Factorio Forums

Flying drones are cool, but huge cargo zeppelins...
It's like a trains. Like trains, that never kill you, because aircrafts no need rails.

What if spitters shoot them down right on top of you?


Otherwise I wouldn't mind having such things. Though they should be rather slow and not be able to carry as much as trains. For any sort of bulk material trains should still be the better option in my oppinion.

hoho wrote:hat if spitters shoot them down right on top of you?

Then you'll have a giant ball of fire falling on top of you from the sky - a magnificent death indeed!
Anyway, talking about flying machines - I would love to have a helicopter to get fast from one place to another, without worrying about those pesky forests

I'd love a blimp. But I'm not sure it makes sense as transportation. Realistically it'd be slow and have a very limited cargo size. Usually it'd make more sense for the purpose of exploration. I think they'd be great as mobile radar stations!

Gandalf wrote:Realistically it'd be slow and have a very limited cargo size.

Zeppelins of future heve no this problems, because it is vacuumic, fast and epic.

sillyfly wrote:

hoho wrote:hat if spitters shoot them down right on top of you?

Then you'll have a giant ball of fire falling on top of you from the sky - a magnificent death indeed!
Anyway, talking about flying machines - I would love to have a helicopter to get fast from one place to another, without worrying about those pesky forests

It'd be like playing that old SNES Apache game. That was pretty fun.

Jamaica_MURR wrote:

Gandalf wrote:Realistically it'd be slow and have a very limited cargo size.

Zeppelins of future heve no this problems, because it is vacuumic, fast and epic.

The future doesn't change physics. Even a vacuum zeppelin would need an enormous size / cargo ratio. For example lifting water would require a volume ratio of 1000:1 plus some more for carrying the blimp itself.
There's a reason blimps and hot air balloons are only used for entertainment ^^

I greatly support this idea, it should start very early in the game as well, seeing as the first hot air balloons existed in 1783. I see the best way to make it being that you build mooring masts as stations for them, these would be enormous and hard to build at first, being that anything later then the first tier would take steel, and lots of it. As for the airships themselves, i see there being 4 tiers of them:
Tier one: Very basic, only 2 cargo slots (plus one for it's own fuel), mostly useful for that one thing that didn't spawn close and needs to be mined 3 screen lengths away. Looks like a hot air balloon with an engine tacked on, very slow, but pretty cheap.
Tier two: Simple, requires proper engines though, and the fuel to run them, as well as the power and water to make hydrogen. Has 6 or 8 cargo slots, looks like a semi-rigid airship or a large blimp, used for replacing the first tier easily, holding out until the third tier with them would be hard though, if not researched quickly.
Tier three: On par with a large ww1 zeppelin, requires immense amounts of aluminum and a full oil industry for sealants and fuel. Comes in cargo and armed flavors, with the former boasting 20 cargo slots and the later able to drop bombs at long range, able to kill biter nests without getting near them, at least until flying ones evolve (are modded in).
Tier four: Hindenburg sized, doesn't need much new developed aside from diesel fuel and bigger mooring masts. Has about 80 cargo slots, far faster then the rest, and more useful because it's unaffected by weather (if modded in, a big problem for the rest of them) and able to beet out trains for sheer throughput, at long ranges at least. If an armed one is made, it would be somewhat overpowered for a while, until being reduced to a big target by better anti air. Still should retain longer range and payload than any other air unit (I have plans for fixed wing aircraft too) until well into the jet age, and better in a few ways do to not needing a runway, only a mooring mast, which while taking lots of steel, is still somewhat small.

As for how they're built, there's going to need to be fabric of some kind modded in, as well as possibly rubber, and i'm not sure how to do so, as most fabric is plant based, and farming is boring. Aside from that, seems not all that hard to mod in aside from the AI to make them work, which i know little about. Aluminum as a resource is needed for more or less any aircraft mod, and seems to work well with Factorio. Ideally, there should be bauxite which has to be refined into alumina and then through the Hall–Héroult process, turning it into aluminum, and using lots and lots of power to do so. The downside of this is that it's kinda getting sidetracked, as would the engines being overhauled, which in my mind, needs to be done as well. I say for now, just add bauxite and make it go through a chemical plant before being smelted, and fix it later.

The cargo capacity of lighter-than-air vessels is a lot higher these days than it was in the Zeppelin era, and they are quite a bit faster. Once can only imagine how much they would have advanced by the time the human race has expanded into space.

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-high-tech- ... ornia.html

Fabric could be synthetic but then oil industry would be a prereq

Gandalf wrote:The future doesn't change physics. Even a vacuum zeppelin would need an enormous size / cargo ratio. For example lifting water would require a volume ratio of 1000:1 plus some more for carrying the blimp itself.
There's a reason blimps and hot air balloons are only used for entertainment ^^

Factorio is a game where I can pick up a 20-car freight train and put it in my pocket. Also, I can build a 1-cubic-meter steel chest that holds more than twice as much as an 8-meter freight car. Hardcore realism has never been on the menu.

Granted there's a lot of sci-fi ideas that don't really fit in Factorio's dieselpunk aesthetic, but IMO heavy-lift cargo zeps totally do.

If the planet has a dense atmosphere then a blimp will have a greater lifting capacity. For comparison, floating cities are plausible in the atmosphere of Venus...

But do you think a dense atmosphere would let through enough energy from the sun to provide 60 kW per solar panel ?
(see https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=9182 for more fun)

It's simple: don't fill the ballon part with anything. A zepplin that uses a vacuum is massively bouyant... until it implodes.