If Zym is allowed to dedicate his entire blog to monkeys (and ukuleles), then I’m going to go on about my own particular obsession – and you can all shut up about how this is all I ever do anyway.

Airships: I love the damn things. They are big, they fly and occasionally explode spectacularly. If an airship could have breasts, all my main areas of interest would be covered.

Airships are like yachts or liners but instead of being confined to seas and ports, you can go anywhere in an airship. As a child, I used to dream of living in my own airship, constantly floating around the world and going from place to place – an airborne Captain Nemo.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a significant resurgence in the idea of airships, most of it conceptual, but still exciting for those who see great potential in them. This started with the concept of using airships that are tethered or designed to hold station to providing high speed, wireless access to very large areas. Although the idea hasn’t been implemented commercially, there are a number of military systems that are either operational or nearly so, based on the same principle. These include surveillance platforms, communication relays and radar pickets.

Since then, there has been a lot of interest in developing airships for a variety of civilian and military applications. Some of the most exciting are project seeking to develop very large cargo lifter. This pretty much feeds into my fantasy of being able to travel in airships – forgoing the horrors of long haul flights for the comfort of travelling in your own berth and being able to walk around in large communal areas.

Airships hold other advantages that make them attractive. Being able to transport very large loads – some proposals have a lifting capacity in excess of 800 metric tons, which makes them very attractive as a way of replacing a huge amount of road traffic. Airships could fly directly and quickly to distribution centres near or in town centres, removing a large amount of trucks driving between cities.

Of course, such designs would also be hugely attractive to militaries. Even though the Walrus project has been cancelled, there is still a lot of work being done on large airships or hybrids that are capable of lifting very heavy loads. Lockheed are certainly up to something.

There also quite a number of concepts for using airships to access space. Airships can be designed to fly high – very high – all the way to the edge of space, from where it is possible to go to orbit. It sounds outlandish, but there are people working on these concepts including making very large stations from sections that have been flown to the edge of space – about 30 to 40 Km above the ground – and linked together..

A couple of the most fanciful deigns are my favourites. These are nothing more than pretty pictures, developed by designers with almost no engineering thought, which means they are almost certainly unfeasible, but still quite cool.

The first is called Strato Cruiser:

But the one I really like is Jean-Marie Massaud’s Manned Cloud concept:

You can see more information about this concept here.

Here are a few more links that I haven’t had a chance to fully read up on:

• Spy Blimps and Heavy Lifters
• New Designs Bring Return of the Airship
• Just Don’t Call it a Blimp