Deltageek2

One pound of lift is a lot to work with. I fly micro R/C and my Skeeter weighs 1 ounce total. The built-in ESC handles 2 amps on the tiny 3 channel proportional RFFS-100 receiver. The magnetic actuators are tiny, a gram or so each but have 100 times less power than the smallest motorized gear servo. Such a tiny system would work in much smaller blimps also considering the weight savings of micro r/c gear.

My RC shop buddy asked me to launch the 19 foot RC blimp for him at the half time show at the hockey game. WOW! On went the cars, the cheerleaders, the T-shirt bazooka brigade then the blimp. It was a lot of fun and got me thinking of tieing blimp video into the house video system with those big monitors all over the place.

For outside work NASA was using a nonrigid blimp with the pointy end facing forward. At the tail was a helicopter rotor-like pusher propeller for propulsion. I believe it was solar powered to some degree and electric.


I am impressed with the semi rigid hotairships with the ultralight style tube and wire frames.

Picture is MicroBlimp from NYBLIMP.COM