Post by caucasoididiot on Jan 2, 2011 14:21:10 GMT -5
OK, I'm sure there are several other fora around where this topic would seem more natural, but "the light is so much better here."
The internet is a marvelous junk heap of information. Just as in a real junk heap you can find the occasional treasure, but the problem is that it comes with no guarantees. One of my recently found treasures was a quite informative site about zeppelins which rekindled a long-standing interest in same. After all, how can you not love a technology that includes the command "Up ship!"?
This got me to hunting around the net, and one of the things I found was the notes on zeppelins from a long defunct online flight sim I used to play (or try to, between a mac and dialup it was always iffy). Now this write up had made a few claims that always struck me as suspicious, but the strangest of them seemed to be backed up by an e-text I found called D'Orcy's Airship Manual from 1917.
The problem is that the technology in question is both arcane and archaic. There are web articles (some even accurate) on the flight dynamics of the Goodyear blimp or Zeppelin NT, but there are some fundamental differences between these vehicles and the classic zeppelins of the early 20th century. The best materials I've found have been in ancient e-texts (Project Gutenberg, I love you) among which d'Orcy's included the most detailed description of airship flight dynamics.
From what I can find, Baron Ladislas d'Orcy, M.S.A.E. (Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering?) was the editor of Aviation Magazine and a founding member of Ye Ancient and Secret Order of Quiet Birdmen. With those sort of credentials I took my initial inability to wrap my head around his explanations as a failing on my part. But I've gone over them again and, at the risk of hubris, concluded that they're fundamentally inaccurate. I suspect that the baron may have been an HTA expert who tried to pick up LTA principles secondhand and got himself bollixed up. As for the flight sim, my pilot friends maintain that the airplane flight model in it was quite good, but I'm coming to suspect that they may have read d'Orcy, failed to spot the problems in his analysis, and injected some empirical handwavium into their sim to make it work "correctly."
Of course, it's also possible that I'm missing something, so if there's anyone about with enough interest in aerodynamics, history, flight sims or whatever who'd be interested in comparing notes, please jump in. Sources would especially be welcome. I remember Penn State's library having a lovely, age-browned handbook of airship engineering from about 1930 that I always wanted to read, but it was in the reference section and sadly I was always too busy.
Here are some of the better online sources I've turned up:
D'Orcy's Airship Manual, Baron Ladislas d'Orcy, M.S.A.E., 1917
In depth treatment, but I believe as deeply flawed.
British Airships: Past, Present and Future, George Whale (Late Major, R.A.F.), 1919
Very good history of British wartime LTA, mostly blimps but also detailed description of the early British rigids.
Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm, F. W. Lanchester, Member Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1916
Still digesting this one, but seems highly detailed.
www.airships.net/hindenburg/flight-operations-procedures
This is the page that sparked my current interest. The site is mostly about the post-war DELAG passenger ships and USN ships. A lot of interesting material.
www.aht.ndirect.co.uk/airships/index.html
Quite a bit on British airships, with considerable technical data on the wartime blimps.
Useless trivia of the day: the first radio message sent from an airship was supposedly: Roy, come and get this goddamn cat!
And just for greens, a photo of LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin looking much as she would have when my grandmother saw her during the 1929 round the world flight. Even if you're uninterested in flight dynamics, I hope this photo made it worth checking out the thread.
The internet is a marvelous junk heap of information. Just as in a real junk heap you can find the occasional treasure, but the problem is that it comes with no guarantees. One of my recently found treasures was a quite informative site about zeppelins which rekindled a long-standing interest in same. After all, how can you not love a technology that includes the command "Up ship!"?
This got me to hunting around the net, and one of the things I found was the notes on zeppelins from a long defunct online flight sim I used to play (or try to, between a mac and dialup it was always iffy). Now this write up had made a few claims that always struck me as suspicious, but the strangest of them seemed to be backed up by an e-text I found called D'Orcy's Airship Manual from 1917.
The problem is that the technology in question is both arcane and archaic. There are web articles (some even accurate) on the flight dynamics of the Goodyear blimp or Zeppelin NT, but there are some fundamental differences between these vehicles and the classic zeppelins of the early 20th century. The best materials I've found have been in ancient e-texts (Project Gutenberg, I love you) among which d'Orcy's included the most detailed description of airship flight dynamics.
From what I can find, Baron Ladislas d'Orcy, M.S.A.E. (Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering?) was the editor of Aviation Magazine and a founding member of Ye Ancient and Secret Order of Quiet Birdmen. With those sort of credentials I took my initial inability to wrap my head around his explanations as a failing on my part. But I've gone over them again and, at the risk of hubris, concluded that they're fundamentally inaccurate. I suspect that the baron may have been an HTA expert who tried to pick up LTA principles secondhand and got himself bollixed up. As for the flight sim, my pilot friends maintain that the airplane flight model in it was quite good, but I'm coming to suspect that they may have read d'Orcy, failed to spot the problems in his analysis, and injected some empirical handwavium into their sim to make it work "correctly."
Of course, it's also possible that I'm missing something, so if there's anyone about with enough interest in aerodynamics, history, flight sims or whatever who'd be interested in comparing notes, please jump in. Sources would especially be welcome. I remember Penn State's library having a lovely, age-browned handbook of airship engineering from about 1930 that I always wanted to read, but it was in the reference section and sadly I was always too busy.
Here are some of the better online sources I've turned up:
D'Orcy's Airship Manual, Baron Ladislas d'Orcy, M.S.A.E., 1917
In depth treatment, but I believe as deeply flawed.
British Airships: Past, Present and Future, George Whale (Late Major, R.A.F.), 1919
Very good history of British wartime LTA, mostly blimps but also detailed description of the early British rigids.
Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm, F. W. Lanchester, Member Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1916
Still digesting this one, but seems highly detailed.
www.airships.net/hindenburg/flight-operations-procedures
This is the page that sparked my current interest. The site is mostly about the post-war DELAG passenger ships and USN ships. A lot of interesting material.
www.aht.ndirect.co.uk/airships/index.html
Quite a bit on British airships, with considerable technical data on the wartime blimps.
Useless trivia of the day: the first radio message sent from an airship was supposedly: Roy, come and get this goddamn cat!
And just for greens, a photo of LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin looking much as she would have when my grandmother saw her during the 1929 round the world flight. Even if you're uninterested in flight dynamics, I hope this photo made it worth checking out the thread.
