Only for surveilance, and that was a mini blimp.

As for how prevalent they are, the only things I've really heard about them is that a group used one in an attempt to get off of a tower after trying to bomb it in one of the Missions (Book name) scenarios. Apart from that, I haven't read about most of them.

Zeppelins, rigid-framed airships, can have other uses if you let them get large enough. The have the potential to be excellent "skycranes" and can deliver payloads in a VTOL fashion that no rotorcraft could ever match. With moderate growth beyond proven airships, a zeppelin could reasonably deliver 500 to 1000 tons anywhere in the world with no concerns for landing strips or terrain. They're also fuel efficient vehicles for their size and speed; the airships of the 1930s had ranges of thousands of miles.

If you find the funding to grow rigid airships to the levels allowed by modern materials technology, then you can get into some truly fascinating applications.

For example, a 1km-long airship (quite technologically feasible) could have a sea level lift capacity of 20,000 tons (with helium). You probably don't want to use more than half of that for actual lift (allowing operation to 5km altitude, where atmospheric pressure halves), and some of the lift will go to the frame, but it'd still be reasonable to have an airship carry 5000 tons of cargo...and do so at 200kph over tundra, jungle, Siberian wastes, etc. Imagine, for a moment, building a military shipyard in the center of a continent and having an airship carry the resulting destroyers and frigates overland to the ocean...

Alternately, imagine building a skyscraper in several factories scattered around a city (or country) and importing the completed sets of floors to stack atop the growing skyscraper. Think how quickly skyscrapers could be assembled if you didn't have to wait for the painstaking completion of the frame, the floors, the walls...just have five or six factories simultaneously building modular sets of floors.

With a 50% scale-up to a 1-mile airship (should be quite feasible with Shadowrun's technology, if not SR's rules), the lift capacities get truly awesome, on par with a smallish bulk freighter (20,000 tons payload to 5km altitude; 30,000 tons closer to sea level). When combined with Shadowrun's fusion power plants, you'd have a high speed (200-250kph) shipping capacity that could deliver goods fast enough to compete with conventional oceanic shipping...but wouldn't be limited to oceanic ports.

Please excuse me while I go out and shoot some Kraut politicians and MBAs!

That's basically CargoLifter but someone in GB was smart enough to generate the necessary financing. Great work Limmeys!


Birdy

I have to ask, how big would the airframe have to be to support a small arcology?

Wait until the metal joints, built by the lowest-bidding contractor, start to get rusty...

To what standard of living and population?

You can probably fit in 1 person into 1-2 tons of mass for all amenities and support equipment, so you can have a town of 5000 in a 1-1.5km airship, albeit in spartan conditions.

You want about 10-20 tons per person for a better standard of living - more park space, more business space, etc. - if built with lightweight materials. That'd call for a mile-long airship for 1000-2000 people, which would be a "small arcology" by some definitions.

There's a cubic relation between airship scaling and its lift capacity. Double the size, increase the lift 8-fold. Triple it, lift increases 27-fold.

No. Big airships get more efficient with their structure. The structural weight of an airship is (roughly) defined by its surface area, while its lift capacity is defined by its volume.

If you have two airships of the same shape, but one is a 2-fold scale-up of the other, then...

*The larger airship has four times as much structural material as the small one
*The larger airship has eight times as much lift as the small one

This means that as you scale airships up, you have more spare lift capacity to reinforce the structure than a smaller airship. You can use cheaper and more primitive materials than a smaller airship, or you can use a stronger frame of the same materials.

Incidentally, the shrinking amount of surface area compared to lift also means that bigger airships can go faster with less (proportional) horsepower because aerodynamic drag is related to surface area. For each ton of cargo and engine it's carrying, a bigger airship faces less drag (even if the total drag is higher).

Airships can be incredibly tough in some ways. Airships like the Hindenberg had 16 separate gas cells - the loss of one or two might soil underwear, but it wouldn't be a disaster. A big airship like those I proposed earlier can lose up to half their gas cells and, in theory, stay aloft (if they don't have much cargo). (Though rigid airships usually depend on each gas cell carrying its local burden - if you blow too many cells in one spot, that spot will "sink," causing the airship to buckle in that spot.)

And those big airships - even something the size of the Hindenberg - have big gas cells. A large bomb is only going to poke a sizable hole in one or two gas cells. Little shrapnel holes won't bother the others. Meter-wide holes on the undersides of gas cells won't bother them. Unless the airship is hydrogen-lift, you can have small wars on big airships and only the insurance company will care.

But, yeah, they are big and easy targets. A fighter will find its autocannons are useless, but a brace of contact-fused rockets spread along the hull will cripple an airship.

Hydrogen isn't very explosive. It's mostly just very flammable, though it can form explosive mixes with air. The classic airship example, the Hindenberg, only burned vigorously - it never exploded. (And before someone says it, yes, the Hindenberg's skin was also very flammable.)

Snowfox: Hydrogen has slightly more lift than helium, about 10% more. Hydrogen molecules (2 grams/mole) are half as heavy as helium (4 grams/mole) so they give slightly more lift in air (avg. 29 grams/mole).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighter-than-air

Perhaps they developed some way to gather He-3 built up over the millenia in the uranium deposits/mines in the Canadian shield. Sort of like the coalbed methane recovery technology developed in recent years. There are some deposits there that are too hot to mine with existing developed techniques.

And the fusion industry would probably pay for the trickle of He3 you could get from the moon, but I don't think you could get enough to make a large, all He3 airship feasible.

I own Outland. Love it.

Unfortunately, mages have to deal with a crippling Mana warp (8+) in most areas of space. They won't be good for much but dying or acting as mundanes in space.