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PaxAeternum — Endeavour, Semi-Aerostatic Airship, Centralis Keye
Published: 2013-09-03 21:45:10 +0000 UTC; Views: 3183; Favourites: 54; Downloads: 30
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Description
"Endeavour", One of the many privately built airships of the world. A 1500 footer, she one of the few semi-aerostats, built principally to lift very heavy loads and move them across long distances. Because she needed to lift heavy loads, she needed far more power than her lifting gas, and as such, her engines, being high power availability, became heavy as well. When flying under no load, she uses her gas for about 70 percent of her lift and her rotors for 30 percent, but when under load, her engines can delivery many times more lift than her gas can, making her a real freighter. Should her engines fail when she is carrying no load, she can very easily sustain aerodynamic flight to the ground. However, it should be noted that aerostatic airships are not liked at all for travel over the sea with heavy objects, for a loss of lifting engine power would result in not only having to dump the cargo, but the inevitable loss of the ship with no landing site, which would in most cases sink beneath the waves. Heavy freight movements of all kinds over the sea, for safety, are done by ocean vessels, and aerostats only cross the ocean when flying light. Whereas these aerostatic ships come in very practical for local over-land use, especially on large islands such as Centralis Keye. They are known for helping to erect buildings piece by piece. One of the roles in this world they serve the role of helicopters, as there are no helicopters in the Great Lone Islands. (Steam engine power to weight ratio simply is not high enough to make a practical helicopter work.)The Endeavour is based permanently on the sprawling island of Centralis Keye, and performs hundreds of jobs per year. Her captain is Otis Tsevsk and she is homed in a hangar on the northwest end district of Calida Portum. Built in 1187 in Ferrouston, by the year 1320 she is 133 years old and has had three captains, all in the same family. Endeavour is one of sixteen semi-aerostatic airships of varying sizes in the world, and is the fourth largest of them.
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Comments: 21
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With all due respect Alexander, in this world that you have invented, do the people who live here prefer the airships over the railways and ships alike how in this world people choose airliners over railways? Are not the airships more rapid? If so I would be led to believe that they would prefer air travel alone instead of trains even though the costs are reputably for free on either mode of public transport.
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Well remember, while the airship can be faster and go more places without waterways or track being layed for it, this world does adhere to physics. The amount of load even these heavy-lifting airships can carry pales in capacity to the bulk-transport capabilities of a seagoing vessel or goods train pulled by three or four strong locomotives. No airship can lift thousands of tons, or move five-hundred times its own weight in bulk freight.
In this world, as in ours, it is not uncommon to see a freight train several miles long.
Furthermore, due to the mathematics behind aerodynamic drag, airships do not usually get any faster than 70 or 80 MPH. Trains can go well into the 130's......
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Where is this land located on the globe anyhow? Is it near any existing oceans, or is the geography different from the continents that this earth has? Who runs this country since it is a communistic state? What kinds of laws are there? Are people allowed to visit?
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Entirely different planet and world. The communistic government of Kalmorov to the North is really the ideal of communism imagined as a reality, it is not the heavy handed totalitarianism that you are spoonfed by the American way of thinking. Centralis Keye, pictured here, is a central island governed by the cooperative, and really a jewel in itself. the "Island of all", shared mostly by indigenous cultures that have been there for thousands of years, with sparse and carefully built settlements and industries along the coast. People are "allowed" to do most anything.....
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Your country is with good intentions, and I do like other cultures, but such a state would last prosperously for no longer than a day.
Never has the American state nor way ever intervened with my education with propaganda as a citizen yesterday and it shan't today. I've learned about the ways of communistic states by means of my own research and having asked about the experiences from people who used to live in such countries. I have friends who used to live in Red China, which I visited myself, and they were not very happy with their country at all. You know Alexander, you may very much recieve your wish for this country that we stand upon the soil of now to be turned into a state that you do not abhore soon. I am no defeatist, and you might be surprised to hear this from me, but I am aware that this country wishes indeed to forgot its identity, and the reasons it was formed for so many years ago.
I shall however stand by the American flag, and what it used to mean, until the very end.
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Then you are extremely short-sighted and cannot see beyond what the idiots have taught you. The reason I love communism is because it requires humankind to be better than he is, which is why of course it did not work for long here. The beautiful principles are so often corrupted because we humans, like the apes and primates we evolved from, want to hoarde and stache things to call our own. We cannot seem to escape our own evolutionary instincts.
This country has no Identity. There are those people who would give our country any excuse by saying "Yes we have our faults, but the IDEAL is still there." That is a nice thing to think and tell yourself to sleep at night, but wether it is firing missles at villiages in Yemen or police brutality against our own people, this country's identity was lost almost directly after it was formed. Look at our civil war as one of many instances. We are the captains of inventing our own problems and misery, as well as that of others.
I wish this country to forget its Identity much as I would a man who had done horrible things that he truly regrets but can never make up for, someone young and foolish who, through his follies, rather than gaining wisdom, only gains denial and delusion and tries to justify his actions. I have seen it in people, and I see it as an amalgam of this nation.
I don't think you have any idea of what the american flag "used to mean" at all. I do not blame you as I do not, my friends do not, NOBODY does. The fact that everyone has a different meaning for our flag in their head alone signals to me that it has lost its meaning.
Now, in fairness and to be of the rest of the world, this does not mean I am saying any country is better than ours, only that for short times they held better ideals. Russia ended in disaster, as you know, and China is on the same slow road to ruin, as you also know. So it has been with every communist state, or monarchy, or theocracy, for all of time and human society. This I do not deny, we are a race of idiots as well as dreamers. With our very best we cannot escape our worst.
The reason these societies work in the world I have created, and believe you me it is wishful thinking, and hence why the world is nearly entirely fictional; Humankind has transcended most of these things, it is truly better than itself. People do not have this uncontrollable desire to own and posses like we do here, they are not warlike like their ape forefathers, they do not go out of their own way to make the lives of others a misery, and the weight of pain and emotion falls far more heavily on these islandic peoples than it does on our shoulders. When the few wars over land and resources (petty things, but practical things) did transpire in the days of kings, the kings themselves walked the battlefields and saw with their own eyes what horror had been wrought, and they imagined if that pain had been inflicted on themselves, and they did collapse and tear at the earth in wishing it was not so, and agreed that such things would never happen again.
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Everyone does if prodded into doing so.
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I hope you get what you want in life one day Alex. And when you do, I do hope you'll be happy.
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Oh believe me, I will be XD
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Reminds me of Miyazaki's Laputa, and Jules Verne's Robur. How much weight could she save by just pitching her rotors forward like a modern helicopter and abandoning separate horizontal propulsion?
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The savings would be limited especially for the fact she would lose her ability to stay still in the air. That is the big advantage with a heavy lifting heli-stat such as this, hovering and direct upward lift.
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You've really done the math behind this one! I'm no physicist, but if I were, I bet I'd find nothing wrong with your equations!
Now that I have my favorites folders started, may I add this one to 'Technology'?
Brilliant, just brilliant. And certainly a bit prettier and more exciting than an everyday jet!
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She would by no means of course compare in power to weight ratio like a modern gas-turbine helicopter or flying machine would, because there is only so much power you can obtain without containing explosions within cylinders, however she would perform the work she was built for as all the other machines of the steam age did.
Remember also that higher power density machines tend to tear themselves apart, hence why our aircraft engines today usually only have useful lifespans of ten years if they are lucky.
The lifting engines of this ship, which do the big work, are rotors turned by semi-uniflow type double expansion engines. (the high pressure cylinders are uniflow and the low pressure cylinders are poppet-valve actuated regular cylinders with full admission and exhaust strokes
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Is there any reuse of steam involved? And if so, is the steam dried before being reused?
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Reuse of steam is done in the compounding, receivers are not heated with live process steam. Exhaust steam from the engines goes to surface condensers outside the ship and then is pumped back to the hotwell, where the water is preheated and de-aerated.
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Hopefully your using helium. Sparks from the stacks would be a disaster!
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Helium is sort of a given with a steamship of any kind, however fear not about sparks. The airships of this world are usually fired by oil, pressurized kerosene or natural gas, as a coal-burning airship would be severely impractical and hard to manage in both weight and firing system. Coal is found in use in boilers where it was normally found here, industries, ships and locomotives.
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That said, do you have any figures on how much is saved (in space, weight, etc) when using oil, kerosene or natural gas over coal? I know it's rather a lot, but only in general terms. Also, I love the Endeavor's lift fans.
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No exact numbers because the ship has not been built. (yet).
The savings with kerosene and oil are that the firing system can be more easily run, and with gas, if un-pressurized, does not change the weight of the ship as it is burned.
That being said, coal would yield a much higher energy density. THe firing rates of these boilers comperable on cubic units of oil or gas do not yield the same steam production as they would with an identical firing rate with coal.
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