If you could do whatever you wanted. (Continued)
Yesterday’s post was about building enormous vacuum tank
airships. I first wanted to explain a
little bit more about why I want to use tanks with all the air pumped out of
them instead of balloon style cells which would contain Hydrogen or
Helium. The Germans put Hydrogen in the
old Zeppelins during the era of the Great Airships, because they didn't have
Helium. Hydrogen is highly combustible
as anyone who remembers the Hindenburg accident
will tell you.
Using Helium has its draw backs also. After you spend the money to build this
massive ship you have to fill the cells with millions of cubic feet of helium
(which is not free) before the ship becomes buoyant, our lighter than air. What makes the ship lighter than air is
replacing the millions of cubic feet of air (which has a weight) with something
lighter than air. When you have replaced
enough of the weight to even overcome the weight of the ship which weighs tons
itself, the ship becomes lighter than air or what we call buoyant.
What does nothing weigh?
You know the answer.
It’s all right, shout it out!
Nothing!
A vacuum is exactly that, nothing. We can’t achieve an absolute vacuum but with
today’s technology we can easily, with the right pumps, get it to better than
95% vacuum. You surpass the buoyancy of
Helium around 90-92% vacuum and you surpass Hydrogen around 93-94% vacuum. This system saves the expense of purchasing,
transporting and using a gas to make the ship float.
When you use a gas it would naturally expand the higher the
ship goes as the outside pressure against the cells becomes less as the level
of air outside the ship decreases. This
puts a limit to how high the ship could fly before the cells burst or you have
to pump some of the gas into high pressure tanks to prevent them from exploding. By using tanks with a vacuum in them they
will be at maximum pressure on the tanks at sea level. The higher they go the less the pressure
trying to crush them. Look at it as a
really large submarine designed to sail through the air instead of water.
When you hold a ball full of air at the bottom of a swimming
pool and then let it go what happens?
It shoots upward to the surface of the water, past the
surface into the air until the buoyancy becomes zero and gravity grabs a hold of
it and drags it back to the water where it will float.
What do you think would happen if you achieved a 96% to 97%
vacuum in the tanks of the ships I have been describing while the ship was
locked to the ground and suddenly released the clamps holding the ship? It would shoot upward.
How far?
It would remain buoyant until the pressure outside equaled
the pressure inside the tanks which wouldn't be until the ship was surrounded
by a 96% to 97% vacuum. With a little
bit of help the ship could reach escape velocity and travel into outer space.
If you designed certain ships of this style to handle flying
in space, by adding thrusters, pressurized cabins with oxygen for the crew to
breathe and a means of re-entering the atmosphere without burning up you would
have a space delivery vehicle.
There was an idea that was being worked on in the late
1970’s by some guys interested in solar power before they got dumped in together
with the other energy groups in the newly created Department of Energy in 1980
by President Ronald Reagan. The idea
entailed building enormous solar cell arrays in space where weather and such
would not affect them and they could collect sunlight and convert it into solar
power almost continuously 24/7 and piggy back the power off of a radio signal
to a collector that was stationary on the ground. By putting an object such as this in what is
known as a geosynchronous orbit the solar array would stay directly over the
same spot all the time.
In late 1979 or 1980 before they were disbanded and fired
for threatening the coal and natural gas industry this group was getting ready
to go to Congress for funding for their space delivery system to start
constructing these solar arrays across the heavens above the United
States. Their plan was tentatively
scheduled to be completed by 2015 to provide totally green environmentally free
power to the U.S. for pennies per kilowatt.
Their plan also threatened the upstart of the new space delivery system
that was currently favored over theirs which was the Space Shuttle, but the
Space Shuttle wouldn't have been a cheap and effective means to deliver the
parts necessary to construct the Solar Arrays.
It’s now nearing the end of 2012 and Oil and Natural Gas industry are
safe, the Space Shuttle has been retired and we are no closer to cheap
environmentally clean electricity.
I also remember reading that one of the original plans for
transporting oil from our Alaska oil refineries into the states was a fleet of
airships which would be able to deliver the oil to almost anywhere it would be
needed or could be handled. It would
have prevented the oil pipeline from temporarily being shut down because the
pipe line route below and tanks the pipeline feeds into are full. The cost of the fleet of blimps would have
been cheaper to build than the pipeline was to construct. The companies and jobs created by the massive
undertaking of building large fleets of airships for various purposes could be
as enormous as the airships would be themselves.
I hope to see mammoth airships sailing through the skies
again during my lifetime.
If you could do anything you wanted to do what would it be?
What things do you enjoy doing?
What things do you do naturally even if nobody is watching
or willing to pay you to do it?
What do you love to do?
What is the biggest craziest dream you can imagine and see
yourself doing?
Please feel free to share your ideas, dreams, and
thoughts. There is no right or wrong
answers to this game as we are only playing make believe and exercising our
imaginations at this point.
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