in the 30s

It's not a matter of weight, but of technology. Developing a radar system small enough to be mobile (not the air-air version of night fighters) took severall more years after the ground stations...
 
It's not a matter of weight, but of technology. Developing a radar system small enough to be mobile (not the air-air version of night fighters) took severall more years after the ground stations...
True but a decent size airship can lift and sustain multiple (insert airship size here) tons of payload and comes complete with engines so you have a small ground station liftable with a power source. Possibly the technology hurdle is a suitable early size radar array but then an airship hull is huge anyway.
 
True but a decent size airship can lift and sustain multiple (insert airship size here) tons of payload and comes complete with engines so you have a small ground station liftable with a power source. Possibly the technology hurdle is a suitable early size radar array but then an airship hull is huge anyway.
Plus, unlike aircraft, they're big with space for equipment, large wire antennae, technicians et cetera.
 
Surface scan radar would probably be more useful for an airship to look for surface raiders or subs charging batteries. A.E.W. implies the risk of enemy aircraft and no airship should be anywhere that is possible. They can't fight and the can't run, even from a Condor.
 
Yeah but they are slooooooow... take ages to get to a patrol area and return... and they'd be very vulnerable...

Their patrol areas shouldn't be that far from their bases. Even assuming a position over the Atlantic on ASW patrol it'd be maybe eight hours to get on station and a week long patrol.
 
Their patrol areas shouldn't be that far from their bases. Even assuming a position over the Atlantic on ASW patrol it'd be maybe eight hours to get on station and a week long patrol.

That I can agree. But actually attacking a sub, from a slow, big dirigible, that would be a problem. Maybe using parasite fighters?
 
That I can agree. But actually attacking a sub, from a slow, big dirigible, that would be a problem. Maybe using parasite fighters?
A lovely concept but one that never really worked. More likely they'd radio the sighting to other ASW assets. I'd have the airships at high altitude, where their surface search RADAR has the best range, slowly covering a large area of ocean.
 
A lovely concept but one that never really worked. More likely they'd radio the sighting to other ASW assets. I'd have the airships at high altitude, where their surface search RADAR has the best range, slowly covering a large area of ocean.

Yeah, I know, but they do look cool. And, if Miss Construction is going for an alternate tech/reality, this might be a possibility. It could even be used to drop mail along the way, without the dirigible stopping. Light plane drops down with the mail, lands, delivers, taks off back to momma. Extra cash without a stopover!
 
Yeah, I know, but they do look cool. And, if Miss Construction is going for an alternate tech/reality, this might be a possibility. It could even be used to drop mail along the way, without the dirigible stopping. Light plane drops down with the mail, lands, delivers, taks off back to momma. Extra cash without a stopover!

Well for those who don't know where the parent thread is

Chamberlain's Dream
 
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