Comment by anikan_vader | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anikan_vader | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget the role that airships played in the US military. These two were fielded as aircraft carriers during the interwar period. Non-rigid airships were mass-produced during WW2 as anti-submarine vessels to escort convoys (including the one that brought FDR/Churchill to Yalta). They were quite effective in this escort role, and I believe only one was lost in combat.

Then after the war the US tried dropping nukes [1] from airships:

>> The tests were to "determine the response characteristics of the model ZSG-3 airship when subject to a nuclear detonation in order to establish criteria for safe escape distances after airship delivery of antisubmarine warfare special weapons."[10] According to the Navy, the "airship operations were conducted with extreme difficulty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-class_blimp#Nuclear_weapon_e...

"I believe only one was lost in combat."

I think that means that we lost more to weather than combat, which was their downfall.

I'm not as sure about that. From everything I can find, fewer than 10 of 134 were lost in weather. New variants of the K-class were fielded after WW2, and the navy didn't retire the class until 1959. This was one year after air-to-air missiles saw their combat debut in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.

Airships continued to see active surface until the entrance of anti-air missiles. It's hard to see at that point how they could compete with heavier-than-air aircraft which were much smaller and faster.

Airships seem really neat but it seems like nobody has been able to make the comeback with those.

For some reason the whole concept of an airship where it keeps itself in the air with creatively little effort seems like you should be able to something with that but they never seem to make it into a commercially viable product. Well outside some very specific uses.

An airship's lighter than air nature is one of their biggest drawbacks. An airship needs a large volume in order to make all of its heavier than air components lighter than air in aggregate. This makes for a huge sail area. So even modest winds make it difficult to control an airship near the ground.

When an airship is near the ground it doesn't really land, it moors. Even if it compresses or vents lifting gas to control buoyancy it's still a giant sail very close to the ground. A gust of wind can seriously damage the airship or mooring or cause it to spill cargo or passengers.

I love the idea of airships but they have a huge number of practical concerns.

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