Why the dirigible will never come back
One of the greatest casualties of the 20th century was the dirigible (or zeppelin, blimp, or airship, call it what you will). Although it was made obsolete by the fixed-wing aircraft, the dirigible has yet to be surpassed in sheer romance, and has long been admired by Steampunk writers and fans. Ponder how amazing it would be if things had turned out differently, and dirigibles still regularly graced the skies above us, docking gently with our tallest skyscrapers. And unlike the cramped confines of an airplane, traveling in dirigibles was downright luxurious, with observation decks providing grand views of the scenery below.
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The only problem is, the dirigible died out because fixed-wing airplanes are simply much better. They can travel significantly faster, don’t need to bother with large volumes of tricky-to-corral lighter-than-air gas, can navigate rough weather much better, and don’t require large ground crews to land (a plane just needs an open runway; a dirigible needs a ground crew to grab and secure its tethers). So you can see why I’m a bit skeptical whenever another story hits the media about yet another dirigible that’s supposedly going to bring blimps back into style (pictured to the right).
Dirigibles were awesome, but they simply aren’t coming back in any real capacity, no matter how many times they’re “reinvented”. The latest fad is in dirigibles that aren’t actually lighter-than-air, and that thus require the lift generated from wings during forward motion to stay aloft. The article I’ve linked above is far from the only airship using this design that’s been marketed recently. But the new design simply doesn’t address enough of the fundamental disadvantages of the airship, so expect to see it only in fringe applications, like leisure cruises. It won’t be causing any revolutions in air travel, passenger or cargo.
It’s a shame, but the dirigible, just like the telegraph, is a technology whose time has come and gone. The only sliver of hope for the airship is in its nostalgia value.
July 14th, 2008 at 21:36
They don’t actually require finniky and rare lighter than air gasses… they’d work even better on good old infinitely available hard vacuum. ;)
/me goes searching for a 100 meter diamond/carbon nanotube dome and efficient nano-machine turbo pumps
July 15th, 2008 at 01:27
I bet you said the same thing about vinyl records, but they’re coming back!
July 15th, 2008 at 08:02
As off-brand Frisbees, maybe.
July 15th, 2008 at 08:05
Ah. The “analog has better quality” argument. Eventually, someone will realize they can encode music higher than 128kbps, and use headphones that cost more than $5, and the fad will end.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:02
Oh, we can wish, William, but that’s doubtful. The audiophool world is full of people who have flatly unreasonable beliefs about sound quality.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:55
T2A`: Vinyl records aren’t coming back, though. Yeah, maybe they have a bit of a year-over-year increase in sales, but they’ll never again come even close to their heyday. Vinyl records today are like the Goodyear blimp today.
July 15th, 2008 at 18:37
I would probably fit in the category of “flatly unreasonable beliefs about sound quality”, as I am perfectly content with 128kbps MP3. I won’t quite call myself an audiophool, but I can’t tell the difference between MP3 128, at 320, and FLAC. And I don’t like music enough to want to spend 100MB for 10 minutes when I can spend 15-20 for the same with some quality loss. See JPG, you know?
July 15th, 2008 at 22:42
I don’t think you have unreasonable beliefs based on your statements above.
Now, MP3 @ 128 even with state of the art encoders is pretty clearly distinguishable by trained ears. Most MP3s are not encoded with the state of the art encoder and are clearly worse off.
I’ve done audio codec development as well as spent a lot of time doing careful listening. … but it doesn’t take years of experience to learn how to listen for stereotypical transform codec distortion: I could sit down with you and some carefully selected example recordings and teach you what the distortion added by MP3 sounds like in only a half hour or so. If you enjoy music, you’d probably hate me for it. … there is a lot of fairly low quality lossly compressed audio and, at least in my case, I’ve found that the ability to hear it isn’t something that can just be turned off.
But it doesn’t take a lot more than 128kbit MP3 to be statistically indistinguishable to even trained listeners on all but the most tricky problem samples. … So I think your point holds true. Better than 128kbit MP3 is easy to justify, but 2x the bitrate, much less 24/96 lossless, is a lot harder to justify.
Some fun reading here.
July 16th, 2008 at 14:12
That could work. Ships haven’t been a good way of getting people from A to B in a long time, but the cruise industry is still around, and ships’ strengths — nostalgia and romance — are the same as dirigibles’.
Of course, there’s the minor problem of making money from airship cruises.