I just love them so much. Everytime I watch historical footage from the early 20th century I get very sad over the zepplins and blimps. I wish I could see them floating through my sky on a daily basis just doin stuff that isn't solely advertising. They are the closest we have to sky whales. I just love that they float around like that, very joyous and whimsical. Fucked up we don't make use of them anymore. I bet this makes them as sad as it makes me. Relatively low energy cost btw.
I've cried over this while drunk more than once. Think of me next time you call blimps useless technology
A lot of technology we consider obsolete is truly just not profitable for our overloads, look at how many people are using mp3 players again, look at how many people are listening to records again. It is important that we remember old tech so we can revive it if we want in a better world and destroy the tech we don't need like fucking crypto farms and ai data centers.
Also blimps are genuinely useful. Like how else could you float in place in the air long term? Helicopters will run out of fuel. Planes can't be motionless like that. It's just that we are very fossil fuel coded so we use helicopters for everything and shrug at the fuel use. Is it used for mass passenger movement? No. But weather balloons are kind of the same thing for example. The tech does still get used. Just not exactly as a blimp/zeppelin. Using them as motherships for drone swarms is something that's been explored recently I think.
Border patrol uses stationary/tethered blimps (or whatever they're actually called) that are jammed full of surveillance equipment all along the border with Mexico as well, to name another modern use
I've seen these personally and it saddens me greatly
Really, the amount of stuff we are wasting on seriously useless things, we don't need a new MacBook every year, we don't need crypto miners, we don't need these GPUs for llms, it is ridiculous. I wish we made better use of it
That last bit is an impure and unholy use of the gentle blimp
Yes exactly, when i was in a aviation university i was heavily interested in experimental aircrafts, most of them where used/invented during ww2 by the nazis and the soviets, after ww2 nasa continued to research some stuff but nowadays its mostly dead as far as i know. I was mostly interested in aerospike engines for planes or rocket engines even for planes or some really ridiculous ideas like a pivot wing, which nasa successfully researched and has a potential to be very efficient, but everytime i brought those ideas up to my lecturers or even to other students they always said that it wouldnt be possible because its not profitable. Tbf i think that was the starting point of me getting radicalized, tbf to them it is unrealistic in todays world and it isnt possible right now because of capitalism, but at the time i would just get mad at them lol. It is very interesting tho, that whole world of aviation its so vast and its so diverse its crazy.
Yea for me aerospace remains this enigma, at one points it fulfills the oldest dream of humans, being able to fly and om other hand it is one of most bloody fields of study