R102 airship

Vahe Demirjian said:
An interesting website regarding the unbuilt British R102 airship:


The R102 would have been history's biggest rigid airship, had it been built, even bigger than the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin II.
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And the routes envisaged (in red) for the R airships according the Imperial airships scheme (1926-1928) Capture d’écran 2024-01-23 à 11.55.27.png
 
Although I have not any particularly great interest in airships, they have always held something more than a casual curiosity for me.
Like the great trans-Atlantic ocean liners (the ‘ships of state’) they remind one of an era of adventure and style - something that seems to be seriously lacking in the modern world…
As we now know, to have made airships safer would have required the use of helium instead of hydrogen, but I think I am correct here, the only major producer of helium at this time was the United States so it was not easy to come by (or cheap) by comparison to hydrogen.
Of course, airships were subject to the vagaries of weather which could be very disconcerting for passengers if caught in severe weather.
However, for the period they were in vogue, IF the alternate gas had been more readily available, then, although they would still have inevitably been over-taken by heavier than air machines, it could well have been a ‘Golden Age’.
 
publiusr said:
With todays materials, I wouldn't be too afraid of hydrogen.
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That kind of depends.
And depends on, among other things, what the static electricity potential of those materials is.
Am currently reading the pictured book ...
... and several of the stratospheric hydrogen balloons through the decades were lost to catastrophic ignition via static electricity in the balloon or gondola fabric.

IMG_6320.JPG
 
Nice Big Wing Canberra there.

Static is why I'd like for there to be a nitrogen buffer---and newer fibers
techxplore.com

Engineers fashion strands of conductive fiber that can be woven into clothes

A team of engineers affiliated with a host of institutions in China and two in Singapore has developed a type of conductive fiber that can be woven into clothes to give them smart device capabilities. The study is published in Nature. Xiaoting Jia and Alex Parrott from Virginia Tech have...
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phys.org

New conductive, cotton-based fiber developed for smart textiles

A single strand of fiber developed at Washington State University has the flexibility of cotton and the electric conductivity of a polymer, called polyaniline.
phys.org phys.org

Maybe now a bladder and a faraday cage can be the same construct. Now to mention an airship being a better giant display---like the Sphere.

For ballast---perhaps heavy gas bladders?
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irz-diec-qg


This gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten_hexafluoride ---perhaps that could be useful on Venus somehow...
 
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Pirate Pete said:
As we now know, to have made airships safer would have required the use of helium instead of hydrogen, but I think I am correct here, the only major producer of helium at this time was the United States so it was not easy to come by (or cheap) by comparison to hydrogen.
Click to expand...
I doubt that hydrgen was ever really much of a danger. To burn, it has to mix with the right amount of oxygen. There would not be enough O2 in the airship's gas cells to sustain combustion. Hydrogen is so light that any leaked gas dissipates rapidly.

Hydrogen also burns with an invisible flame--the flames seen in the famous Hindenburg film are from the fabric envelope, not the gas.

The fabric was the probably the real fire danger, because it was treated with nitrocellulose dope--a lot of it.
 
I wonder where the R102 would have been built? Having grown up just down the road from RAF Cardington I have more than a passing interest in lighter-than-air vehicles. Having been inside Shed 1 (my father worked for Airship Industries briefly in the late 80's) and looking at any of the readily available images of the R100 and R101 inside the sheds, there would not be room for anything larger.
 
scautomoton said:
I wonder where the R102 would have been built? Having grown up just down the road from RAF Cardington I have more than a passing interest in lighter-than-air vehicles. Having been inside Shed 1 (my father worked for Airship Industries briefly in the late 80's) and looking at any of the readily available images of the R100 and R101 inside the sheds, there would not be room for anything larger.
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Itwas to be built at Cardington

 
Georges said:
Itwas to be built at Cardington

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yes I guess I should have read the link first. Interesting the comment about building a new shed with room for 2 craft side-by-side! That would have been a truly monumental (in the truest sense of the word) building. I remember when the fire service still owned Shed 2 it had a 7 storey block of flats built inside it, with plenty of room to spare above and around, and it looked tiny compared to the Shed.
 

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