Orbital Airships using Hooligan Labs blimps

[Northstar1989]

After reading up on JP Aerospace's plans for an Orbital Airship...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_airship

I was inspired to see what players here think of creating one in KSP...

I imagine it would be particularly easy and realistic with FAR (so that you could take advantage of aerodynamic shielding to reduce drag on huge blimps, as well as the increasing ballistic coefficients of increasingly-large objects), and KSP-Interstellar (so that you didn't have to haul the solar panels for the ion engines around on the blimp- you could instead simply beam the needed power from the ground or orbit using a Microwave Beamed Power network...)

KSP-Interstellar would also allow such a blimp to take advantage of Microwave-powered Thermal Turbojets, to attain much of orbital velocity in the upper atmosphere using the atmosphere as propellent instead of Xenon for ion engines... (you would switch over to ion engines at the very top of the atmosphere- perhaps relying on KSP-Interstellar's plasma thrusters for scaled-up multi-dozen megawatt ion engine power to reduce burn times if enough Microwave Beamed Power were available...)

So, I would like to hear player's ideas on the feasibility of this in KSP. Perhaps even see some working examples!

Regards,

Northstar

Edited June 11, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Northstar1989]

Anyone? Any thoughts?

@Mods: Is this the right sub-forum for this question? Are there any others (where it might get more attention) I could post it in?

Regards,

Northstar

[Dangerous_Beans]

i'm not sure if this would work in KSP, but it's a pretty cool idea.

for the actual orbital airship idea, KSP unloads vehicles in the atmosphere so you couldn't do the floating base. though i think there is a mod that can fix that?

i think one issue is that the hooligan labs airships are designed for low atmosphere flight, and are similar to the ascent stage of the JP Aerospace plan. according to their wiki and some excel maths, the cirrus envelope should be able to lift ~25 ton to 12km, where atmospheric pressure is 0.09. i'm not sure that is high enough for it to start going quick on ion engines. maybe give it a test?

the big issue is that ion engines are slow. the JP people are planning several days for the orbiter stage to reach orbit: even if it only takes a few hours in KSP, that is far more time than i am willing to dedicate. my beamed power thermal turbojet rockets can do an apoapsis of 40km with no fuel usage in <2 minutes. far less efficient, but far faster.

something similar that might be practical in KSP would be a rockoon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon). use the airship envelopes to haul the rocket up to 12-15km, then burn to space on high isp engines (possibly nukes?).

still, it may work and would make a cool mission report.

[Apature rocket science]

I like your thinking this is defnitly a 100% kerbal design using a airship to get into orbit, it would be a ssto but the question is how Mutch can it carry