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Originally Posted by Anthony G Williams  Even the need for refuelling is eliminated by one class of airships - they use power beamed at them by satellites. I was a bit concerned about the passengers being cooked  so these are "tandem" airships, with a remotely controlled drone ship following some distance behind, connected by a power cable. The drone has a huge internal aerial to collect the beamed power and convert it to power the motors of both ships. |
Oh, what a waste. you could make the top of the airship transparent to microwaves, and make the bottom reflective, and a near perfect parabola that focusses the waves onto the receiving antenna, with a laser beam aimed back to the satellite so the maser beam is always tracking the ship (interesting in a storm) with your main restriction (not as easy as it sounds) that the airship doesn't fly over inhabited regions; aerostatoports outside the cities and weather forcasting a precision science (there's a lot of surface area on a big airship, and the onboard motors can't compete with a strong wind, so you have to find the wind that's going your way…
Oh, yes. Two short stories; one, I believe, in Algis Burdry's "Blood and Burning" with biplanes and the like taking off and landing on a lighter than air dirigeable airstrip, so they never need to approach the ground, and a supersonic Zeppelin in - ¿Maxwells demons? from Ben Bova.
And in "Orion shall rise" by Poul Anderson, aren't they policing the planet from lighter than air craft at the beginning, before Orion does?