If Helium had been easier to mass produce, would we have had

>>29217862
The US actually used a hella of a lot of blimps in WW2 and the brits used loads in WW1

>>29217862
>>29217886

brits used a lot of blimps during the blitz as passive AA

>>29217862
Maybe. The trouble with blimps is that all you have to do is load up your fighters with incendiary and the whole thing goes up like kindling.

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>>29217886
>>29217898
>no flying ironclads

WW1, mostly barrage balloons and observation platforms for artillery.
WW2, more K-classes for patrols and ASW operations.

I want a titanium rigid airship full of helium. that carries a B-52 sized payload of guided weapons.

The zepplin just loiters above a COIN theater for a week at a time. getting fire support missions and firing missiles or JDAMS.

>>29217924
>main armament poitning upwards
Utter dogshite.

>>29217926
>WW1
>mostly barrage balloons
No, just no.

>>29217926
You forgot the German Empire using Zepplins to bomb London.

>>29217862
Not in World War Two. By that point, aside from loiter time, they didn't do much a plane couldn't whilst be substantially larger and a helluva lot easier to bring down.

>>29217898
Prefer to call them barrage ballons desu due to their passive nature. They aren't true dirigibles imo.

>>29217951
For what it's worth they were badass in WW1. Imagine seeing this massive grey whale just lumber through the air moments they release their explosive payload.

>>29217941
>what is indirect fire?

>>29217919
Blimps were used for ASW. U-boats don't have fighters.

>>29217983
I'd imagine it'd be as scary as seeing a glorified kite pootling along at 90mph before it dropped an explosive payload....

>>29217947
Apart from a brief period of 1916 they were actually pretty ineffective at bombing.

>>29217947
>the massively wasteful and inefficient attacks that saw roughly half of any raids destroyed, and even more were lost in landing accidents
Sure, great idea.

>>29218000
For a population that was born during a time when the horse and steam train was the most advanced transporation. It was probably very scary.

>>29218038
No, that's literally exactly why the daylight raids had more casualties than expected. Because people came out and just sat there staring at them like it was a picnic and got blown up, because normally they were really bad at hitting anything and they weren't scared of the things.

>>29217989
>what is indirect fire being completely fucking useless on a floating and thus not stable, platform.
>using an aircraft for indirect fire not being pants-on-head retarded anyway

>>29218038
They're not scary, they're too big, slow and innefective to be 'scary'.
What this guy >>29218056 said.

>>29217862
How do airfraft launch from blimps?

Power up while attached then detach?

>>29218102
very carefully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTGBFY82Gik

>>29218071
>>using an aircraft for indirect fire not being pants-on-head retarded anyway
Any air-launched BVR weapon is indirect fire you pube-toothed, fart-sucking faggot.

Also lmao
>>what is indirect fire being completely fucking useless on a floating and thus not stable, platform.
"I don't understand how naval artillery works at all."

>>29217926
>WW1, mostly barrage balloons
Sure, the krauts never used zeppelins for bombing, never

>>29218071
>>what is indirect fire being completely fucking useless on a floating and thus not stable, platform.
Hello 21st century? Stabilization?

>>29217862
If I remember well, the helium production was not the problem (except for the enemies of the U.S.), but i's the Hindenburg accident that limited the use of blimps

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>tfw you won't live long enough to see airships on Mars.

>>29218726
>BVR weapon
We're pretty clearly talking about artillery as per the image.
>'I don't understand how naval artillery works at all'
Again, see above, we're pretty claerly talking about floating in the air, a completely different ball game.
>>29218764
>hello 21st century
Again, look at the fucking picture, clearly it's not supposed to be the 21st century.

>>29218845
>it's not supposed to be the 21st century.
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_41-65_skc33.htm
It doesnt need too. Using gyros and bearings is no rocket science...

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>We will never live in a Crimson Skies world

It hurts.

>>29218825
How the hell would that work?
Blimps work by having lower overall density than the surrounding atmosphere.
Is Mars' gravity weak enough to make up for the thin (i.e. low density) atmosphere?

>>29218845
>Again, see above, we're pretty claerly talking about floating in the air, a completely different ball game.
Still wouldn't matter because air behaves like a fluid when you try to move a lot of it all at once, it would be no different than the guns on the USS Missouri. What would happen at the very most is they would have to have a new table on the GFCS to compensate for lateral drift and bow pitch so the guns don't bracket targets at certain firing angles.

It's the same ball game.

>>29219121
It would be far easier to fly a balloon in a Martian atmosphere because you could have hydrogen lift gas at an absurdly low pressure with massive displacement. Since the ambient pressure is so low you might even be able to get away with it using a vacuum balloon provided you had some futuristic material to keep it from imploding or collapsing.

>>29219204
isn't combustion possible in Mars' atomsphere?

>>29219235
Nope. For one the ambient pressure is too low and for two there is literally no oxygen, it's about at the same concentration there as argon is here.

>>29219061
>>29219169
Fine, if you two jerk offs want to pretend that indirect fire artillery blimps are a possibility/good/both that's fine by me.

>>29217924
Whoever drew this absolutely does not understand scale.

>>29219395
>blimps
we were not taliking about blimps

>>29219271
If there's practically no atmosphere, how would the balloon float? It needs denser air to displace it on earth so that it can rise. The higher the density of the surrounding atmosphere, the more force is generated by the baloon. It seems like ballooning on Mars would be hard as fuck.

>>29219454
Buoyancy is still a thing, and the dangers of using the lightest possible gas are completely null and void in an atmosphere with no oxygen so that opens up possibilities for a hot gas. Raising the temperature of the lifting gas as high as you can go without compromising the cells (it's not just one big balloon by the way) will add even more lift.

Sure, it's not nearly as easy as ballooning on Titan or something (not even going to mention Venus) but it is quite possible precisely because the atmosphere sucks so bad.

>>29217919
>whole thing goes up like kindling
>Helium
Spastic

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>>29219109
We kinda did. Most of the planes from the original PC game (i.e. the only CS game that mattered) were based on real aircraft. For example, superior master race Bloodhawk was based on the Henschel P.75 heavy fighter concept.

>>29217862
it wouldn't have mattered because they were stupid fucks who used hydrogen.
even after the fucking R-101, they still didn't fucking learn. redesigned the Hindenburg to use helium, then just went 'nah fuck it, dat increased capacity'

>>29224340
Also they couldn't buy enough Helium (at anything like a reasonable price) as the producer of 90% of the world's Helium wouldn't sell it to them

>>29217924
Ah, if only the atmosphere were a thousand times denser than it actually is.

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>>29220066
>>29219454

I call bullshit, Mars' atmo is ultra thin.

In metric because fuck dealing with those conversions.

Hindenburg as an example displaced 200,000 cubic meters or about 255,000 kg of air at STP
The best Martian pressure (bottom of Hellas Planitia) is 1,155 pa
So even if we made the Hindenburg into a vacuum dirigible, we're displacing ~3,900 kg assuming the atmo was 100% CO2.
Accounting for roughly 0.38g on Mars that brings lifting capacity of a Hindenburg sized vacuum dirigible to 10,265 kg weight.
The Hindenburg, which would be lighter than our vacuum dirigible because it has internal pressure help out, weighed about 12,000kg.

And vacuum is obviously going to be lighter than any gas you can use and even that wouldn't lift the Marsdenburg. Ballooning on Mars is gonna be shit and way way harder than Earth.

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>>29221023
Just one spark and the whole thing goes up in flames.

>>29224898
Im the second person you replied to, and that was my point. Thanks for doing the calculations, it's good to see the numbers.

>>29218102
Launching was easy, landing on a blimp was hard.

>>29224920
Helium is inert. Hydrogen goes up in flames.

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My Great Grandfather took these pics. Thought I'd share.

>>29224920
"Helium is flame retardant, what part of that do you not understand?!"

"Well obviously the core concept, Lana!"

>>29225468
A site with more info about them. Relative made it

http://www.afn.org/~afn42211/genealog/sterner/hindenburg/