Balloons and blimps and other floaty things

That's a rotor on the bottom - it better not flap :-)

Back in the 1980s, in the early part of my working life, I did a brief stint as an aeronautical engineer; I played the role of an ersatz blimp engineer on a few projects. I was enamoured with blimp-like flying machines, and sized and drew and pondered many odd configurations outside my day job. Seeing balloons and blimps in the news causing a national security incident so deep into the 21st century seems quite odd to me after all these years. I had come to dismiss blimpy things as impractical after my '80s inoculation. But, who knows what's going on out there. Maybe there are very advanced lighter-than-air flying machines flying all over the place. It's not like I'm in the loop these days. 

So, in the spirit of lighter-than-air weirdness, maybe induced by standing too close to the helium cylinders decades ago, here are a few sketches of airship hallucinations dug up from my files.

The vibration in those crazy long arms would be wild 

The idea of attaching rotors to blimps was a thing back then. It was thought that the combination of one or more rotors, say from a helicopter or V-22 Osprey, attached to an envelope filled with helium, maybe via a frame or stuck right on the envelope, might produce a vehicle capable of great lift. 

Control was an issue. It's fairly easy to make a spherical envelope point any way you want, but, wow, that sphere has a lot of drag when you need to push it in the direction you want to go.

Ok, well, maybe some sort of triangular base truss is the way to attach those rotors. But still, we're talking a massive structure. Quad-rotor drones weren't a thing then, so maybe with the advances brought about by that technology means these kinds of hybrids aren't completely impossible,

Maybe the sphere isn't the way to go for an envelope, even though it does give the most volume for the least surface area. Maybe a Homer Simpson inspired donut is the ticket; however, the one shown over there is far too small to provide the lift needed. It does though give a place for a central lifting rotor. 

I thought it would be great to have a personal sized airship. There were personal pan pizzas and personal computers, so why not. If it just wasn't for those pesky winds, expensive helium, and so on and so on.....

Try as I might I kept making drawings of design variations years later. All impractical, but nevertheless fun to speculate. I'm still of the opinion that it might be possible to build HO scale airships that fly. My initial attempts weren't very successful, but I think a better modeller than me might be able to make them work. It would certainly add some wildness to a layout. 

On this one the rotors would need to be able to tilt.

This one always struck me as looking rather prissy. Again, those rotors need to tilt.

Maybe ducted fans instead of rotors is the way to go? They too probably needed to be able to tilt. I think this one might swing too much like a pendulum when in flight. 

A somewhat cruder, but likely more practically buildable variation that maybe could be made in HO scale, if not O, although it would be rather large in that scale.

I think it might be possible to build one of these underslung rotor jobs with a streamlined envelope, but the rotor's motion no doubt could cause trouble. You wouldn't want a gust to cause it to slice into the envelope. 

Like everyone else I heard reports that the spy balloon was equipped with propellers and flaps that allowed it some degree of maneuverability. And I heard other reports that said, no, no, none of that. Well, I'm curious to hear what the postmortem on the shot down one has to say, if the report ever sees the light of day. 

The machines in all my little sketches have rotors, and some have flaps of various sorts, but these vehicles aren't designed for high altitudes like 65k+ ft. I'm wondering if those balloons use some sort of strato-sailing technology? Maybe one day we'll find out.

That rotor looks way too close

This one and the previous have a keel that runs along the bottom of the hull to attach all the necessary flight equipment.

In this one the keel even has a whale-tail attached. I don't know how effective it would be for control, and the vertical fin looks too small. Hind sight is 20/20.

Well, I'm keeping my eyes to the skies. If some big, honking blimp with an equally big rotor attached crashes in my backyard, you'll hear it here first :-)

Cue the X-Files music.