The Roessler airship project.

[klem]

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the little-explored field of aeronautics in general has seen a number of daring and sometimes extravagant ideas, and patents and encyclopedias bear witness to these attempts. This is how I came across a project on the Internet that caught my eye because of its originality: the project of the German engineer Roessler, from Augsburg, who designed the plans for a large aircraft that was nothing other than a kind of Zeppelin divided by two central engines. However, this innovation is not Roessler's alone: the principle of the airship with a central propeller comes from a project drawn up in 1907 by Messrs Kluytmans and de Marçay, whose experiments in 1908 were unsuccessful: the aircraft failed to rise. This arrangement has already been tried out by Santos-Dumont and is applied on board the Zeppelin. All in all, this project, presented in Germany as new, is little more than an agglomeration of projects already attempted with varying degrees of success, and Mr. Roessler's idea ever got off the drawing board

 

[Tonton-42]

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the little-explored field of aeronautics in general has seen a number of daring and sometimes extravagant ideas, and patents and encyclopedias bear witness to these attempts. This is how I came across a project on the Internet that caught my eye because of its originality: the project of the German engineer Roessler, from Augsburg, who designed the plans for a large aircraft that was nothing other than a kind of Zeppelin divided by two central engines. However, this innovation is not Roessler's alone: the principle of the airship with a central propeller comes from a project drawn up in 1907 by Messrs Kluytmans and de Marçay, whose experiments in 1908 were unsuccessful: the aircraft failed to rise. This arrangement has already been tried out by Santos-Dumont and is applied on board the Zeppelin. All in all, this project, presented in Germany as new, is little more than an agglomeration of projects already attempted with varying degrees of success, and Mr. Roessler's idea ever got off the drawing board

This discovery is for me a treat ! At that time we barely knew the rules of aerodynamics that already sought to optimize the propulsion performance ! Hell is paved with good intentions ...

 

[riggerrob]

Many inventors have proposed mid-fuselage propellers, but none have succeeded.
What advantage did Roessler propose that others missed?