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Call me a lunatic but: Airships! I want to see airships, zeppelins, blimps come back. They can fly passengers or cargo faster than seafaring ships or travellin
by exDM69 12y ago
Call me a lunatic but:
Airships! I want to see airships, zeppelins, blimps come back. They can fly passengers or cargo faster than seafaring ships or travelling on land, while being able to take off and land in a smaller area than an airport runway. The speeds of airships were around 120-200+ km/h, making it comparable with a slow flying piston powered aircraft of the same era.
A flight on the Hindenburg was more luxurious than flying in an airplane has ever been. There was a dining salon and a smoking lounge and plenty of room to walk around. Airships were capable of transporting close to 100 passengers. They can fly closer to a big city than an airplane can, reducing the total time of travel when you don't need to go to the airport, far away from the cities.
Anecdote: my home town has a futuristic art deco hotel built in the 1930s, which has a mast that was designed as a mooring point for airships, right in the middle of the city. Unfortunately that has never been used to my knowledge.
Airships might also be (partially) powered by electricity and have very large surface area that could be used for solar panels.
Unfortunately, I can't see this happening any time soon. There are some ventures into building modern airships, with mixed success. I recon modern people are too impatient to travel 4-5 times slower than what they're used to. Transporting cargo overseas is so cheap that it's difficult to compete with. And whether it makes any kind of economic sense is another question.
- ghaff 12y ago>There are some ventures into building modern airships, with mixed success. Where mixed ~= no. The luxury of pre-WW II zeppelin travel is something of a red herring. To the degree there were a market for travel at the equivalent cost of trans-Atlantic Zeppelin travel, you could pretty much have it in a wide body aircraft. After all, Pan Am's original 747s had a first class lounge upstairs which today is (universally, as far as I know) used for additional business class seating. High-end seating on airlines like Emirates is pretty luxurious today but the modern preference tends toward individual suites rather than space given to common areas. >I recon modern people are too impatient to travel 4-5 times slower than what they're used to. Well, even if the travel is relatively luxurious I don't have a burning desire to spend a couple of days in a relatively confined space although your general point is probably true. On the other hand, I'm sure lots of the people who travelled by ocean liner or zeppelin would have jumped at the chance to go from London or Berlin to New York in under 10 hours.
- amyjess 12y agoAirships are cool and all, and I love the dieselpunk style, but just for the sake of argument, let's think bigger and more modern. I want a Helicarrier.