Of course if Imperial Germany wins the Great War then that's not such a detriment.
Probably. OTL, the Count himself was disillusioned with his invention toward the end of the war (he died before it ended) and the Zeppelin company was branching out into airplanes--specializing in big ones and seaplanes. I don't think it was just realpolitik that had Dr Eckener stressing that airships were better suited to peaceful commerce and exploration in the interwar years though it's hard to separate out sincere conviction from pragmatism. Actually, despite his outspoken hatred of the Nazi regime and being made an uncitizen and removed from control of the company in the later 30s, he did continue to personally cooperate with putting the last rigid, the Graf Zeppelin "II"*, at the disposal of the regime for clearly non-peaceful purposes--among other things, trying to electronically scout out Britain's new Chain Home radar system shortly before the next war. Certainly the most dramatic demonstration of the potentials of airships for long-range commerce was itself a military mission, the LZ-104's attempt to bring aid to von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa. Because of the manner of the mission's failure--news over the radio indicated von Lettow had been defeated--the ship wound up traveling farther than intended as it had gotten most of the way there when the decision was made to turn back. (The plan was to cannibalize the ship for supplies rather than attempt to fly it back north). The military potential of possibly penetrating British attempts to interdict the flight was thus ultimately untested though certainly if the British did know of the attempt they failed to intercept it twice over the Med or northeast Africa. But the demonstration of range with payload was quite impressive.
Being the kind of guy I am I don't settle for just any CP victory; I want one where the Germans don't look like bad guys, which is why I like LordInsane's Central East timeline, where the French and not the Germans first violated Belgian neutrality and the British and Americans never joined the war; also the war was over considerably sooner and so less damage overall was done. That ought to be good for the Zeppelin reputation too, though they wouldn't have as long to develop their art from the remarkably primitive forms they started the war with.
Anyway if there was ever going to be a Golden Age of airshipmanship, it should have been the 1920s.
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*--the Zeppelin company called their last rigid, LZ-130, simply the Graf Zeppelin having decommissioned the original Graf, LZ-127. It never had a numeral "II" after it officially.
I'm probably the one you heard it from. Here's the man who's done the most to bring this possibility to the world's attention, in our lifetimes anyway: Tom Goodey.
A good question! It seems to me that the essence of "steampunk" is to achieve capabilities associated with a later stage of technology at an earlier stage; if you just accelerate the general development of technology and it all comes along more or less in the order it did OTL, that's not steampunk. So most steampunk is either in blatant disregard of the basic laws of physics, or at best involves an alternate path of technical development so that some things that were only possible OTL at the same time as other things are possible earlier before you have the other things. I'm pretty skeptical about that.
Take my beloved airships. I do love them, but the more I've learned about their development and limits, the more I realize that far from being a more "primitive" form of aviation, that they became practical using pretty much the same advances in technology that made airplanes practical. In order to solve the problems airships face, you need to develop materials and engines and so forth that might just as well be used on airplanes instead. Indeed a number of advances in HTA aviation began as developments intended for airships, like duralumin for instance, and other developments were first tested on blimps before being refined, ruggedized, and miniaturized for use in airplanes.
Goodey himself is pretty skeptical of steam airships, on any scale more than for an advertising blimp--he thinks steam is good for the latter mainly because for a small blimp it is good to be able to deflate it completely and fold up the envelope for storage and transport. You don't want to do that with helium because it is difficult to scavenge it from an inflated ship and compress it for storage and transport, and you certainly don't want to vent the expensive stuff. Hydrogen is more disposable but while cheaper and easier to supply at a distant location than helium (one can synthesize hydrogen from more readily transported/stored or locally obtained materials, while helium must be hauled in from one of just three known sources in the world) the stuff still isn't free, and of course there are the well-known hazards of dealing with it.
As a lift gas, steam at sea level can lift about 60 percent by volume of what helium can, about 55 percent as well as pure hydrogen. Of course as it cools it condenses back into water and needs to be boiled again; that's a constant power drain. Goodey empirically found, with his own experiments, that about 1.4 kilograms of water condensed from each square meter of his setup every hour. Something the volume of the Hindenburg or the American ZRS rigids, around 200,000 cubic meters, could be enclosed in a minimum sphere of about 73 meters diameter, which would have the area of 16,540 square meters and therefore (if the cooling rate stays constant for unit area as we scale up, which seems likely but isn't entirely clear) 23 tons of water would drip down over the course of an hour. Furthermore not only is that new weight to be borne (assuming we don't just drop it as ballast) but the loss of lift due to the loss of steam volume is also about 23 tons--it so happens that steam at sea level lifts about twice its own mass. Considering that the total static lift of 200,000 cubic meters of steam initially is 120 tons, we see that a simple steam balloon of this size could stay airborne just a bit under five hours if the condensate is dropped as fast as it dribbles down.
However Goodey also experimented with insulation--it is not practical to insulate hot-air balloons, but considering the much greater lift of steam at similar temperatures (modern hot-air balloons do operate at near boiling temperatures) it is feasible to insulate a steam balloon. A simple layer of bubble wrap halved the rate of heat loss; a more elaborate coat reduced it by a factor of five! If these effects scale, a layer of insulation on our 200,000 cubic meter steam balloon weighing around 2 tons would lose just 4.5 tons of water per hour. If then we can reboil that mass of water, about 1 and a quarter kg per second, the craft can stay afloat indefinitely--rather, until we run out of fuel; from other figures Goodey mentions elsewhere I gather it takes about 1/10 a kg of typical hydrocarbon fuel to boil 1 kg of water, so 450 kg an hour would be the fuel consumption rate--or about 9/10 of that since of course it is not necessary to keep lifting fuel weight that is burnt up!
Note that while for purposes of steam ballooning, one would use fuel simply to generate low-pressure steam directly, with a propelled dirigible, much of the heat we'd need would be available as waste heat from the engines, heat that is useless for power by the laws of thermodynamics but which in this case can still do us a second useful service.
But take note first of all some reasons Goodey is reluctant to be all gung-ho about a steam dirigible airship:
1) an airship can't be a simple sphere; that shape is much too draggy. The big rigids were about 6 times as long as their greatest diameter; the actual skin area would be more like 30,000 square meters in area, so even holding still in the air the cooling rate would be doubled.
2) no one seems to know just how a forced draft of air over the surface would affect the rate of cooling--presumably accelerate it but we don't know how much. Also airships tend to operate at altitudes where the air is significantly cooler than on the ground; this too will accelerate heat loss, we don't know how much.
3) Goodey, in private communications to me, pointed out that as steam condenses it can wind up sloshing around in an elongated hull, which would be bad news for stability and control.
In regards to the "steampunk" topic, note that Goodey is using quite a few highly advanced materials. The basic balloon fabric is that used for modern hot-air balloons, a material not available until after WWII. The insulations he used in the experiments, including simple bubble wrap, are also quite modern. A lightweight flash boiler might I suppose have have been achieved long before they were developed OTL, for steam automobiles, but then again there may be good reasons of materials science and also control techniques that delayed them until then.
Could more "steampunky" materials do the job well enough? If modern Primaloft(TM) insulation is not available, how about eiderdown? In Goodey's history sections he points out an early proposal to use eiderdown--and doubts its practicality. If unhindered by any pesky OSHA regulations and a combination of blissful ignorance of consequences and/or lack of conscience about the fates of one's workforce, could a light and effective insulation be made from asbestos fibers? (It may become clear why I am thinking about fireproof materials!) How early could some kind of fiberglass insulation batting have been developed, and how light could it be?
Beyond specifically steam-related reasons to be dubious of a modern steam airship, there is the matter of the general requirements of propelled dirigible airships--that they combine a reasonable streamline form with a structure strong enough to stand up to the bending moments liable to occur in powered flight. The slower you go, the less this strength needs to be, but go too slow and you basically have a slightly steerable balloon anyway, helpless to do much more than shuffle around a bit among winds. OTL, hydrogen lifted rigid airships were greatly improved with the invention of Duralumin, a much stronger aluminum alloy than had been available before then. Before that, steels despite their much greater density might have been considered at least for an airship big enough, and wood was actually a very reasonable candidate material. But it would have to be a large airship indeed to justify using steel, and while I have been giving some serious thought to the possibility of wood, I am not at all sure it could be successfully combined with steam as main lift gas..
For that matter, before the invention of modern synthetic fibers such as those used in hot-air balloons nowadays, I am not at all sure there was any fabric material available that could stand up to steam back when all the reasonable candidates would have been organic materials like cotton and silk! (That's one reason I've been musing about a really big steam volume enclosed directly in thin plywood sheeting! But how does wood react to being steam-blasted? Does it just turn into pulp or what?
I'd coat the inside with something that resists the moisture itself--but before Scotchgard(TM) and the like, what would do that job well?)So you see, a lot of apparently "steampunk" approaches might actually require very advanced modern materials to work out in practice!
Well, OTL we know that even to this day, there are just three sites in the world where helium is available in commercially useful concentrations--three natural gas fields, one, the only one known before WWII and as far as I can tell quite some after, in North America. The other two are I believe in Algeria and Siberia.
In all cases, the helium is a small contaminant (about 5 percent at most in the best fields for this purpose) of natural gas. Extracting it was a major feat of cutting-edge technology in the 1920s, involving compressing, cooling and liquifying all other gases until only helium remained in a gaseous state. Then storing and transporting the helium was itself a major headache, and once used to fill rigid and blimp hulls, the gas seeped out through the gas cells or outer hulls with depressing speed--in, that is, the very best maintained cases. (Yet another way that airships really involved quite advanced technology--in the 1930s both Americans and the Germans developed synthetic fiber/coating combinations that were at last both cheaper and superior to old Goldbeater's Skin coatings, which were quite a nightmare both economically and technically--but goldbeater's skin would have been the very best a previous century could possibly have come up with)When there were the kinds of leaks that could in principle though all too often not in practice have been avoided the loss was worse. Meanwhile air seeped into the helium, and repurifying it to restore its full lifting power was another expensive and imperfect operation.
It got better; by WWII the US Navy was keeping fleets of big blimps aloft; postwar many uses dwarf all but the most delirious fantasies of airship fleet demands. But to this day helium is quite expensive certainly on the scale of a big airship, and can only be replaced by hauling more of it in tanks from the refineries near the various fields. All of which have only finite supplies!
Helium is definitely a high-tech, very much non-steampunk approach. I'd think a Steampunk age would simply maintain a stiff upper lip in the face of hydrogen's risks and take pride in reaping its benefits.
And that's the thing--why should airplanes stand still while airships are improved? When so many of the pioneers of lighter-than-air flight--Count Zeppelin himself; Santos-Dumont; Barnes Wallis...--were also enthusiasts of heavier-than-air? These people wanted to fly, or use flight toward some ultimate end beyond that, they didn't care so much precisely how it was done.
That's why in my own overblown fantasies of airship fleets plying the skies I am most concerned to harmonize their operations rather than set one mode of flight against the other--rather, to use their respective strengths in synthesis toward the final ends. This is why in my mind, the ZRS scout-carriers Akron and Macon are the very epitome of airship glory--because they enabled airplanes to do what they otherwise could not in that era.
Probably not, otherwise they'd have done it in the 19th century already! I hope it's clearer why, despite steam's considerable potential as a lift gas, for instance (proposed by Sir George Cayley in 1815!) still no one actually tried it on any scale until Tom Goodey just last decade, and unless there's news he hasn't put on site yet, no human being has yet flown that way!
I believe that with some effort, homework, and finesse, one can justify some pretty impressive feats long before they were done OTL. But it takes a lot of work, and as a general rule I find it hard to believe there could be a general advance over OTL in some select fields without as it were dragging others forward with them--vice versa, advances in any one field will slow and stall if others don't keep up more or less.