This eliminates the danger of running a coal fire under a giant bag of hydrogen (anyone who's ever ridden on a steam train can tell you about the burning cinders blowing around). Also, it is a much cheaper option for pirate crews and the like. Your balloon and its boiler could be their own closed system, with the steam trap pipes dumping the condensed steam back into the boiler. A pressure valve would turn the steam off to prevent the balloon from bursting, and turn it back on as you gain altitude and the temperature drop condenses the steam at a faster rate. You could combine steam and other lift gases perhaps, in separate envelopes, since you would need a pretty big balloon to displace the weight of the boiler, the water tank, the coal or oil, your crew, and all your weapons, and a bigger steam balloon would necessitate a bigger water tank and more weight.
The next question I would try to answer is whether you ought to use normal steam or "dry" or superheated steam. Dry steam can perform an enormous amount of work, but is it lighter? It's hotter, so it's probably less dense. You just need to send the steam back through a separate section of the boiler to get it hotter. Jay Leno explains a bit about a compact version of this technology in his video about the amazing Doble Steam car. If you were going to use steam power to run your propellers as well, you certain would like to have a superheater.
So, I would just like to say, "They said it couldn't be done! But I'll show them all! Mwahahahaaaa!" (fires lightning cannon from airship)
This may well be one of the most astoundingly cool things I've ever seen. "Fools! I'll show them all!" is second only to "For science!" as a steampunky battlecry.
ReplyDeleteI love how people seem to think "generating a plausible handwave" in speculative fiction (of which hardy clan steampunk is a sept) is a bad thing--and then sit still for the most implausible developments in character relationships this side of Forks, Washington.
Proper attention to handwavium processing forces a writer to show his true strength, and can sometimes create inspirations for actual technologists. Not that they'd touch steam airships--they suffer from the delusion that one cannot put back the clock, despite living under the barbarous regime of daylight savings time--but such a thing could get a hobbyist into engineering. Next thing you know we've got steam-powered mecha.