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Sort of an Ekatoplan with a gas envelope. Could be made to work...

A rigid dirigible... that drags its keel in the water? Somebody in the brainstorm session got the kabong.

My Dad's Aunt covered the construction of the USS Akron (ZRS-4) for an aircraft magazine. She gave a piece of the framework to Dad; I remember it from when I was a kid, but I haven't seen it in 20 years.

Ah, the sylphlike yet elephantine bulk of an airship, but the panache of a great clipper ship! Delightful!

and apparently Captain America behind the wheel.

And why not?

yeah, every ship needs a captain. ^^

You think a guy painted that picture? XD

interesting. but why risk the tide of the oceans tugging at the keel? and how high would they fly during an atlantic storm? a zeppelin seems to be more practical. or a plane.


btw, someone used to think the Beatles' music will never catch anyone's interest. XD

I think it's more like it is coming in for landing or taking off rather than skimming the waves.

It makes sense really it would have been able to use infrastructure already built for flying boats.

yes, but those were always on land, where the keel would be hindering. the zeppelins themselves were awkward to handle to begin with.

unless this one was supposed to water, then it could work. still would need a mobile landing platform because no harbour would eb big or deep enough.

back in the early days of aviation there wern't many airports so there were plaines that were designed to take off and landed on water that were known as flying boats. Most of them did not have any built in wheels. Sort of like the Short Solent IV that TEAL used on the Coral Sea route until 1960.

http://www.kiwiaircraftimages.com/solent.html
https://waitematawoodys.com/2015/02.....nics-bay-1945/

oh yes. the first planes used skier-like skidders. things were very makeshift for a long while.

You all aren't looking at this with the eyes of someone from that time. It isn't a zeppeli-boat or some sort of hybrid ship and zeppelin, it is a zeppelin that lands and takes off on the water like the giant flying boats just coming into service. Instead of mooring masts and vast ground crews, you simply land on the water using the same aerodromes the flying boats used. Flood the keel to keep it on the water then drain it to take off. It is clever and quite workable except it had the same limitations as flying boats, it's all hunky dory until the waves start picking up.

This!

Added to the fact that the idea makes a level of sense since it was discovered that people didn't want to use places like the Empire State Building to access these craft because they felt the small gangway wasn't the safest place to be so high up.

Not to mention things like dumping ballast on the streets below, or having a Hindenberg in the middle of a major metropolis.

But those issues are issues for poor people. Therefore not something for the designers to worry about. :P

Congratulations! I think you have a very good idea of the rationale they might have had to propose the idea. The same aeronautical engineers would probably be thinking of some of the down-sides if they thought it out enough. That's a good catch to think of the idea of having large landing spaces where the zeppelins wouldn't need as much infrastructure to have a stable mooring area. (No towers.)

One other possibility is to have the speed and low friction of an ultra light-weight & streamlined 'ship' with a keel for some stability. Having a keel in the water would also mean they could fly the zeppelin-ship "heavy" with the keel's displacement of the water making up for losses in the lifting gasses through venting valves or slow leaks in the ship envelope.

That makes a lot of sense.

you have a good point there. though the tall keel would need them to be serviced far off any harbour. but that's what floating cities are for, I guess

Are you sure this wasn't the April edition? :)

Replace that keel with a giant buzz saw. Talk about cutting through the waves... Heh.

One word: Hindenburg.

The Terran Trade authority books, not to mention all those art books Paper Tiger and Dragon's Dream put out. I remember them fondly, and I still have a couple.

You can tell that anime artists in the 80s were familiar with those books, as was whoever designed the Serenity.

Ah, yes. The famed passenger ship Hindentanic!