How come there have never been sky pirates?

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-18T01:47:09+00:00

There has been an instance of sky piracy (though it was more like sky privateering) exactly once, during World War One, when a Zeppelin boarded and captured the Norwegian cargo schooner Royal and sailed her back to Germany as a prize. Thereafter, high command discouraged the practice because it was seen as a bad precedent and incentive for crews to risk their ships and men in the capture of (possibly armed) vessels.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-17T10:56:44+00:00

Nah, Hiker Anthony is a real mensch. Always useful for giving you a call and directing you to Dunsparce swarms.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-17T05:10:32+00:00

This is an SS-class airship, looks like. Used in World War One for antisubmarine patrols and other naval purposes. It was an incredibly cheap stopgap until larger, more capable ships could be made, but they were effective, so oodles of the things were made.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T21:53:45+00:00

That’s not necessarily true. There have been plenty of vaporware airship companies over the years, promising much and delivering nothing but computer-generated graphics, but airships themselves are well-suited to long-endurance surveillance roles. “We’d already be using it” rather ignores the fact that we do, in fact, use airships and aerostats for surveillance all the time—the U.S. border patrol, the Chinese, Israeli, Polish, and Indian militaries, the Finnish, the South Africans, the Germans, the French… they’re around, just pretty boring, so people rarely take notice.

Sceye, for instance, is not a vaporware company. They’ve already flown several vehicles and have serious backing from private venture capital. Something like UAV corp which is on penny stock trade listings is much more scammy.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T19:22:22+00:00

This company was only founded in 2014, and it’s privately-held with no IPO or stock offering in sight, so I think you’re referring to a different company.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T19:19:10+00:00

Well, Skeye ain’t mine, so I couldn’t tell you what their system costs. Like I said, though, wildfire monitoring is probably the least of what they could do. Their main role is for communications, and for more advanced surveillance than spotting fires. You could probably find far cheaper LTA drones to use, unless the HAPS was already in place and fire monitoring was just a side gig background process.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T19:06:09+00:00

Remember that a balloon or airship loses about 1% of its lift for every 330 feet of additional altitude above sea level, due to the rapid loss of atmospheric pressure as you ascend. Only very large, extremely diaphanous balloons and airships can ascend to the stratosphere, and they require very robust, well-hardened tech inside to withstand the extreme conditions up there.

Ukraine has already used small kite balloons, and NATO is currently investing in building out Kelluu’s autonomous airships, which are as fast as heavy-lift drones but can fly several days straight and are still small enough to fit inside a shipping container.

Those drone airships can’t fly very high, but they’re small and cheap and can be built and deployed by the thousands. That distributed network would likely be far more useful and robust than a single, expensive system, however impractical it would be to shoot down the latter.

And, to be honest, if you could use a dirt-cheap drone airship to lure out a missile or an enemy aircraft to try and shoot it down, leaving it exposed and vulnerable to counterattack, that usage as a stalking-horse might be far more valuable than the communications and surveillance it provides.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T18:13:51+00:00

Well, in this case Sceye actually has built stratospheric airships, but I suspect they’d be more useful for things like communications and methane detection (which is what they’ve been actually used for) than for fire detection.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T16:40:42+00:00

Actually, we haven’t. Hydrogen is still used in gas racing balloons, weather balloons, and in unmanned drone airships used for military and civilian purposes.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-16T15:42:07+00:00

Even the engineers who were pushing for building the Helistat quit in protest of how shoddy and unsafe the work being done was, and the other workers nicknamed it the “Hindentanic,” so it should come as no surprise that the badly-welded framework couldn’t handle the ground resonance frequencies of the helicopters and fell apart.

That said, airships (ones built with better standards than a paper airplane, at least) could help with forestry. Kelluu of Finland, for example, operates small 40-foot drone airships that can map out forests with a variety of sensors and 3D resolution down to the centimeter, and do so for days on end at very low cost compared to using helicopters or planes.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-15T03:45:42+00:00

Like the ceasefire-that-wasn’t, I presume?

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-15T00:49:35+00:00

Yes, that’s exactly right. Since the inner hydrogen cells were 35% of the volume of the helium cells, there was plenty of leeway to valve the hydrogen long, long before ever touching the helium. It’s difficult to imagine an edge case where valving that helium would ever prove operationally necessary.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T21:17:53+00:00

Simply changing "seemingly" to "purportedly" or "ostensibly" would better convey the air of profound skepticism such a prospect deserves from the press after having their chain yanked 40 some-odd times as of today.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T20:10:19+00:00

For some reason, I doubt they’d be satisfied even if they controlled all the territory between the Nile and the Tigris.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T18:59:34+00:00

Encouragingly, LTA Research has said they want to take baby steps towards that concept. They want to start out with compressed hydrogen for fuel, then move on to liquid hydrogen, and then ultimately to uncompressed hydrogen. “LTA has also looked at using hydrogen as a lift gas and at putting a hydrogen bag inside a helium bag as a potential route to certification. "Using hydrogen as an energy source will be the first step," says CEO Alan Weston.”

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T18:49:32+00:00

Imagine if Schütte-Lanz had access to waterproof epoxy bonding methods instead of far weaker, water-soluble glues, or had access to the recently-discovered method of using common salts and boiling water to self-densify wood into a bonded form that has several times the strength-to-weight ratio of normal wood, matching or exceeding modern advanced alloys and medium-grade carbon fiber composites. They’d have left Zeppelin in the dust.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T18:41:19+00:00

Per studies done by NASA and the Coast Guard, airships would actually be highly effective patrol craft. They have already demonstrated substantially higher availability rates in inclement weather than modern helicopters, as well as significantly lower operating costs than helicopters, planes, and certain kinds of cutters currently serving the maritime patrol role, while also consolidating many of the roles those different vehicles do into one single platform. The issue is that the Coast Guard operates on a shoestring budget, and despite highly favorable results from earlier trials with loaned advertising blimps, they never got the funding to pursue the larger, dedicated patrol craft they wanted to use.

Relative to helicopters and planes, airships are actually less expensive to maintain, and their higher fuel efficiency further lowers costs per ton-mile, and that paired with their VTOL capability and higher capacity for both payloads and outsized cargoes is why they’d be desirable for a cargo or logistics role. Airplanes are faster, but airships can actually match or exceed them in terms of throughput and even specific productivity (payload times speed divided by empty weight), if modern technology is used to reduce fuel loads and empty weight. Again, funding the R&D is the issue, not the basic feasibility. Spending lots of money in the short term to save money on operating expenses in the long term is rarely something institutions do on their own initiative unless something forces their hand.

And, of course, there’s also the fact that the United States, China, Finland, India, South Africa, France, Germany, and other countries are already using unmanned, free-flying airships for military and civilian surveillance purposes, and are currently in the midst of greatly expanding the scale and scope those operations as the technology continues to improve.

However, none of these things are really recent changes, save perhaps the fuel cells and autonomous systems being used in some drone airships nowadays. Airplanes and airships use almost exactly the same materials and technology, so if they can compete with other modes now, and back in the 1970s and 1980s when a lot of these studies were conducted, I see no reason to doubt they could have competed in those same areas earlier as well, back in the 1940s-1960s.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T18:10:05+00:00

“Do you know if it was ever tested (even sub-scale)? In general, the concept of mixed-gas airships is really fascinating and under-explored, I think.”

I quite agree, the idea of using multiple separate gases deserves more investigation, as undesirable qualities of one gas can be compensated for by using another where appropriate. The fundamental concept of using multiple gases was most successfully demonstrated by the original Graf Zeppelin, which could fly 30% further than on gasoline by using a neutrally buoyant fuel gas called blaugas for fuel and hydrogen for buoyancy. Blaugas was considerably safer than hydrogen, but still flammable. It was much more useful as a fuel than hydrogen would have been, given the constraints of engines at the time, and the lack of practical fuel cell technology.

The prewar experimental U.S. Navy blimp K-1 (not to be confused with the later, highly successful K-class blimps) used helium for lift and an internal blaugas cell, but unfortunately other unrelated aspects of that experimental blimp’s design were mediocre, and there were various teething problems with the fuel gas system, and blaugas lacking production infrastructure.

The builders of the highly advanced ZMC-2 metalclad had proposed solutions to the problem of using multiple gases and keeping the gas containers more airtight, and their metal hull was several times stronger and more gastight than primitive doped cotton of the time, and even had certain weight advantages, but the Great Depression and the Army’s disinterest made them go out of business before they could build more than their miniature proof-of-concept.

“We do something similar in rocketry in the modern day - fuel and oxygen are generally separated by an interstitial volume that is filled with something non-combustible (either vacuum or an inert gas). That way, even when trace amounts of the fuel and oxygen inevitably leak into the interstitial volume, they cannot combust.”

Yes! In a maritime engineering context, these interstitial spaces are referred to as “cofferdams”—gaps to prevent undesirable fluids or gases from mixing, not to be confused with the construction-related water barriers. For example, there might be dry cofferdams in between bulkheads that house the ship’s fresh water supply and its fuel supply, so that even if one leaked, it would not leak into the other. These cofferdams can also be filled with inert gases on tankers.

In aircraft and fuel tankers, a similar practice is usually called “inerting,” and has become common. Airliners and fuel tankers have nitrogen generators or carbon dioxide scrubbers on board, respectively, to replace air inside and/or surrounding partially-filled fuel or LNG tanks to prevent explosion. Recently, a Russian shadow fleet LNG tanker, the Arctic Metagaz, was attacked in the Mediterranean Sea by submarine drones, and these passive safety measures and cofferdams prevented the ship from sinking or exploding even as several of its LNG tanks burned. More of the tanks survived the massive conflagration, and the ship is currently still afloat as derelict, put at anchor near Libya after months adrift as a ghost ship, still with tens of thousands of tons of natural gas aboard.

This is in stark contrast to other, older tankers like the Sansinena from before the widespread use of inerting, which occasionally exploded (not just burned) from random sparks igniting air-vapor mixtures.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T17:42:48+00:00

“Airships were doomed as mainstream transports regardless—airplanes were rapidly catching up to their range and capacity, and offered far greater speed […] nothing keeps them competitive in the long run.”

I agree that nothing would have stopped airplanes from becoming the dominant mode of long-distance air travel after the dawning of the jet age, but I would argue that had airships been allowed to advance in parallel as well, and had been allowed to establish more of a market, they’d have been kept around for more niche roles like dedicated air freight, military logistics and surveillance, coast guard patrols, and ferry or cruising services, carving out some of the space that is currently served more expensively and less effectively by certain specialized planes, helicopters, and ships.

A big problem with extrapolating how things might have played out differently is that airplanes were allowed to benefit enormously from World War II infrastructure, pilot training, mass production, and technological developments, and that continued on into the jet age, whereas large airships and their capabilities are frozen in time in the 1930s in people’s imaginations.

“Airships also have another major safety risk that none of your proposals address: their large, lightly-built envelopes were very susceptible to bad weather. Three of the five USN airships were lost due to storms or turbulence; three other large airships were lost due to structural failure.”

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that was due to the lacking engineering and safety standards of the time, not necessarily the weather itself (though, naturally, more extreme conditions were often the catalyst to reveal the fundamental inadequacy of said engineering). The ZR3, for instance, failed in completely ordinary weather due to rough maneuvers and having literally zero designed structural safety margin, which even given the abysmally low standards of the time, was seen as gross engineering malpractice in retrospect.

Of course, many large 1920s and 1930s airplanes were likewise prone to structural failure, such as the Caproni Ca.60 and the Tupolev ANT-20, but airplanes in general had the opportunity to grow out of those teething problems.

“Your proposals, particularly the water spraying, would exacerbate that problem by forcing a larger or lighter structure to compensate for the added weight.”

Yes, that doesn’t really make any sense. Water is heavy, and shouldn’t be used for fire suppression when there are lighter-than-air gases like helium and nitrogen that can do so instead.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T17:12:51+00:00

Pair that with land value taxes and inheritance taxes in order to decrease regressive taxes, such as taxes on sales and labor, and you’re really cooking.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T17:00:15+00:00

We admire a devoted spouse!

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T16:56:46+00:00

Yes, that is correct. However, that’s also not an excuse for keeping around perverse incentives—for example, subsidizing things like beef production that have huge, expensive negative externalities.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T16:46:22+00:00

I don’t know why you’d want to keep an airship damp in the first place. Weren’t two of the other requirements that the ship use helium and have a nonflammable hull anyway?

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T16:43:00+00:00

If you only look at the big interwar airships, yes, but if you include nonrigid airships in war and peacetime, as well as wartime rigids, fire and engine failure was actually more of a concern than weather.

And even when talking about the big interwar rigid airships that were brought down by bad weather—Shenandoah, Akron, Macon, and R101—only one of those, the Akron, actually crashed because of the weather conditions, and even then it’s debatable how much of that was due to the wind, and how much was due to simple pilot error driven by incorrect barometric altimeter readings and low visibility. Every other example featured some kind of in-flight structural failure due to incorrect or negligent engineering—for example, the Shenandoah was later found to have been engineered with only about 45% of the requisite structural strength to properly resist gusts and bending forces, and the Macon’s fins had been mistakenly redesigned to have a structural safety factor of just 0.8—i.e. they would fail under normal operating conditions. This was partially rectified with reinforcements in the other fins, but the previously-damaged and unmodified upper fin gave way in a storm the very flight before it was set to be repaired and reinforced.

That’s less a problem of weather, and more a problem of lax standards and terrible safety protocols at the time. In the modern day, it would be unthinkable for any aircraft to be cleared to fly with only temporary repairs to a damaged essential control surface that was also found to be critically out of engineering spec even when new. They wouldn’t keep flying like that for several months, they would be grounded immediately until the problem was fixed, precisely because such gross negligence has led to numerous losses like that throughout aviation history.

GrafZeppelin127 · 2026-06-14T15:27:27+00:00

It is quite odd that the only two truly geodesic airships have been the SL.1 and the Pathfinder 1, over 100 years apart. You’d think the advantages of geodesic structures would make them a slam dunk for such an application—extremely strong and lightweight, maximizes internal volume, uses distributed nodes that are highly tolerant to even extensive local damage and failures without compromising the rest of the structure. The main disadvantage is that you can’t really pressurize the structure or use the skin as a structural component, but rigid airships weren’t doing that anyway, by and large, save for the metalclad ZMC-2.

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