Doesn't it seem as though there are actually two separate streams of output by airship designers and manufacturers :
1. The DARPA- and National Defense-motivated (and financially rewarded) makers who turn out (or, at least present galleries of PHOTOSHOP photographs of) designs of incredible complexity and capability ... you know (exaggerating for effect) , the billion-dollar airships that are a mile long, can stop a speeding bullet at the outer skin of the very-high technology envelope; that can perform persistent surveillance for 25 years without landing or refueling; that can design, build, and launch a Pleiades spaceship from an onboard laboratory; that travel at a speed of Mach 2.0 ; and are fueled by asteroid dust !
It's almost as though the first automobiles were produced in two factory models, electrically-powered golf carts and 200 mile-per-hour Lamborghinis
Unfortunately, they never seem to be completed or to appear on one's roads.
2. The backyard-bred, manufactured, and launched 15- to 50-foot simple models that actually fly and can be readily seen on YouTube .
I'm thinking of wonderfully successful airships like Dan Geery's HyperBlimp out of Utah in the United States or the Swiss Mini-Zepp, both of which keep soldierin' on (in the old Army phrase), and which quietly sell their models to organizations in the Near East and Cambridge.
It makes one wonder whether, perhaps, they should get together and produce a useful working prototype with specifications somewhere in the middle ... you know, like a classic, working 1957 Chevrolet .
... in our present case, an airship that meets the relatively modest requirements of eliminating the need for the Ice Road Truckers, and that would be useful enough to satisfy the need for Dr. Barry Prentice's Airships (to the) Arctic.
My guess is that until they do, we will continue to read utter nonsense by unlettered, unkowledgeable Forum participants who deny that an airship can ever travel in weather conditions with wind speed of more than 5 knots.
Remember the old saying by Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique : "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" : " The Best is the Enemy of the Good !"
I have an old friend --- knowledgeable, funny, extremely bright --- who had been polishing his Harvard Ph.D. thesis for about 50 years, as it did not meet his own incredibly high standards for submission. Sadly, he passed away his past year, without ever having achieved his life goal.
....Well ? What shall it be, ladies and gentlemen ?
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