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Old 01-08-2023, 11:50 PM   #14 (permalink)
freebeard
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airplanes get horrible gas mileage
You're paying money for lift. Airships lose on frontal area. But they can pulse and glide:

www.sciencedirect.com: Full model of a buoyancy-driven airship and its control in the vertical plane
Quote:
Abstract
A new concept of airship without thrust, elevator or rudder is considered in this paper. It is actuated by a moving mass and an internal air bladder with adjustable mass. This results into the motion of the center of gravity and the change of the net lift. The development of this concept of airship is motivated by energy saving. The moving mass and the airshipʼs rigid body are viewed independently, which renders the modeling easy and displays clearly the interconnection of the two subsystems.
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Section snippets
The buoyancy-driven airship
The concept of this airship is derived from a combination of conventional airships [5] and underwater gliders [10], which replace traditional propulsion by a cyclic change of the net lift and the position of the center of gravity. This new concept of airship is first introduced and proven to be efficient in [16].

The basic structure is shown in Fig. 1.
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