THE FUTURE OF AIR-SHIPS.
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they will be shot at—and now and then be brought down to earth : such is the fortune and the cost of war, which sees costly artillery abandoned, stores deliberately destroyed—and war-ships sunk ! But other air-ship scouts will obtain information that may decide a campaign.
There will be air-ships and air-ships, small and large, for different uses. In my imagination I see one of the great aerial cruisers of the future ; and lucky will be the army or navy that is first privileged to use it as an auxiliary !
Being constructed with the resources of a nation, and designed for momentous uses, it will be enormously stronger and more powerful than my " No. 7," whose sharp elongated form it will nevertheless adopt for the sake of speed. I will suppose it to have a gas capacity of 77,000 cubic metres, to give it a lifting power of ninety-three tons. This is no fanciful picture. I have long and carefully calculated these specifications, and they are in due proportion to each other.
For example, there must be an intimate connection between the capacity, shape, and strength of its balloon, the speed at which it is to be driven by its motor, and the weight of the crew, fuel, munitions, and permanent furniture it is to carry.
The balloon ought to be two hundred metres long and twenty-eight metres in its greatest diameter. It would be propelled through the air by thirty propellers, each worked by a separate petroleum motor of one hundred horse power. This would give a total of three thousand horse power, sufficient to impart to the air-ship a steady high speed of as much as one hundred kilometres per hour. To withstand the exterior and interior pressure corresponding to such speed, the balloon envelope ought to be composed of twenty-six thicknesses of Lyons silk properly superposed and varnished.
With a balloon of such lifting power, enough fuel could be curtied to make one thousand kilometres at full speed, or from three to four thousand kilometres at reduced speed, and there would remain enough lifting power to carry a crew of twenty men and a supply of explosives to be hurled at the enemy by means of one or two cannons genre lance-torpille à l'air comprimée.
Such an aerial cruiser would have nothing to fear from the wind. With its high speed of one hundred kilometres per hour it could make its way tranquilly in the stiffest breeze ; and when not in use it could be held close to the ground, practically out of the wind's reach, by a hundred cables.
Doubtless in future wars on land and sea the great aerial cruisers, with their crews, will be brought down like simple little air-ship scouts. It will happen less frequently because of their
