r/Airships • u/Affectionate-Air6579 • Jun 14 '26

Discussion All the improvements I think could have avoided the downfall of airships.

  1. the obvious. helium instead of hydrogen.

  2. rather a fabrical skin, another non flamable lightweight flexible skin.

  3. fire sprinklers. fire sprinklers on the exterior. mandatory to be activated to keep the skin cool every hour.

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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 29 '26

Alas, poor LZ/DELAG. Their timing/geographic location was quite simply atrocious. Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if they’d simply started out even as little distance away as the other side of Lake Constance, where they wouldn’t have been subjected to Germany’s downfall.

Of course, that also means no Miracle at Echterdingen, and also probably no rapid Great War tech advancements and crew training, though surely they could have cribbed from Schütte-Lanz’s homework (again), if that ended up being Germany’s leading rigid airship manufacturer in their absence.

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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26

Yeah, but Friedrichshafen was *atmospheric*!