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
Kirov reporting.
I think you might like the Beluga plane, it flies over my mum and dads house regular.
For me the saddest example is the Ekranoplan.
Just look at how cool (and kind of terrifyingly) this thing is!
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.
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.
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
That last bit is an impure and unholy use of the gentle blimp
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
ive been inside the hanger for the goodyear blimp and its so massive it makes you feel nauseous
v cool
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
tbh if i was on a blimp i’d just take an edible
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.
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.
Very cool!
I wish I could smoke on a blimp
this is what they took from you
Sharma spotted in the wild!!!
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.
To be fair, it wouln’t explode, it would deflagrate.
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.
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
They could be covered in solar panels and swoosh silently through the skies.
I’m mean that’s in the cards but they’ll also have a wind turbine and be tethered to the ground.
No complaints here. Balloons that power the city I live in? Count me in!
I would die for this future
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.
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”
Once the Children of Kali start shooting down jets, airships will start making a lot more sense
:ministry-of-the-future:
CARRIER HAS ARRIVED
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.
I saw the Goodyear blimp fly directly overhead once and it was cool as shit.
Hell yeah, I love that for you
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
Only if you have an unlimited supply of birthday grade helium.
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? ;-)
One day fusion power will be a reality
Yeah, but we kinda need the water… or we probably will by then.
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 ;-)
Haha dw about it ❤️😘
ok yay 💗
