Jake
12-08-2007, 10:41 PM
Hello everyone,
First off I wanted to say thanks a lot to Charles Adams for maintaining this site! It's really an amazing community and I'm astounded by how productive and resourceful you guys all are.
Anyway, I'm a university engineering student, and I'm thinking of starting a project to build a solar-powered airship at my university. I already have a few friends who are interested in the idea, so who knows, we might even wind up as an official school design team. We're aiming it to be an environmentally friendly approach to air transportation.
If the plan goes anywhere, we're going to start with a scale model to test the concept. Probably more than one, actually, but we'll see. Most of the threads I've read so far is (understandably!) focused on rigid airships, but I was wondering if anybody has any good tips for nonrigid or semirigid scale model construction. I'm really not sure how to do things like make a nonrigid envelope to the right shape, etc.
It's probably going to be an R/C model, but that's not important for the first tries because development will mainly be focusing on the solar power arrays. I'm not too concerned about accurately mimicking any historical airships, because my main focus is to make it practical and flyable. But it should be a basically cigar-shaped design.
Oh yes, and the scale can be anything. The dream is for the final model to be manned and solar-powered, but who knows how long that might take. So advice on any techniques from 1:1 to 1:100 is welcome :D
So, if you have any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it!
First off I wanted to say thanks a lot to Charles Adams for maintaining this site! It's really an amazing community and I'm astounded by how productive and resourceful you guys all are.
Anyway, I'm a university engineering student, and I'm thinking of starting a project to build a solar-powered airship at my university. I already have a few friends who are interested in the idea, so who knows, we might even wind up as an official school design team. We're aiming it to be an environmentally friendly approach to air transportation.
If the plan goes anywhere, we're going to start with a scale model to test the concept. Probably more than one, actually, but we'll see. Most of the threads I've read so far is (understandably!) focused on rigid airships, but I was wondering if anybody has any good tips for nonrigid or semirigid scale model construction. I'm really not sure how to do things like make a nonrigid envelope to the right shape, etc.
It's probably going to be an R/C model, but that's not important for the first tries because development will mainly be focusing on the solar power arrays. I'm not too concerned about accurately mimicking any historical airships, because my main focus is to make it practical and flyable. But it should be a basically cigar-shaped design.
Oh yes, and the scale can be anything. The dream is for the final model to be manned and solar-powered, but who knows how long that might take. So advice on any techniques from 1:1 to 1:100 is welcome :D
So, if you have any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it!