I had an article in Pyramid 2, "Airships Buyers Guide for 1922." I had a historical sources a couple of dozen airship proposals with air speeds listed, from which I created VE 3e spreadsheets. It's taken me a couple of days to find my notes and reconstruct my thinking.
I did almost all of them with radical streamlining, then multiplied the air speed by .85. There were a couple of designs with gondolas hanging below the gasbag on cables, there I multiplied by .8. The Goodyear Pony Blimp worked out to the correct airspeed with excellent streamlining. I did some partial spreadsheets for the Hindenburg and Akron, the ".85 of radical streamlining" rule of thumb works there too. With the price multiplier for radical streamlining (and excellent streamlining for the one Goodyear design), the prices worked out to roughly correct for 1922 $US. One thing that is totally broken with airships and VE 3e is the crew rules. A typical watch for the Hindenburg, excluding the steward crew, was: 1 keel watch 1 sailmaker 4 engineers (one for each engine) 1 officer for the above 1 radio operator 1 rudder man 1 elevator man 1 commander for the whole ship. That seems to be standard for a rigid, no matter the size of the ship. On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 1:18 AM, Brandon Cope <[email protected]> wrote: > I've noticed that the top speed formula for airships in VE2 gives about > half the historical top speed. Anyone else noticed this? > > Brandon > > > > _______________________________________________ > GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> > http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l > _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
