On May 29, 11:56 pm, Jim Logajan wrote:
BradGuth wrote:
I'm certainly not looking for absolute perfection, but would you like
to help R&D this rigid airship anyway?

I think I can offer some guidance.
(Followups set to the only newsgroup I believe this thread now belongs.)
There are two resources you should begin with:

This paper:
"HIGH TEMPERATURE MATERIALS FOR VENUS BALLOON ENVELOPES"

Which you can find online hehttp://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/b.../1/95-0417.pdf

And this book, which is the most "modern" text available on the subject
of airship design:

"Airship Technology" Edited by Khoury and Gillett

Available hehttp://www.amazon.com/Airship-Techno...space-Khoury/d...

Other books and web sites worth adding to a research library on airships
include:

"Airship Design" by Burgess

Old but still useful and available hehttp://www.amazon.com/Airship-Design...dp/1410211738/...

"Airship Aerodynamics" By the U.S. War Department

Originally intended for training of Navy airship personnel but a short
yet effective guide to basic concepts. Available hehttp://www.amazon.com/Airship-Aerody...r-Department/d...

The website of the Experimental Lighter than Air organization:

http://www.xlta.org/

There are a couple of PDF docs worth downloading in the LIBRARY page and
further links to other sites in the LINKS page (naturally).

Hope some of this helps.

For some odd reasons this reply of mine wasn't getting posted to all
of the intended groups. So, here's one more time for the old Guth
gipper.

Thanks once again for all of that constructive and only somewhat
outdated though informative leads, but also some of that rather silly
balloon sport feedback has its place, much of which I've seen dozens
of times before.

It seems folks expect little old me to accomplish 100+% of
everything. I didn't realize that I was being thought of as far
better than Einstein that had teams of assistants (aka minions and
peers) working as an intellectual cartel on his behalf.

By way of expressing rigid composite should suggest this is not an
inflated balloon application, as proposed by Yavrouian, not that
efficiently ballooning science instruments below them thick clouds
isn't technically doable as relatively cheap, especially on behalf of
the micro electronic packages that involve so little mass and require
such little energy as they outperform their task in most every aspect.

Starting from scratch, this custom rigid composite airship is capable
of good size and substantial payload, and its going to be like nothing
ever before utilized on Earth or any other planet. Perhaps the
closest
analogy of anything terrestrial is going to be a nuclear submarine,
whereas instead having its Venus buoyancy created by either a vacuum
that’s easily managed by way of getting CO2 pumped out, or merely
displaced from the top down with the failsafe gas of hydrogen. I was
thinking along the lines of using rigid/hard composite spheres,
arranged into an airship format (5 in tandem) that’s kind of
aerodynamically suited to the task at hand.

This application requires more than a simple balloon, especially if
active flight and navigation is incorporated.
. – Brad Guth