Stealth Zeppelins

Sorry for having an absolute noob moment and posting two Zeppelin What-Ifs at once, but could stealthy rigid airships be possible?
 
Well a rigid one can really be any shape, only problem is getting it fast enough for that to matter.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
Satellites are better for that, but you could have tiny remote swarms of them that are indistinguishable from clouds.
 

Bearcat

Banned
It would have to use modern materials, fly very high, and use passive sensors. Probably unmanned.

DARPA might be able to build something like this, today. They are, supposedly, working on long-persistence, high altitude airships. Not sure how truly stealthy they would be, though.
 
There were 'stealth' zeppelins used in the Great War. These late war airships were high flying and, IIRC, outfitted with quiet(er) engines.
 
In the early-mid 20th C? No. Too much radar-reflective metal interior structure. They'll litterally be flying billboards to radar. It'll take the post-war invention of strong plastics to allow a stealthy rigid-hull airship, and by then they're so out of date since any world with the tech to make plastics probably has the tech to make good airplanes.

A stealth blimp (non-rigid) is possible, but its limited carrying capacity and slow speed would limit its use. A small, low-flying aircraft ala the Storch or Lysander will remain the better aircraft for clandestine work.
 
Or a regular blimp could be disguised as say, a advertising one (goodyear, Metlife style, and have spying equipment on board. It would be seen as a harmless one (as long as it wasn't in restricted airspace) and it could take images and the like, while passing itself off as harmless. Unless thats not where we're going with this.
 
Or a regular blimp could be disguised as say, a advertising one (goodyear, Metlife style, and have spying equipment on board. It would be seen as a harmless one (as long as it wasn't in restricted airspace) and it could take images and the like, while passing itself off as harmless. Unless thats not where we're going with this.

And Air Traffic Control would be fooled... how?
 
What I'm saying is, if there are blimps commonly above the city, in certain flight paths, that change on whether they're chartered or not, one could I think outfit a civilian charter blimp, put it on a not particularly suspicious route and take images. I don't see what you are getting at. There are out in California the NT-Zeppelins that have charter routes. I think one could with some little disbelief do this to a civilian blimp.
 
What I'm saying is, if there are blimps commonly above the city, in certain flight paths, that change on whether they're chartered or not, one could I think outfit a civilian charter blimp, put it on a not particularly suspicious route and take images. I don't see what you are getting at. There are out in California the NT-Zeppelins that have charter routes. I think one could with some little disbelief do this to a civilian blimp.

Except ATC in the US (and similar organizations in most countries) monitor air traffic. Anything commercial should have a transponder and generally a flight plan. A visually camouflaged aircraft won't be noticed immediately, but it will be noticed eventually. Questions will be asked, and at some point a disguised bogy is going to find an F-15 giving it quite pointed instructions on where to land. At that point the crew is going to have some serious explaining to do.
 
Sorry for having an absolute noob moment and posting two Zeppelin What-Ifs at once, but could stealthy rigid airships be possible?

Simple answer? Nope. Even if one could be made almost invisible to radar by use of non-reflective materials, they are just too big and must fly too low. Blimps/aerostats with expandable envelopes possibly, but the rigid framework of a zeppelin forces it to valve gas when it reaches its pressure height, and since there's so much weight in the structure, the airship's gas cells have to be almost filled up when it takes off so even a very lightly built zep would reach pressure height at between 15,000 and 20,000 feet at most. Most zeps operate best at leass than 5000 feet.
 
Actually a blimp would be pretty stealthy. A rigid airship would have the rigid structure that would tend to reflect radar (especially if it were metal - composites could reduce that somewhat, I'm sure). A large object composed of cloth and gas (with engines shielded somehow) could have a pretty tiny radar signature, I'd think.
 
Carbon fibre...

It would take lay-ups the size of those 'Gossamer' and 'solar-flyer' aircraft, but I suppose you could build frames from carbon-fibre and resin composites. Absorbent panels over the motor pods, shielded mufflers, larger, slower ducted props to reduce the noise footprint...

IIRC, Zeps had air-filled ballonettes to allow for expansion of their lifting gas. The vents were for descent...

Snag is that, once spotted once, the element of surprise is lost. After that, like those NarcoSubs off Mexico, it is cat & mouse...
 
I
IIRC, Zeps had air-filled ballonettes to allow for expansion of their lifting gas. The vents were for descent...

Actually, it's blimps that have ballonettes, usually two, that can be filled and valved with air to keep the envelope containing lifting gas taught. Zeppelins had multiple individual gas cells containing lifting gas within the rigid frame. The cells were valved to descend, but they also had automatic valves that opened when the ship reached pressure height (the altitude at which the helium or hydrogen expanded to completely fill the gas cells).

One exception was Graf Zeppelin during one point in her career when the lower portion of each gas cell was filled with "blaugas" (a natural gas mixture that was used instead of liquid petrol/diesel). At one time it was also initially planned to employ both helium and hydrogen in Hindenburg - the hydrogen in cells in internal compartments within each helium filled cell - the cheaper hydrogen being valved instead of expensive helium.
 
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