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Comment by TinyBig | Hacker News Reader

"Floating in oxidizer" doesn't matter - airships are under such low pressure that leaks are too slow to maintain a flame front. I researched this quite a bit for the Army back in the day, even worked with a vendor who fired 50 caliber tracer rounds through an airship to try to get it to catch on fire, and it did not.

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German Zeppelins were essentially invincible until the British invented incendiary ammunition. Their conventional rifle rounds would harmlessly punch through the gasbag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomeroy_bullet

There are rumours that because of this fact, that the Hindenburg disaster was not from natural causes.

Okay, what’s the alternative scenario and how do we ensure that doesn’t happen?

Rips along the seams of the fabric siding causing large surface areas of hydrogen to be mixed, I think?

IIRC something about the pain used on the aerodynamic outer shell (the gas cells inside were separate gas tight balloons made from processed cattle stomach tissue (!)). This paint apparently turned out to be highly flammable and/or explosive and could be activated by dischrges of static electricity.

I think there was static discharge involved, and thermite paint. And of course a giant bag filled with hydrogen, surrounded by oxygen.

Iirc there is a great YouTube video with Bill Hammack about this. Highly recommended. https://youtu.be/ixxXhZVFXxQ

He also wrote a book.

Do you mean that it was sabotaged?

There are also rumours along those lines. Not entirely unfounded as incendiary bullets were available by the 1930s

In this doco they run through the ammunition types they tried and actually fire some from WW1 and they still worked.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/zeppelin-terror-attack/

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