Look out for Poul Anderson's names in unusual circumstances.
If a characters is last seen in circumstances that should inevitably lead to his death, is it safe later to assume that he is indeed dead or might there be some ingenious explanation as to why he is still alive? In one kind of popular fiction, this happens all the time: eleven times in a twelve-part cinema serial. (Clone technology helps.)
Are airships less dangerous in alternative timelines - two by Stirling and one by Moorcock - or have people in those timelines just not realized the danger yet?
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would suggest two reasons for Stirling's slightly odd fixation on airships: he likes them and the people living in the early Draka era and the Black Chamber timeline have not yet quite grasped their disadvantages.
Sean
Sean,
Drakas make three. I was thinking of the Angrezi Raj.
Paul.
Paul and Sean:
Lots of people like airships in their alternative-history stories. I particularly recall one synopsis of a plot that mentioned the use of airships and paused to add, "Yayyyy! Airships!" There's a site that discusses common concepts in works of fiction, and it has a section titled "Zeppelins from Another World" in reference to the idea that looking up and seeing plenty of airships floating about is a short way of letting readers/viewers know they're not in Kansas anymore.
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
Paul: Oops and drat! I forgot about the airships used in the Angrezi Raj alternate world of THE PESHAWAR LANCERS.
David: I understand the point you made about how many SF fans think of zeppelins as a "futuristic" touch. But airships were so dangerous and SLOW. The hydrogen gas used to float them was hideously flammable. And advances in airplane technology soon would soon make them too SLOW for any truly major. These reasons and the "Hindenburg" pretty much killed off airships.
Sean
I meant to write "the "Hindenburg" DISASTER pretty much killed off airships."
Sean
Airships are not that unsafe, and the numbers actually prove it.
Airplanes of the early aviation era, on the other hand, were violently unsafe. They crashed all the time, or simply fell apart in mid-air, and there were thousands of fatalities in accidents, mostly of pilots. It was quite common for airplanes flying over water to simply disappear and never be heard of again - Amelia Earhart was just one example.
Aerodynamics was poorly understood, the airframes were fragile and often poorly designed vs. a vs. the stresses, and engines were unreliable. And if an airplane's engines fail, it falls out of the sky.
Airplane attracted less attention than the (less numerous, proportionately) airship casualties because they were more dispersed.
Back to airships: begin with, while hydrogen is flammable, it has to be mixed with oxygen to burn; you need a hydrogen-air mixture. And while the small size of the hydrogen molecules makes them prone to slight leaks, they float up very rapidly if they do, dispersing in the air.
Airships didn't burn because of some stray sparks; they had an excellent record that way, until the Hindenburg, which was a freak accident (more later).
To make a Zeppelin burn, you need something that simultaneously rips open the lifting-gas bags, and applies open flame. During WWI this was found to require hundreds and hundreds of hits from machine-guns firing incendiary bullets.
The Zeppelin company had an excellent safety record; in fact, it had only -one- large accident, the Hindenburg... which happened to be coated with a new compound of powdered aluminum. This was a major oopsie -- the composition is nearly identical to solid-rocket propellant.
It was the outer fabric that killed the Hindenburg; the gasbags only lit after the fabric envelope went up like a match.
The "Graf Zeppelin" (L127) made -dozens- of intercontinental flights in 1929-1937, carrying thousands of passengers, and went all around the world in 1929, including one stage of over 7,000 miles non-stop and an uninterrupted passage from Japan to Los Angeles, something aircraft couldn't do until well after WW2.
As for speed, aircraft were faster but not much faster in that period -- maximum speeds were in the 100-150mph range until well into the 1920's, and civil aircraft didn't routinely exceed 200 mph until the 1930's. Airships typically cruised at 60-80mph.
Where airships killed the opposition was freight capacity and range. As early as 1917, a German Zeppelin (LZ 104) with 15 tons of cargo and over 20 non-crew passengers went from Bulgaria to the Sudan and back, 95 hours in the air and 4,200 miles.
And as I mentioned, in 1929 'Graf Zeppelin' circumnavigated the globe and crossed the Pacific nonstop.
These were capacities grossly in excess of what heavier-than-air craft could do -- the ranges were unmatched until the 1970's, and the freight capacities rival the best available now.
So airships were -technically- capable of intercontinental travel by the 1910's, and would have been faster and no less safe than other methods of transportation.
"Path dependency" and political decisions were the limiting factors.
To make a Zeppelin burn, you need something that rips open
All,
Well, I am glad that I asked the question!
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected as regards what you said about airships! I admit I had your use of them in some of your books a bit quaint, but your explanation of how they were actually practical corrects my error. I can only conclude that it was technological improvements in airplanes which finally killed off airships.
Sean
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