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Gallery: A Garage-Sized Flying Model Airship

Posted 6.14.11 at 10:52 am 2 Comments

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Scale

Cody Pickens

When Clemens did the math, he realized that a working model airship of this type would have to be huge. He would need lots of helium--at least 150 cubic feet worth--to carry the weight of the internal wooden frame. That meant lots of interior space. By his calculations, the model would have to be at least 20 feet long. Anything smaller, and the weight of the frame would negate the lift of the gas. But he also couldn’t go any larger; a 20-foot-long airship would just fit, on a diagonal, inside his two-car garage.

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Read the article: You Built What?! A Colossal Flying Reproduction of a 1935 Airship

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2 Comments

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skyship007

06/15/11 at 10:02 am

Hi Folks,
If you like model airships or the real thing and are in need of a Helium sniffing laugh then try my Gasbags site:
www.hybridblimp.net for the worlds only lighter than air comedy web site.
Regards JB

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twayneking

06/28/11 at 9:50 pm

Technically, if the 20 foot model reaches a top speed of 20 mph, then it's actually flying at 588 scale miles per hour since the original was better than 39 times as large. A scale speed of 80 plus mph would have been about 2 mph scaled down.

Tom King

"If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect." - Benjamin Franklin

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