Yeah I had a feeling it would be a zeppelin. Wonder if Doc Wissenschaft realizes that the advent of the AIRPLANE makes an armed zeppelin nothing but a big, fat, slow target? Especially with modern missiles and AA artillery?
Hi, All! There has been a lot of talk about the usefulness of a zeppelin again missiles. Well, a vintage WWI era zeppelin against modern missiles would be useless. A completely upgraded zeppelin with 360 degree defenses is another matter I’m not going to explain the nature of the ships defenses or offensive capabilities, because Wissenschaft will rattle on about it himself in comics coming up quickly.
And again I ask: What if direct confrontation and combat is not the ship’s purpose?
If it is basically going to be like the Goodyear Blimp, saying “Dr. W is AWESOME!” then maybe it might have a purpose. The best use for such a thing would be to load it up with a really nasty bioweapon, and use the airship to deploy it over the city.
I still say that even discounting missiles, a zeppelin is a large, vulnerable, explosion waiting to happen. Hell, all it takes is someone with a bomb and a knife he took from a certain someone that lets him go around corners (ANY corner!), and the thing is toast. Heck, that’s not even the most obvious way to kill it in a world with superpowers. Here’s the things that come to mind most quickly:
1) Magnetic control to rip the steel frame apart.
2) Fabric control to rip the envelope apart.
3) Wind control to subject the thing to a tornado in midair.
4) Teleportation to slip a bomb inside.
5) A redneck with a machine gun and incendiary rounds.
6) Fireball
7) Sonic control to shatter steel Machine control to make the engines steer into a mountain.
9) Telepathy to make the pilot crash.
10) Telekinesis to rip the thing apart.
Now, of those 4, 5, 6, and 9 are obvious enough that someone with Dr. W’s brain could have come up with defenses for it, but the others are harder to deal with.
All good points. Many of these would even kiill a huge navy aircraft carrier!
5 & 6 sort of assumes that the ship is filled with hydrogen, not hellium, which is non-flammable.
You forgot a Tesla Rail Gun! That would kill it! (and, just about anything else.)
At the base level of the ships protection (Spoiler!) is 360 degree threat detection, combined with omnidirection missile-killing lasers and and tons of hunter killer drones.
I think everyone has the images of the Hindenburg burning in their minds, and other disaster footage, that leads people to feel these ships are fragile.
(In WWI, German airships only defense again planes with incindiary bullets was rapid ascent, flying higher that the planes could go. Half of all the men in the German zeppelin corps died. Half!)
There are scores of ways in a super world to destroy an aircraft carrier, but no one thinks of them as fragile. Hope you see my point.
I do, anyway. With the right kind of high tech defenses, a zeppelin could blow every jet fighter in the world to hell. Offensively, in and of itself, it sucks, but defensively, it’s a redundantly-floated, stable platform that nothing airborne short of a copter comes close to (despite all their tech, jets have only one real defense: run faster). And anyone who thinks those things are badass should see what happens when one little problem crops up in whatever’s counter-rotating the whirly.
Here’s one example. An EMP pulse is going to bring down every modern offensive aircraft you care to name (unless it can glide), and most missiles, too, with ease. It’d be much easier to shield the zep because it doesn’t rely on speed or special whizbangery to stay aloft, even if the shielding failed. Once the effect is past, whatever’s not fried can simply be restarted.
Get the Hindenberg out of your brains. Like a lot of tech after Der Scramblebrains got through with it, it was a botch. But the idea was and is sound. If we ever get fusion power stations that make HE as a byproduct, I think you’ll see tons of airships in the skies soon after.
The thing that makes an aircraft carrier harder to take down is the sheer MASS of it. Even if the airship was the same size bow to stern and amidships as the aircraft carrier, it would have only a fraction of the carrier’s sheer mass. Much of this mass comes in the form of armor and redundant systems, such as watertight compartments, helping it to survive explosions, and the mass makes any large-scale telekinetic or magnetic control attack more difficult. But an airship is limited in the number of redundancies and armor it can have, because increased mass decreases the system’s buoyancy. And in a lighter than air craft, you need all the buoyancy you can get.
It seems people look to much at the weapon part of the text, and not nearly enough at the propaganda part, also the fact the not so good doctor. Almost literally says that this thing, might look like Useless relic, it is not, actually far from it even .
I’m sort of expecting this sort of thing to basically be the cause of the World war’s in JS’s his world
Also why on earth would the doctor need a blimp to release chemical weapons?
Easier to use planes/bombs, hell dumping his own invisible brand of it into the water supplies?
Rob- do you really think that you’d get that much helium from a fusion reactor? Try the numbers and you’ll find it’s just not so. Let’s say you have a 100 megawatt reactor. If I can believe what I see on the net, then the mass reduction is on the order of 0.7%. So if you take the energy and divide by .007,you get the mass involved. Let’s further assume a reactor/generator efficiency of 50 percent. Then we use that famous equation. Solving for mass we get e/c^2 or about 1 X 10^-9 kg mass per second. Divide by 0.007 and then by 0.5 and it’s 3 X 10-7 kg of helium per second, approximately. So in a year you’d have around 10 kg of helium. Which is only enough to lift something like 62 kg of mass. Or a skinny person in a lawn chair under a bunch of weather balloons. And they might have to drop the bb gun.
Or I could have blown the math. But not by a Zeppelin’s worth.
————–
Someone mentioned that a Zeppelin would stay airborne long enough to reboot after an EMP. Well, if you don’t use Microsoft for your operating system, and if you bother to set up the controls so that you don’t really need boost, or at least not fly by digital wire, then lots of aircraft can do this too. (Some large aircraft use trim tabs such that muscle power will control them without hydraulics or other additional power boost.) I’ll bet a B-52 would glide for a long time. Hmmm… let’s say 30,000 feet, 14:1 glide (guess, but it’s close), 400 mph (an average, as this number will slow as you descend), then you’ve got about 12 minutes before sea level. Probably the 400 mph figure is way too high.
A zeppelin, being mostly fabric and open steel trusses, is effectively radar transparent. Radar guided missiles will have a hard time locking on. The low heat signature of the engines means basically the same thing for heat-seekers. Might be a target for laser guided weaponry, but well-placed chaff, aerosol and flare dispensers will take care of most (if not all) of those threats. And those are just the obvious active defenses. I’m willing to bet on some form of kevlar for the lifting envelope. Turboprop propulsion, with modern variable pitch carbon-fiber props. Interceptor missiles? Hunter-killer drones? Multiple, independently targetable lasers?
And I haven’t even gotten into offensive capability. Co-axial linear accelerator? EMP generator? The sheer terror of something that big in the sky?
Scoff all you want, folks – this is brilliant. And I predict destruction on an epic scale before this is over.
‘There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV (airship) squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with .22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.
The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.’
Well, I didn’t suspect it, but this has been one intelligent debate! You guys astound me. Benita and I have both commented that we learn a lot from all of you.
What’s funny to me is that if I had drawb a bunch of zombie cyborg nazis riding nuclear tyronsaurs, I doubt it would have garned too much attention. Part of this, I suppose, is because we make a comic with more of a real physics sense than do most superhero comics.
A f***ing zeppelin? You better have a good reason Scott.
Scott loves zep’s
a zeppelin FUCK YEAH i love zeppelins
Now for the real question…what leverage does Dr Synn have over Tactical ?
Ohhhh a zep! I love Zeps, one rocket launcher and they make such a wonderful crash!
Yeah I had a feeling it would be a zeppelin. Wonder if Doc Wissenschaft realizes that the advent of the AIRPLANE makes an armed zeppelin nothing but a big, fat, slow target? Especially with modern missiles and AA artillery?
Hi, All! There has been a lot of talk about the usefulness of a zeppelin again missiles. Well, a vintage WWI era zeppelin against modern missiles would be useless. A completely upgraded zeppelin with 360 degree defenses is another matter I’m not going to explain the nature of the ships defenses or offensive capabilities, because Wissenschaft will rattle on about it himself in comics coming up quickly.
And again I ask: What if direct confrontation and combat is not the ship’s purpose?
If it is basically going to be like the Goodyear Blimp, saying “Dr. W is AWESOME!” then maybe it might have a purpose. The best use for such a thing would be to load it up with a really nasty bioweapon, and use the airship to deploy it over the city.
I still say that even discounting missiles, a zeppelin is a large, vulnerable, explosion waiting to happen. Hell, all it takes is someone with a bomb and a knife he took from a certain someone that lets him go around corners (ANY corner!), and the thing is toast. Heck, that’s not even the most obvious way to kill it in a world with superpowers. Here’s the things that come to mind most quickly:
1) Magnetic control to rip the steel frame apart.
Machine control to make the engines steer into a mountain.
2) Fabric control to rip the envelope apart.
3) Wind control to subject the thing to a tornado in midair.
4) Teleportation to slip a bomb inside.
5) A redneck with a machine gun and incendiary rounds.
6) Fireball
7) Sonic control to shatter steel
9) Telepathy to make the pilot crash.
10) Telekinesis to rip the thing apart.
Now, of those 4, 5, 6, and 9 are obvious enough that someone with Dr. W’s brain could have come up with defenses for it, but the others are harder to deal with.
All good points. Many of these would even kiill a huge navy aircraft carrier!
5 & 6 sort of assumes that the ship is filled with hydrogen, not hellium, which is non-flammable.
You forgot a Tesla Rail Gun! That would kill it! (and, just about anything else.)
At the base level of the ships protection (Spoiler!) is 360 degree threat detection, combined with omnidirection missile-killing lasers and and tons of hunter killer drones.
I think everyone has the images of the Hindenburg burning in their minds, and other disaster footage, that leads people to feel these ships are fragile.
(In WWI, German airships only defense again planes with incindiary bullets was rapid ascent, flying higher that the planes could go. Half of all the men in the German zeppelin corps died. Half!)
There are scores of ways in a super world to destroy an aircraft carrier, but no one thinks of them as fragile. Hope you see my point.
I do, anyway. With the right kind of high tech defenses, a zeppelin could blow every jet fighter in the world to hell. Offensively, in and of itself, it sucks, but defensively, it’s a redundantly-floated, stable platform that nothing airborne short of a copter comes close to (despite all their tech, jets have only one real defense: run faster). And anyone who thinks those things are badass should see what happens when one little problem crops up in whatever’s counter-rotating the whirly.
Here’s one example. An EMP pulse is going to bring down every modern offensive aircraft you care to name (unless it can glide), and most missiles, too, with ease. It’d be much easier to shield the zep because it doesn’t rely on speed or special whizbangery to stay aloft, even if the shielding failed. Once the effect is past, whatever’s not fried can simply be restarted.
Get the Hindenberg out of your brains. Like a lot of tech after Der Scramblebrains got through with it, it was a botch. But the idea was and is sound. If we ever get fusion power stations that make HE as a byproduct, I think you’ll see tons of airships in the skies soon after.
The thing that makes an aircraft carrier harder to take down is the sheer MASS of it. Even if the airship was the same size bow to stern and amidships as the aircraft carrier, it would have only a fraction of the carrier’s sheer mass. Much of this mass comes in the form of armor and redundant systems, such as watertight compartments, helping it to survive explosions, and the mass makes any large-scale telekinetic or magnetic control attack more difficult. But an airship is limited in the number of redundancies and armor it can have, because increased mass decreases the system’s buoyancy. And in a lighter than air craft, you need all the buoyancy you can get.
The lasers and hunter-killers make for a good defensive front, with the possibility for strong offense. But the more I hear about it, the more I get echoes of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs-OvfG8tE&p=F74598572406A8F4&playnext=1&index=38
It seems people look to much at the weapon part of the text, and not nearly enough at the propaganda part, also the fact the not so good doctor. Almost literally says that this thing, might look like Useless relic, it is not, actually far from it even .
I’m sort of expecting this sort of thing to basically be the cause of the World war’s in JS’s his world
Also why on earth would the doctor need a blimp to release chemical weapons?
Easier to use planes/bombs, hell dumping his own invisible brand of it into the water supplies?
Rob- do you really think that you’d get that much helium from a fusion reactor? Try the numbers and you’ll find it’s just not so. Let’s say you have a 100 megawatt reactor. If I can believe what I see on the net, then the mass reduction is on the order of 0.7%. So if you take the energy and divide by .007,you get the mass involved. Let’s further assume a reactor/generator efficiency of 50 percent. Then we use that famous equation. Solving for mass we get e/c^2 or about 1 X 10^-9 kg mass per second. Divide by 0.007 and then by 0.5 and it’s 3 X 10-7 kg of helium per second, approximately. So in a year you’d have around 10 kg of helium. Which is only enough to lift something like 62 kg of mass. Or a skinny person in a lawn chair under a bunch of weather balloons. And they might have to drop the bb gun.
Or I could have blown the math. But not by a Zeppelin’s worth.
————–
Someone mentioned that a Zeppelin would stay airborne long enough to reboot after an EMP. Well, if you don’t use Microsoft for your operating system, and if you bother to set up the controls so that you don’t really need boost, or at least not fly by digital wire, then lots of aircraft can do this too. (Some large aircraft use trim tabs such that muscle power will control them without hydraulics or other additional power boost.) I’ll bet a B-52 would glide for a long time. Hmmm… let’s say 30,000 feet, 14:1 glide (guess, but it’s close), 400 mph (an average, as this number will slow as you descend), then you’ve got about 12 minutes before sea level. Probably the 400 mph figure is way too high.
Another point is that this is a comic and we shouldn’t be looking for exact science!
A zeppelin, being mostly fabric and open steel trusses, is effectively radar transparent. Radar guided missiles will have a hard time locking on. The low heat signature of the engines means basically the same thing for heat-seekers. Might be a target for laser guided weaponry, but well-placed chaff, aerosol and flare dispensers will take care of most (if not all) of those threats. And those are just the obvious active defenses. I’m willing to bet on some form of kevlar for the lifting envelope. Turboprop propulsion, with modern variable pitch carbon-fiber props. Interceptor missiles? Hunter-killer drones? Multiple, independently targetable lasers?
And I haven’t even gotten into offensive capability. Co-axial linear accelerator? EMP generator? The sheer terror of something that big in the sky?
Scoff all you want, folks – this is brilliant. And I predict destruction on an epic scale before this is over.
Airships are not actually that vulnerable.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7918762/Airships-a-second-age.html
‘There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV (airship) squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with .22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.
The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.’
Well, I didn’t suspect it, but this has been one intelligent debate! You guys astound me. Benita and I have both commented that we learn a lot from all of you.
What’s funny to me is that if I had drawb a bunch of zombie cyborg nazis riding nuclear tyronsaurs, I doubt it would have garned too much attention. Part of this, I suppose, is because we make a comic with more of a real physics sense than do most superhero comics.
I’m getting a Zeppelin tattoo for my birthday.
:3