I just love them so much. Everytime I watch historical footage from the early 20th century I get very sad over the zepplins and blimps. I wish I could see them floating through my sky on a daily basis just doin stuff that isn’t solely advertising. They are the closest we have to sky whales. I just love that they float around like that, very joyous and whimsical. Fucked up we don’t make use of them anymore. I bet this makes them as sad as it makes me. Relatively low energy cost btw.
I’ve cried over this while drunk more than once. Think of me next time you call blimps useless technology
The craziest part about the Hindenberg disaster for me was that 2/3rds of the people on board survived. And I guess also that they had a smoking lounge
I guess also that they had a smoking lounge
They did, an interesting one. Given the proximity of the hydrogen it had a double airlock and slight overpressure to avoid hydrogen getting in; and a steward at the exit making sure nobody took lit up cigarettes / pipes outside.
Very cool!
Didn’t they try to blame it on the smoking lounge? Or did I imagine that?
I have no idea; looked it up quickly without result.
I wish I could smoke on a blimp
tbh if i was on a blimp i’d just take an edible
China uses them for logistics in Tibet a lot! They’re great for short repetitive trips that moves really heavy stuff in difficult terrain
Back in the day before helicopters rich dudes put blimp mooring posts on their skyscrapers was the old timey private jet
Afaik the empire state building still has it’s planned mooring post
Hell yeah, that rules
born in the wrong universe to get turned to paste alongside your comrades trying to bring down invading coalition airships with nothing but revolutionary plasm
born in the right universe to get deep-sixed by a delivery drone for hanging solar panels from your balcony
Consider, delivery blimp. Hydrogen inside to save money, a little fan powered by solar panels on it and running a basic navigation software.
It could be wonderful. The dream Amazon is hiding from you.
Until someone shoots it and it explodes.
Hydrogen is only about 8% more buoyant than helium which doesn’t explode. May as well use that.
Helium is quite hard to come by tho. Hydrogen is much easier to get.
Its not as cool if it doesn’t explode.
To be fair, it wouln’t explode, it would deflagrate.
They could be covered in solar panels and swoosh silently through the skies.
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No complaints here. Balloons that power the city I live in? Count me in!
I would die for this future
A lot of technology we consider obsolete is truly just not profitable for our overloads, look at how many people are using mp3 players again, look at how many people are listening to records again. It is important that we remember old tech so we can revive it if we want in a better world and destroy the tech we don’t need like fucking crypto farms and ai data centers.
Also blimps are genuinely useful. Like how else could you float in place in the air long term? Helicopters will run out of fuel. Planes can’t be motionless like that. It’s just that we are very fossil fuel coded so we use helicopters for everything and shrug at the fuel use. Is it used for mass passenger movement? No. But weather balloons are kind of the same thing for example. The tech does still get used. Just not exactly as a blimp/zeppelin. Using them as motherships for drone swarms is something that’s been explored recently I think.
Border patrol uses stationary/tethered blimps (or whatever they’re actually called) that are jammed full of surveillance equipment all along the border with Mexico as well, to name another modern use
I’ve seen these personally and it saddens me greatly
Really, the amount of stuff we are wasting on seriously useless things, we don’t need a new MacBook every year, we don’t need crypto miners, we don’t need these GPUs for llms, it is ridiculous. I wish we made better use of it
That last bit is an impure and unholy use of the gentle blimp
Yes exactly, when i was in a aviation university i was heavily interested in experimental aircrafts, most of them where used/invented during ww2 by the nazis and the soviets, after ww2 nasa continued to research some stuff but nowadays its mostly dead as far as i know. I was mostly interested in aerospike engines for planes or rocket engines even for planes or some really ridiculous ideas like a pivot wing, which nasa successfully researched and has a potential to be very efficient, but everytime i brought those ideas up to my lecturers or even to other students they always said that it wouldnt be possible because its not profitable. Tbf i think that was the starting point of me getting radicalized, tbf to them it is unrealistic in todays world and it isnt possible right now because of capitalism, but at the time i would just get mad at them lol. It is very interesting tho, that whole world of aviation its so vast and its so diverse its crazy.
Yea for me aerospace remains this enigma, at one points it fulfills the oldest dream of humans, being able to fly and om other hand it is one of most bloody fields of study
this is what they took from you
Sharma spotted in the wild!!!
I saw the Goodyear blimp fly directly overhead once and it was cool as shit.
Hell yeah, I love that for you
Kirov reporting.
I hope that blimps make a comeback. They could be used as drone carriers (like aircraft carriers), and could recharge the drones with solar power. And if they were unmanned, then hydrogen would be more more acceptable.
Plus materials science has come miles since then. I’m sure you could further lower the fire risk with tougher textiles, modern ultra-light nonsparking alloys and redundant multi-chamber designs. This shit could be made to work.
CARRIER HAS ARRIVED
Once the Children of Kali start shooting down jets, airships will start making a lot more sense
:ministry-of-the-future:
So about hydrogen. I think many people forget that every machine we use has flammable shit in it. Like jet fuel explodes too. They were just bad at stopping things from exploding back in the day. We have oxygen tanks around hospitals all the time and they rarely explode. Gasoline is everywhere it rarely explodes. We’d just need to be more careful about the hydrogen and it would probably be fine.
most explosive things are also kept in more durable containers than “balloon”
Only if you have an unlimited supply of birthday grade helium.
One day fusion power will be a reality
Yeah, but we kinda need the water… or we probably will by then.
Haha dw about it ❤️😘
ok yay 💗
fusion uses seawater not fresh water typically. And if you have fusion and its making power then you can just use it to power desal anyway.
I mean, I was kinda kidding… but I suppose with sea levels rising everywhere we need all the Toramaks and Hindenburgs we can get ;-)
I think we’re a bit quick to give up on Hydrogen. We’ve got lots of better ways to suppress and avoid fire hazards these days.
IDK… apparently the current thinking is that the design of The Hindenburg formed a big capacitor that set off the hydrogen supply? I was only half paying attention to the YouTube video… but you’ve got a lot of other challenges to overcome. Zeppelin and blimps proliferated in a much different era, a 2 week trip across the Atlantic wasn’t a big deal… these days you would be competing with cruise ships that have movie theaters and roller coasters.
Yeah but are those cruise ships in the sky?
Haven’t ever been on a modern one… but it looks like they got like 6 stories above the deck, so… yes? ;-)
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Blimps ARE NOT lame 😡
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Hovercraft: They’re not exactly common in the U.S. but the U.K. has a bunch. You can even buy a personal one for like 30K… not exactly cheap but not unattainable.
Flying Cars: Theoretically there’s the Molor sky car with its 9 Mazda engines… but with gas prices… and the whole lack of an untethered demo, stick with the hovercraft.
Rocket Packs: Primary problem is they burn off your assmeats. There is actually a “Rocket Man” though. Ieves Rossi or something like that. IIRC he actually sells the suits. And there’s a few folks who still make the 70’s era peroxide jet packs, but you only get like 90 seconds.
Mass Transit: California is building a high speed rail line 😂 The networks will probably always be imperfect at best, but the rise of small EVs (bikes, scooters, etc.) seems poised to bridge the gap.
Just a heads up to any comrades looking to get into rocket packs – the US DOJ went after John Gotti for flying around with an unlicensed rocket pack and hunting Nazis out of season
Going to need a link for this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti
Gotti’s underboss, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, aided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in convicting Gotti; in 1991, Gravano agreed to turn state’s evidence and testify against Gotti after hearing the boss make disparaging remarks about him on a wiretap that implicated them both in several murders. In 1992, Gotti was convicted of five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, rocketeering, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion and loansharking.
ROFL 🤣
California is building a high speed rail line
lmao “building” doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That project has been in the works for like 18 years and has a “projected” completion year of 2030-2033 with many components of it like tunnels and coastal extensions to serve cities between San Francisco having no projected completion date and it is realistically decades away from completion (if ever). It’s an absolute joke.
Yeah… hence the laughing until I cried face. I don’t really expect the project to advance much beyond the low speed dirt bike track that it currently is.
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One out of 4 ain’t terrible… and depending on where you live mass transit + an e-bike/scooter gets you two.
USSR built a lot of them of various types.
Flying cars are just helicopters.
There was a startup like 20 years ago trying to get them to be used for trucking/shipping purposes iirc. Guess it didn’t work out. If used with hydrogen instead of helium, that can be more cost effective. I’ve only seen the Goodyear ones a few times when some kind of sportsball event is happening in the metro.
Supposedly they are constantly getting shot at in the states. I recall seeing some docu show where one of the pilots or maintenance folks mentioned finding small holes in them quite often after flying around.
Hopefully we see fusion power in our lifetimes and helium becomes a cheap commodity. I feel it is unlikely but every night I go to bed dreaming of this future.
Anyway that last bit is the most american thing I have heard all day lmao
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Based based based based
Wow, i forgot blimps existed holy shit. I only saw one once in my life overseas, two decades ago and never saw it again (I live in a developing country, we don’t have this stuff. It was somewhere in europe iirc?) Now that I remember it, how the hell could i forget about that? There’s something so mind-boggling about it just slowly floating in the air, and a beautiful sight
Fuck everything else we need to RETVRN to fucking rad blimps
Google money is trying to bring it back :https://sfstandard.com/2025/11/18/san-francisco-blimp-lta-research/
If only it was the will of the proletariat creating blimps for the love of the game
the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanityfor the love of the game
For me the saddest example is the Ekranoplan.
Just look at how cool (and kind of terrifyingly) this thing is!
