Let's put a billion birthday balloons worth of MRI gas in a terminally slow aircraft and inexplicably fly it over sports stadiums.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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There are other gasses to use.
And that don’t readily explode when exposed to an ignition source?
(I actually think hydrogen party balloons would be fun).
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Modern airship designs can go hundreds of km per hour.
With modern technology we also can contain fire into pockets.
This isn’t much different than criticising a plane because petrol is flammable.
Yeah, no. I'm back at a real computer and thought about this so I went and looked.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-speed-for-an-airship
Guinness World Record is 115 km/h, a blistering 72 miles per hour.
That's a stripped down machine made for "speed". Anything made for "work" is going to be considerably slower. Don't get me wrong, airships were an important stepping stone for aviation but none of them can compete with an airplane for utility.
Wait, what? I'm in my phone at work so searching sucks, can you link one of those fast airships?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
Apart from the 80% of the entries that are basically "Crashed during bad weather" - my personal highlights:
... breaks loose from its mooring during a storm and is blown over the English Channel; after sightings in Wales and Ireland and a brief touchdown in Belfast, the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
Zeppelin LZ 8 Deutschland II (brand new) is caught by a wind gust while being walked out of its hangar and damaged beyond repair after it smashes on the roof of the hangar.
... the airship, weighed down with gold and burgundy paint, reached 600 feet altitude before beginning an unplanned right descending turn, making a "controlled descent" into a garbage dump, impaling the blimp on a pine tree, coming down just a quarter-mile from the site of the Hindenburg's 1937 demise.
... suffers an intentional mid-air collision with a radio-controlled airplane.
the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
Hastily stuffing "Ghost zeppelin" into my horror idea bag
Yes, those things are really hard to park.
lol, the gilded blimp crashing into a junkyard
the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
zeppelins are always just Phineas and Ferb plots
suffers an intentional mid-air collision with a radio-controlled airplane.
like you cannot tell me that this isn't just the platypus controlling the evil guys "overly complicated bomb holding RC plane" after stealing the remote from him
No cigarettes
I fucking love Archer
I still haven’t seen the series-ending movie because I was so underwhelmed by the final season.
Agreed. Big Scott Bakula fan. Plus I hold that the show remains under-appreciated for the Star Trek fandom and— oh. THAT Archer. Nevermind. Please continue.
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they were abandoned because commercial airliners were faster, safer, more durable, and could carry more people.
...and they don't fuck up our limited helium reserves en masse.
EDIT: they might fuck up other things, but it would be some serious waste, because there are much more important applications to our limited helium.
forgot about helium
Hard to say that theyre really safer, when the primary safety incident everyone thinks of, occurred during the 1930s, a time whose airplanes certainly wouldnt have been as safe as modern ones either
planes are safer because they are less prone to failure and can take more damage (and more significant damage) before falling out of the sky, as well as being able to maneuver on the way down instead of just actually falling.
Also hard to maneuver, hard to park, and not very good in even moderately bad weather.
Well, the Nazis were stupid and used hydrogen instead of helium. The Hindenburg, pride of Nazi Germany, was full of rich people when it blew up in New Jersey, so who really cares anyway?
It's also worth noting that it wasn't the hydrogen that caused the fire. The Hindenburg had an aluminium skin. It began having degradation issues, so they painted it. The paint was iron oxide based. Aluminium and iron oxide are the 2 main ingredients in thermite.
Analysis of the video shows that it was the skin burning off. It would have gone up almost as badly, even if filled with helium.
Thermite is known for being freaking hard to ignite, even torching it is not enough sometimes. So I doubt that had anything to do with the fire.
Not according to myth busters. Although some thermite reactions likely accured the blimp would have gone up without it
Helium is very finite and very leaky. If you want flying ships you need something else.
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The Nazis had to use hydrogen because that other gas was hoarded as a strategic reserve by another nation.
But still Nazis. So...
Anyway big flying things are cool. Still would be.
its just that planes are faster, cheaper to build, less of a hassle to land and take off...
Well they weren’t totally stupid, they couldn’t get helium because the US restricted them from getting it as the largest supplier. The plan was originally to use helium, but they went with the second best option.
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Every 100 years, I guess. We gotta go through all the shit every 100 years.
what if it was made of helium though
that stuff doesn't burn
Helium has problems of its own, sadly. Besides being a little bit less effective at actually lifting, it's relatively scarce on Earth and it leaks even faster than hydrogen
I believe we're also already getting dangerously close to depleting our supply of helium, as well.
That's actually not a big deal for blimps. Blimps don't lose a lot of helium, they only need to be serviced for if like once a year. When people say we have a helium crisis, they're talking about high-purity helium for advanced medical work and advanced science.
Phew, so it's only a crisis for important shit. Dodged a bullet there! :D
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It's a Noble gas that we can't synthesize chemically and is light enough it just floats away forever when released. And it provides less lift than hydrogen.
Helium's sole advantage is also why it's about the least-renewable thing out there.
The Empire State Building was designed as a zeppelin docking station. Boarding/de-boarding and flight times are barely competitive with the modern subway. It was fun and novel, but quite impractical.
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honestly, I bet we could probably make a hydrogen one reasonably safe, if we really wanted to. Sure, its flammable and all, but so is jet fuel, and we can throw giant tanks of that stuff into the air safely with enough engineering put into it.
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We had the pandemic, now likely a great depression, so why not Hindenburg?
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We shouldn't have made them from led.
I don’t understand this meme. Everyone knows that modern airships use helium instead of hydrogen, right?
It was my understanding that these vessels were propelled by flatulence.
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