Turtle Airships: Not Slow, But Hardshelled
by Warren McLaren, Sydney 
on 10.26.07
Edward de Bono, the champion of lateral thinking is credited with saying "It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all."
One such ideas person is Darrell Campbell, who stumbled upon some of our earlier airship posts, in particular the AerosCraft, which he likes though naturally thinks his designs are better. Darrell professes to be the orginator of the design and technology promoted by Millennium Airship (That’s their pic above) but he is working on his own even more improved design currently—the Turtle Airship.
His vision is for a fleet of rigid shelled airships. To this shell of aluminium, titanium, or stainless steel he envisages despositing amorphous thin film photovoltaic cells. Their solar generated electricity would drive motors that used super-conducting magnets in lieu of copper wire. Biodiesel generators would be on board as back-up power.
The airships themselves would filled with helium inside an rigid inner skin, protected by a skeleton frame and outer skin (the one with the solar panels). Darrell suggest that “current commercial airplane operations spend $100 Billion each year on fuel”, so is excited by his idea of providing air transport with minimal fuel needs.
He believes his rigid shell airship design eliminates mooring masts traditionally used by blimps. And because of the vertical take-off aspect don’t need vast amounts of land for aircraft landings.
If you’d like to muse on the rightness, or otherwise, of such ideas with Darrell, float over to his blog at ::Turtle Airships.
NB: Other blimp posts on TH include the Buckminster Fuller’s rotating house delivered by airship, and the pedal powered White Dwarf blimp.
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amazing.. really great ideas and i´d love to be a captain on that skyturtle too :)
One of the best uses for big airships is to move huge cargo with no need of a big fleet of trucks polluting our roads.
For example, a gas-turbine generator is so big that it needs to be disassembled after it's been tested and built, otherwise it couldn't be shipped to its destination.
With a big airship, large items can be moved from the factory to its place in a single shipment, with less pollution and with no disassembly, thus reducing costs for both the builder and the buyer. The idea of shipping large items this way should be worthy of study.
Gives you time to enjoy slow airline food on the way.
One problem: The world is currently in a helium shortage and not projected to come out for a while.
One word: headwind.
The Goodyear blimp cruises at 35 mph in a no wind condition. Put a steady 35 mph wind in its face and it goes nowhere.
Slow travel is quaint, but there's no going back.
Isn't the major way to get helium through refining natural gas? I don't know where we'd get the helium for maintaining fleets of airships.
Who needs helium? We can produce plenty of Hydrog...oh Hindenburg...nevermind.
Seriously though, they could use vacuum chambers instead of helium. The rigid shell makes it a bit more feasible. Also the only Helium losses would be due to leakage, so the only trick is getting enough He to start out with. After that only small amounts would be needed to top off.
Actually, steam from water is a viable alternative to helium. And the Hindenburg was coated in rocektfuel, so hydrogen could probably be sealed in better ways to prevent accidents.
The only problem with steam is that you need to keep heating it.
Vaporware.
totalyl bogus, come read the truth.....
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