Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube Waltz

@@danielnachbar9795 Thanks.

2023 lmao

+Dan NZ Always delighted to meet another pilot. Yes, we carefully studied the Cameron, Gefa-Flug, Kubicek, et al designs before we started. Our conclusion was that the best performance that can be obtained from that design direction is still well below the level required for wider application. That's why we are driven to explore different envelope structures. Our view is that hot air ships will remain very much on the margins until someone comes up with a design that can fly at something like 40 knots and can takeoff/land in something like a 20 knot surface wind,. We've done the math to confirm that such performance is indeed plausible. But there remains a great deal of development work between here and there.

+Daniel Nachbar Yes you are absolutely correct, the Cameron hot air blimps are pretty useless at wind speeds of over 12 knots so ideally you need a nice still day to inflate and operate one. I do like your rigid internal support structure rather than the flexible catenary lines as employed in and by Cameron models. Keep up the good work and stay reasonably safe as my old instructor used to say :-)

Would it not also need to be white inside to not cool down too fast hm?

some sci fi polarizing paint that could change colour from black to white readily would fix that..

Cool idea! What if you used parabolic concurve reflectors, aimed at the balloon?

Goodyear blimps have that feature, although it's mainly used for deflating the envelope completely. To increase or decrease lift, they have an air ballonet inside the helium envelope that can be deflated or inflated in order to compress the helium, or allow it to expand (changing it's density varies it's lifting force).

Doesn't look like it. I wonder whatever happened.

Helium is a lot more expensive, and the FAA doesn't permit the use of pure hydrogen due to the risk of an explosion. Hydrogen could be made relatively safe with the right technology, of course, but that would be quite expensive.

In air with a density of 1.2 kg/m³, hydrogen gives you around 1.1 kg lift per m³, helium around 1.0 kg and hot air (typical temperatures in hot air balloons) around 0.3 kg/m³.