How do steampunk airships work

So, for a fully kitted out steampunk airship? Centives would like to thank Brian Hall of Airship Ventures for providing information on Zeppelins to help us write this article.

Enjoyed this article? Perhaps check out our coverage of The Batman over here , or have a look at sponsorship in The Hunger Games. You can find this and other articles in our Editorials although for a selection of the best check out our Greatest Hits. And be sure to stay in touch:. Tags: Airships , Steampunk , Zeppelins. There is a major flaw in your calculations : a sailship has a few tons of lead under the water used to maintain his center of gravity under the floating line. So, you shall remove at least half of the weight, probably more since the lead also compensate for the force of the wind in the sails on a sailship.

Steampunk Airships…Plausible? August 26, in Editorial The most recent Three Musketeers film is worth watching, if for no other reason than seeing a sky battle between two airships. Zeppelin NT. Picture courtesy of Airship Ventures. May 13, at am. Anonymous says:.

November 30, at pm. My suggestion might be to take a leaf out of WWII where gliders were towed behind planes and then released to continue to their destination. Accuracy was very poor but their silence had obvious advantages. Lifting bi- or tri-plane gliders very high by balloon and then releasing them may be one option. For long-distance flights across the US for example a series of balloon-lift relay stations in mile sections could invoke memories of stage-coach journeys where the horses would be changed at regular intervals.

Increase atmospheric density. Use any of the almost -possible flying machines, like the spiral pump or flappy forms. Tame large birds or construct feathers that make the flapping efficiently work. Handwave the ridiculously complex material and mechanics problem; You did say steam punk, after all.

Otherwise, you have to displace sufficient amounts of mass. Usually air, eg balloons, choppers, or planes but it can be rocket exhaust, too, say. The main issue you have is energy. With light gases, you don't care about carrying some form of energy source because you're simply as light as your surroundings. Since electricity is not an option, you're left with chemical energy, i.

The former means combustion engines and the likes. This technology is probably too advanced or unfitting. You're pretty much left with the latter: Kinetic energy storage. This can happen two ways, either you lift off with kinetic energy and store it in your speed i. It's a bit limited and possibly a bit of a stretch, but if you implement materials storing a lot of kinetic energy you can knock yourself out.

Another way would be to extract energy from something on-the-fly sorry for the pun! Magical energies are a classic but probably unfitting, thunderstorms could work as well in various ways, thermal lift would be something more mundane that is actually being used, but probably wouldn't be effective in combat scenarios. Expand this to have more screws to increase the lifting capacity and a few propellers for lateral movement and you could achieve something steampunkish.

What you can relatively easily do is a Human powered steam assisted airplane craft. The first successful human powered craft was assembled at , when the materials were not reliant on electricity to produce. What you can do with this is a human powered but steam assisted airplane, where a couple of compact steam engine help with the initial lift that takes the most amount of power and then keep the plane in the air at minimal velocity with help from one or two humans.

When more velocity is required the humans will have to give it their all. There's nothing stopping animals from growing big enough to carry people around, there just hasn't happened to be anything that big since humans have been on the scene.

In another universe, it may well be that huge pterosaurs or birds exist and can be domesticated. If they aren't common, a Jules Verne-type expedition to a subterranean land or exotic isolated valley would fit quite well with a steampunk aesthetic as a way of describing where they came from. Ultimately, there's a reason we didn't have flying machines before we did. Without lightweight materials and compact power sources, flying machines are exceptionally difficult to build, especially when you consider the degree of aerospace knowledge required to design effective ones.

By the time a society has developed the technology for flight, it's difficult to explain why they wouldn't just use that same technology to improve the rest of their society. Animals, as a zero-tech solution, offer a great way to circumvent that issue without requiring any hand waving or changes to a planet or it's atmosphere. To compensate gravity we need to push air down.

The more air we push, the less energy we spend for the same pull. But as we push a lot of air we start losing more and more energy on friction. But if you want to go slow you get other problems - if you go slower than wind then you vehicle is useless. And if you move slow, then your wings meet less air, and you need bigger wings to push the same amount of air down. That's why human powered airplanes have such big wings. And it is hard to make big and light wings without good technologies.

So - increase density of the air ten-fold and make climate calmer zero axis tilt and airplanes would become much easier to build and use. There are several possible approaches, but each one has limitations, and all of them provide far less flight ability than using internal combustion Otto, Diesel or even Brayton engines piston engines and jet engines, respectively.

If steam power is used as flight assist i. The second option leaves the boiler and firebox on the ground, but does not subject the aircraft to violent acceleration. Direct production of steam without a boiler through chemical reactions is possible. The WWII German Me rocket plane was powered by high pressure steam created by mixing highly concentrated Hydrogen Peroxide with a mixture of methanol and water.

The fuel and reaction itself was insanely dangerous, but if you're looking for a rocket powered interceptor, this might be the way to go. A somewhat less dangerous reaction was using "Walter" technology, where Hydrogen Peroxide was used as an oxidizer for more conventional engines.

Walter turbines were fitted to seem experimental Germa n U boars towards the end of the war, buring a mixture of Diesel fuel and concentrated H2O2. The combustion products and steam expanded in the turbine, giving the submarine rather spectacular performance, however the short range and danger of using concentrated H2O2 as the oxidizer was a negative factor for the Navy. A final option would be to ditch the steam altogether and use the Stirling engine. This is also an external combustion engine, but uses a gas contained within rather than water as the working fluid.

While early Stirling Engines were quite heavy, they were designed as stationary engines. There have been many lightweight designs that were developed by car companies in the s and 70's, which could be adaptable for aircraft usage. Once again, the power to weight ration is lower than a comparable internal combustion engine, but a Stirling engine is quiet and economical, and in a large "steampunk" aircraft there should be room for multiple engines, the large radiators and external heaters needed.

As far as I understand, what you need is an external combustion engine which does not use water vapor, because 1 water is heavy and 2 the boiler is very heavy. You may want to take a look and take your pick from the list of external combustion engines which use air as the working fluid in the Wikipedia article on caloric engines.

My suggestion is to use the Ericsson engine , which has already been used successfully albeit fictionally to power airplanes in William R. Forstchen's series The Lost Regiment. Alternatively, if you don't need more than a few minutes of flight time, you may use a carbon dioxide engine, such as the engine used in the real-life Vuia I aircraft Liquid carbon dioxide is boiled off to produce gaseous CO2 which is fed to a piston engine as a total-loss working fluid.

Lift gas is replenished and generated on-board the vessel via the algae tanks not visible. Landing This airship is designed to land on water. Water intakes on the drive train 3 also allow the boilers and algae tanks to be conveniently refilled while the ship is at rest.

Other stuff: Cloud Lantern — Anti collision lighting designed to be visible as the ship rises through cloud 7. Life boats — Self explanatory! Standard fold out glider type 4. Nests- These are used to ensure visibility around the craft at all times- the lookouts communicate with the crew in the gondola via speaking tube. Next Next post: Sketchbook June- August