He asked if I'd been reading steampunk fiction lately, and while I enjoy the genre the answer is no; I've always been a sort of zeppelin crank.
They just seem sort of dangerously cool to me, and I love the idea of this massive thing floating along nearly silently, like a cloud only with several tons of bombs inside, over an enemy landscape as a sort of aerial assassin. Scary cool, if you will.
Mind you, if I was on the ground the scary would have it all over the cool.And even in the air - the rigid airships seem to have been fiendishly dangerous for their crew and passengers. Certainly the German zeps got hammered by constantly improving antiaircraft and fighter defenses. The statistics tell the story; 53 destroyed and 24 damaged to the point of being non-mission capable out of an total of 115 airships. Crew loss rate of 40%. Cost about five times the total damage inflicted.
Still. Call the zeppelins a personal quirk, an indulgence, one of my hidden passions, an odd devotion to a vestigial past.
Airships are still just freaking cool.Anybody else out there have one of these odd, trivial passions?
5 comments:
Airships are neat. Especially the Akron and Macon with their little biplane fighters launched like trapeze artists.
And some of the Zeppelins, those that lowered a tiny capsule by cable during bombing runs, were Gothic horrors. The observer, isolated and alone, reported bomb hits by telephone to the mother ship hovering a mile or more above in the the darkness.
Paul: I was just reading about those Spahkorben. That would take more sack than I've got, period. Yikes.
The USN had a hell of a lighter-than-air program between the wars, but if they hadn't had bad luck they'd have had no luck at all. All three of the major crashes owed something or everything to major errors in either judgement or handling. But I guess the real problem is that the gasbags don't have much margin for error; problems that would have been a nuisance for winged aircraft were too much for them...
But, still...very cool machines.
If I had a billion, I'd have one of these:
http://davidszondy.com/future/Flight/solar_blimp_02.jpg
And tool around dropping Benjamins to the little folk when I wasn't dogfighting my triplane aggressor squadron.
srv: Sweet! I like the picture of the zep as the Kong of the Skies, spitting machinegun fire in all directions at the swarming tripes - totally get where you're coming from!
Found some pics you posted while searching for representations of chapters. Thanks for posting, great work.
If you are still into airships...
http://rrschultz.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/the-merchant-and-the-minstrel-chapter-1/
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