BLimps and wasting taxpayers money

Yesterday as I was flipping thru the channels with my remote I saw footage of some ungodly creation that had crashed. The thing was a Blimp with four helicopters minus the tail rotors attached together with some kind of metal frame work. This contraption crashed after the framework started collapsing.It was mentioned that the Navy had spent several million dollars testing this Rube Goldberg type contraption. My question is what the hell would it have been used for anyway? It might have been capable of lifting a lot of weight under ideal conditions but in high winds and less than ideal conditions worthless. As the footage clearly showed. Makes you wonder what other hare brained ideas that are tax dollars are being wasted on. Dennis

Reply to
Gunluvver2
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The addition of the helicopters was exactly for the situation of high or gusty winds (or at least moderate ones).

The normal blimp is not that maneuverable - the addition of the helicopters was to gain more controllability. Not a bad idea at face value.

The problem is that doing such things on the cheap like this always leads to problems. I always fought having to update substantially older systems. Best to start from scratch and design a more controllable blimp or whatever.

BTW, I am a big believer in airships, but the problem is the reason this hybrid was done. The capital investment to make a really good design from scratch today is enormous. In past decades the high cost of money was the primary inhibitor. Now, however, with low interest rates, would be a good idea to resurrect the big rigid airship.

The large airship has the same economics as the supertanker or large cargo ship. The payload goes up as cube of dimensions, while the drag and hence energy consumption goes up only as square. Theoretically, if you make ship large enough, say two or three times size of Hindeberg, you'd primarily need engines for starting, stopping, and maneuvering, could cut WAY back on cruise power.

Also, you'd need a lot of rudder trim to fight Coriolis force at high latitudes :-)

Gunluvver2 wrote:

Reply to
Don Stauffer

Others thought so too. Do a search on cargolifter. I think that the website is still up, though the company went down, after making quite a bit of actual hardware.

Reply to
Ian Stirling

Reply to
JR North

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