Re(1): Could Airships Really Revolutionize the U.S. Navy?

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Re(1): Could Airships Really Revolutionize the U.S. Navy?
Posted on 5/23/2019 at 12:15:14 by John Wells

And just where is all this power coming to come from? Let's say the airship guys find some magic crystals that produce zillions of kilowatts of energy, the best efficiency one can expect from "stay aloft and zap missiles" is perhaps 99 percent. Let's also say that this ship needs 25,000 horsepower to do its magic zapping. So we have to throw away one percent of 25,000 hp or 250 horsepower. Since we're aloft all the time, the only heat sink available is air, which is less dense at these altitudes, so we have to have a heat exchanger that heats the air around the airship. This means a turbo-charger to compress the air taken into the heat exchanger, and this means our wonderful 99 percent efficiency goes to hell in a hand basket. So this means it's not 250 hp we have to discard into the sky, but closer to 500 hp. See what a wonderful heat sink the ocean is? Had this discussion when I was supporting NavSea. It's not airships in the sky, but pie. But it makes good SciFi.