Johannes replied to me: > It would most likely be labeled a surveiliance craft. And yes it would be > a bit unusual to do that. You could work that into the campain background. > There might be a faction, that came up with the idea of the blimps and > lobbied hard to get them and now are eager to proove how usefull they are. > And the other faction, that never have liked them and just wait for a > "told you so" moment.
I have a rough draft. If the numbers are right, I can get an airship with 50 mph top speed for five hours and two and a half days at 15 mph patrol speed. Depending on the crew and quarters, there would be 500 to 1,000 lbs. of instruments. Sounds good compared to a real-world UAV. The utility variant would dump most instruments and the bunk(s) for cargo space and passenger seats. Perhaps four people and 600 lbs. of cargo. The heaviest part is the gasbag with DR 1 non-rigid armor, assuming it comes in a single piece. 440 lbs. Are the control surfaces for a blimp subsumed with the gasbag or the body structure? Next is the MHD turbine at 345 lbs. Perhaps I could make it two turbines with the same total power. That brings redundancy, too. > Would a setup work, where for larger missions the electrolysis equipment > stays in the basecamp and usually blimps go on missions without it, but > the base camp is designed to be moveable by blimps? Moving a large basecamp in quarter-ton increments sounds iffy. More likely the larger camp is near the gate (and gets resupplied from Earth) and the blimps go on missions from there. > The autonomous self refuelling blimp could be included as emergency > scenario. The fuel tanks take 1,000 gallons LHyd. Anything less than 5 gph will be a drop in the bucket, and that would take a serious bite out of my mass budget. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
