Garrison
Donor
Yeah they would have been shot to pieces, not to mention all that Aluminium wasted on a pair of impossible to protect sitting targets.
Question: In what specialized niches could zeppelins survive?
- Thread starter Elmer_Homero
- Start date
I've wondered in the past how useful they would have been in hunting u-boats in ww2.
You could base them on Bermuda or maybe in the carribean? Not too close to Europe or they're easy targets for the luftwaffe, but further out maybe.
Not sure if u-boats could carry any AA weapons, but if they did I think it would be difficult to be accurate in a rolling sub.
You could base them on Bermuda or maybe in the carribean? Not too close to Europe or they're easy targets for the luftwaffe, but further out maybe.
Not sure if u-boats could carry any AA weapons, but if they did I think it would be difficult to be accurate in a rolling sub.
Zeppelins, being German wouldn't be hunting U-boats. US Navy blimps did that, and did it well, but only where there was no chance of encountering enemy aircraft. It should be noted that despite the success of their Blimps the US Navy scrapped their surviving Zeppelin USS Los Angeles in 1939. Too fragile and vulnerable to rough weather for service.
USS Los Angeles (ZR-3) - Wikipedia
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Zeppelins, being German wouldn't be hunting U-boats. US Navy blimps did that, and did it well, but only where there was no chance of encountering enemy aircraft. It should be noted that despite the success of their Blimps the US Navy scrapped their surviving Zeppelin USS Los Angeles in 1939. Too fragile and vulnerable to rough weather for service.
USS Los Angeles (ZR-3) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
View attachment 813302 View attachment 813306
As an interesting "FYI" the "Los Angeles" WAS in fact a German built "zeppelin" given to the US as War reparations
Randy
Line of Sight Calculator - everythingRF
www.everythingrf.com
Graf Zeppelin's maximum altitude was 6,000 feet. The distance to horizon from 6,000 feet to the horizon is 275km
The carrying capacity (useful lift capacity) of Graf Zeppelin was 192,000lbs, of which including passengers and crew of 56, a "typical disposable load" was 43,000lbs. I don't see statistics on how much the gondola weighed, but there must have been at least another 3 to 5 tons of civilian type shit that would extraneous to a military mission. A military crew might be 20 or 25, but it sure as hell won't be 56, so that's more weight saved there.
The British defense concept for Atlantic shipping in WW2 was predicated on the fact that a convoy is scant easier to detect than a single ship. That holds true for surface raiders, search aircraft, and for submarines. In all cases, the searcher was only a bit more like to see a convoy than an individual ship.
The exception to this rule is a bit pertinent to the topic - radar. A convoy of 30 ships has 30 times the radar reflection of a single ship. If Graf Zeppelin was equipped with an airborne version of the Freya radar system, it should be able to track convoys at over 200km.
The cruising speed of a Zeppelin was maybe 50-60kt, so once it made contact with a 10kt convoy, say at 150km, it could easily make the contact report, then move off for self-protection. Over the next day or two it occasionally re-estabilishes contact until the U-boats or surface raders have made contact and taken over. The Zeppelin itself never approaches closer than 100 miles to the target. Fat chance of your Hurricane pilot or AA crew getting a DFC, right?
Eventually Allied carrier defenses would make them lost or obsolete, but in the meantime, they might prove useful.
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Not for long. Zeppelin sheds are as fine a target as the airship and to have a chance at the convoys they'd have to be in either Occupied France or Norway.
Garrison
Donor
You mean apart from the fact its slow, easy to spot and lit up like a Christmas tree by a radar that requires a considerable amount of power to run and was never intended to be airborne, but apart from that a perfect plan.Line of Sight Calculator - everythingRF
Graf Zeppelin's maximum altitude was 6,000 feet. The distance to horizon from 6,000 feet to the horizon is 275km
The carrying capacity (useful lift capacity) of Graf Zeppelin was 192,000lbs, of which including passengers and crew of 56, a "typical disposable load" was 43,000lbs. I don't see statistics on how much the gondola weighed, but there must have been at least another 3 to 5 tons of civilian type shit that would extraneous to a military mission. A military crew might be 20 or 25, but it sure as hell won't be 56, so that's more weight saved there.
The British defense concept for Atlantic shipping in WW2 was predicated on the fact that a convoy is scant easier to detect than a single ship. That holds true for surface raiders, search aircraft, and for submarines. In all cases, the searcher was only a bit more like to see a convoy than an individual ship.
The exception to this rule is a bit pertinent to the topic - radar. A convoy of 30 ships has 30 times the radar reflection of a single ship. If Graf Zeppelin was equipped with an airborne version of the Freya radar system, it should be able to track convoys at over 200km.
The cruising speed of a Zeppelin was maybe 50-60kt, so once it made contact with a 10kt convoy, say at 150km, it could easily make the contact report, then move off for self-protection. Over the next day or two it occasionally re-estabilishes contact until the U-boats or surface raders have made contact and taken over. The Zeppelin itself never approaches closer than 100 miles to the target. Fat chance of your Hurricane pilot or AA crew getting a DFC, right?
Eventually Allied carrier defenses would make them lost or obsolete, but in the meantime, they might prove useful.
Garrison
Donor
In operation yes, but it means the Zeppelins are much more expensive to produce and utilize far more vital resources that the Reich is short of so the cost/benefit ratio is different.
Garrison
Donor
Was intended to do so, but that was at a point when people rather overestimated the capabilities of the Zeppelins. I suspect that might the main use of the Zeppelins if Lakehurst could be avoided, giant propaganda symbols for the Third Reich, perhaps Hitler could be persuaded to use one as a flying HQ for travelling, heck of a way to arrive at Nuremburg.
That's a good point. What are the odds that in the second half of 1940 a Zeppelin could be based in France?
Two Zeppelins were already built by 1939, so were all intents and purposes 'free'.
Empty weight was 130,000kg. A Ju-88 was about 10,000kg, so the Zeppelin is the weight of about 13 aircraft, which is, for the potential being discussed, trivial.
Wow, you mean a Zeppelin might get shot down, like happened dozens of times in WW1?
A US Liberty ship cost $2 according to Google, (about $5 RM). A German twin-engine bomber, maybe around 250,000 RM. By weight, a zeppelin might have been x13 a JU-88 in cost, so each Zeppelin is roughly in the ballpark of cost of less than 1 Liberty ship. Of course, sometimes a ship is loaded when it's sunk so the zeppelin costs less than 1/2 of a merchant ship, right? You seem to be conflating a Zeppelin with, I don't know, a battleship in terms of cost and prestige, (otherwise, the thrust of your comments to its loss are incomprehensible). In fact, they were more like a single 10,000 ton freighter, or a squadron of twin engine bombers. The idea that the loss of one would be a significant event? This is patently absurd. In the scale of the war being discussed, these airships were dirt cheap.
Moving on to the operational aspects. A Zeppelin moving at 60kt and searching once every two or three hours to a radius to 200km should be able to search something about 600,000 km per day. A submarine might be able to search 20,000km per day. So what the zeppelin brings to the table for Germany in 1940 or 1941 in the Atlantic is the search equivalent of about 30 U-boats per day. More importantly, all of this search capacity would be in sea regions beyond the range of land based German air assets.
As you must be aware, in this period the biggest operational constraint faced by the KM was locating convoys. As per the cost information above, the zeppelin has already paid for itself if it gets one wolfpack onto one convoy. If, during its career, it gets 10 wolfpacks onto 10 convoys, then it's paid for itself over 10 times over, (probably more like 50 times over).
The other operational aspect of note is the coordination of a zeppelin with heavy surface raiders. There's endless discussion of the Graf Zeppelin being attached to Operation Rheinübung. But always the carrier Graf Zeppelin, never the airship Graf Zeppelin. Had a couple of Zeppelins been attached to Operation Berlin, it is easily possible that this raid would have doubled or even tripled its tonnage score. Had they been attached to the Bismarck's sortie, given the proximity of British carriers it is likely one might have been lost, but it is also the case that Bismarck's chances for escape would have been significantly higher.
I’m curious why not use Blimps vs Zeppelins ?
Blimps would seem less expensive ?
What advantages did Zeppelins have in this context ?
US Navy blimps, semi rigid airships, were used for ASW work in World War 2. Only one was shot down by a U-boat. https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/blimp-vs-u-boat/
Puzzle
Donor
Carrying light and large structures through undeveloped country always seems like a use case. A lot of industrial shipping is limited by the size of roads and containers, plenty of things aren’t even designed because there’s no way to get them out of the factory. Maybe if a bunch of blimps would happily carry anything that could have slings rigged to it anywhere there’d be applications found. Windmill blades seem like an option, or ironically airplane fuselages.
Zep's have a size advantage to blimps. You have a larger capacity for everything onboard and can have a longer endurance, service ceiling, speed, and crew. German zeppelins in WW 1 had a service ceiling up to 20,000 feet. If you can go from sea level up to that depending on the mission.