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Type TV Airship Spaceport

This is a TL7 design for an airship that functions as a spaceport. The concept is that since the first few kilometers of atmosphere are a significant hiderance to launching lower tech spacecraft, getting the spaceport up a few kilometers to start with could help launches significantly.

This design uses mostly FF&S1 design rules, with the addition of landing and hangar deck design rules from the Wet Navy part 2 article in Challenge 54 (pg30) - which is a MegaTraveller design rules add-on. The design was begun in early October 2004 after a discussion with a co-worker. As of this date (17 Dec 2004) the design is not complete, but is pretty close.

My initial concept was to be able to hold the equivalent (in airplanes, spacecraft, gondola, etc.) of about 3 fully loaded C5 aircraft. The aircraft (and spacecraft) should be able to land and take off from the airship without significant trouble. Essentially this is an airborne aircraft carrier. The airship can load up at a ground facility, then rise to operating height with minimal fuel use. It can then drift with the wind until it conducts landing or take-off activities. If additional supplies, or last minute cargo or passengers are needed, then aircraft can land on the deck. It has enough speed to be able to assist landings and take-offs by having headwinds of up to 200kph over the bow. Common procedures would include generating enough headwind so an aircraft landing on it would have a closing speed of only a few kph, making pinpoint landings very easy, then the airship would cut power and drift while the "ground crew" takes care of moving cargo and maintaining the aircraft.

Envelope needs surface area figure.

Gondola needs volume figure.

Envelope: 190 513 dtons, speed multiplier=1.0, Helium filled, rigid cigar, TL7, standard atmosphere used for calculations.

The turbofans have extra volume included to represent vectorable attachment points and in-flight maintenance access space.

Power plant is to run electronics when turbofans are not in use.

Crew space: 4x bridge workstations + 10x Crew Stations (O)

Headlights are mostly for runway lighting, with a few navigational beacons and landing lights.

Crew: pilot, copilot, navigator, flight engineer, 10x "ground crew"

Head on view looks something like: \/ (like a triangle with the point down - ASCII art having some limitations).

The width of the top of the triangle is 75m, the height (depth?) is 47.42m, the length is 1500m.

Total thrust required for max speed of 200kph is: 87.744312 tons.

Gs required for max speed of 200kph is: 0.0571428 G.

Hangar deck is 120% x2 of: 76m (l) x 68m (w) x 20m (h) = 248064m^3

Landing platform is 75m (w) x 1500m (l) x 1m (h)

Envelope dimentions if slab configuration used: 1500m x 75m x 23.7m

Helium cost for full inflation = MCr5.71536

Max speed for "cigar" type rigid airship = 0 to 200kph

C5 max weight= 381024kg, 3x C5 weight = 1143072kg = 1143.072 tons

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Copyright ©; 1997-2004, Joseph Kimball. Last revision - 17 Dec 2004

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