Hi! Martin Spott wrote: > I think Ralf Gerlich has quite some expertise on this one - his home > airfield is the place where these beasts are being built and he's one > of these guys who want to know every detail :-) > As far as I remember he also has a nice livery for the "Gummiwoosch", > yet I don't know wether it's ready for distribution. > > Ralf !?
Yes, the Zeppelins are built at EDNY. Note that they differ from blimps by the fact that Zeppelins have a rigid inner structure while blimps are held in shape by the pressure of the gas. That's one of the tricks the guys at Zeppelin have, so they can attach the engines to the body of the Zeppelin instead of the cabin, which makes flying nearly silent for the passengers. With a hull without rigid structure, there is nothing to attach the engines to. They have space for 12 or 13 passengers. The hull generates dynamic lift and most of the time the ship is actually not lighter-than-air. I was told that typically they have a mass of about 2 tons, but a weight of around 700kg. If empty or with low fuel and payload, they are lighter-than-air. IIRC the rule-of-thumb figure for the transition between dynamic flight and hovering is at about 20kts IAS. They can activate a special system, which directly puts thrust-vector-control of the aft engine on the pilot's sidestick, allowing to control the ship the same way as with elevator and rudder. The side-engines can be rotated upwards and downwards, which is used during take-off and descend. These ships are flying at EDNY all the time. They're doing several roundtrips around the Lake of Constance area each day, given appropriate weather. Just today I had just vacated the runway coming back from a short local flight, and I saw one of them taking off. One is currently doing trips in London, and is bound to be shipped to San Francisco afterwards. IIRC it will take its homebase in Moffett Field. I don't have that livery yet and I had hoped to get some more detailed information on the geometry etc. The livery takes reference to the fact that the ship will be flying in the San Francisco area for tourist attraction. I'm not sure, but somehow I seem to remember that this is our standard scenery area ;-) That's all the info I could come up with at this late time of day ;-) Cheers, Ralf ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
