It took five days to finish the return trip. Thanks to favorable winds, it was much faster than the trip out, but it still felt like too long. When we finally got back, I found myself standing inside Sydney’s office. I was exhausted and couldn’t wait to go back to my room and sleep in a proper bed, but we needed to report in ASAP. Sydney was sitting at her desk, which was covered in loose papers and random tools as always. Vera and Akari were standing next to me. We had been summoned to give a report on our trip to Japan.
Sydney began by giving us a lecture: “As you may know, there are three types of airships. Rigid, semi-rigid, and non-rigid.” She wrote these terms on a piece of paper and drew a small sketch of each.
Vera poked me and said smugly, “Kind of like your dick!”
“Hey! That’s sexual harassment!”
“Sexual what? I’m just a simple airdock forewoman, I don’t know those fancy legal terms.”
“Shut up, both of you!” Sydney barked at us.
“Right… Anyway, what’s the point of those different airship types?” I asked.
“Basically, it’s to handle pressure. Non-rigid ships, or blimps, are the simplest—they’re basically just a big bag full of gas. They’ll automatically adjust their size to match the pressure outside. That can be convenient, but it means they’ll stretch a lot as you rise, and if you go too high they’ll burst open. Sometimes we only fill them partway, on the ground, so there’s room for the gas to expand as they rise. Otherwise they have to dump a lot of hydrogen at altitude, to avoid bursting.”
“Oh that makes sense.” I said.
“Yeah… they’ll rise and expand just like your dick,” Vera snickered at me.
“Shut up!” Sydney reprimanded her, and then smoothly continued her lecture. “The opposite type is rigid airships. Sometimes called Zeppelins, although that’s really just one specific company that makes those. They’re the biggest and most capable, because you can fully inflate them and still ride at high altitude. But they’re expensive and complicated to make.”
I raised my hand. “I have a question.”
Vera cut in: “You’re wondering what it’s like to be rigid, since you can’t get it to rise up?”
“No. I was wondering how much these things cost.”
Sydney grimaced a bit, then answered: “A lot. That’s basically why we use non-rigid types wherever we can—they’re a lot cheaper. We can make them locally, just get some ladies to stitch together a lot of canvas, attach a boat hull, and you’re halfway there. The cost for a local airbus is about $5000.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.” $5000 was less than a used car in my own world. Of course, the wages here were a lot lower too—I only made $5 a day—but it still sounded reasonable for something like a city bus.
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“Yeah, we can make those all locally with mostly unskilled labor, so it’s not too bad. The big rigid ones though, like the Zepps or the British H-series? They cost a lot more. The Zepp-100 that you guys rode, which we use for long-distance cargo, costs about a million, and the prices go up from there.”
“Why is it so expensive?”
“Well, they’re bigger for one thing. They can carry 100 tons of cargo, compared to only 10 for the biggest blimps. And they can fly for weeks. But mostly, it’s the engineering costs. Those things are state-of-the-art, and they don’t exactly share their trade secrets. They’ve got high performance engines, weather gauges, batteries, radios, and metal alloys that we just can’t recreate. So they charge whatever they want, since the whole world’s economy depends on them. The navy is working on an American version, but so far they’ve they’ve all crashed.”
“Do they have better engineers there?”
“No, they’re not better. We’ve got some damn good engineers here! I’m one of them!” She sounded very proud as she said this. “They’ve just got more of them. They’re one the great powers, you know? America is still catching up, and San Francisco here is just a port for trading, not exactly a center of science and technology.”
Quite a bit different from the San Francisco I remembered! But I guess it was like that in my own world back in the old days, too.
Sydney continued: “Anyway, in Japan they’ve started to experiment with a new type, called semi-rigid. It’s basically a standard blimp, but it has a solid keel like a rigid airship. We’ve been hearing rumors about them, but the Japanese have kept them secret, so I haven’t actually seen one yet. That’s why I sent Akari to investigate. Akari, were you able to learn anything useful?
Akari stood up and answered: “Hai. Semi-rigid airships are a new invention from Mitsubishi air works. They are designated the N-type1
. They combine a flexible envelope with a structural keel, to distribute structural load forces and fix the shape along the forward axis, without requiring the weight of a fully rigid hull. They are considered suitable for crossing the Pacific, but not for world circumnavigation or polar voyages.”
Sydney jotted this down. “Sounds like a very useful ship for their trade with us. Do you think it’s better than our Zepps?”
“I do not believe so,” Akari answered. “It has some advantages in weight, but also disadvantages in hull strength. While I was investigating, I learned that it cannot cross tall mountain ranges. Certainly not the Rocky Mountains. The high wind sheer over the tall peaks would create too much stress on the keel, leading to catastrophic instability.”
“In other words, we’ll be seeing a lot of this type for trans-pacific traffic, but we’ll still be relying on Zepps to go east over the Rockies.”
“Hai. That is my opinion.”
“What do you think, Vera?” Sydney asked. “Will your crews be able to handle docking this new type, while still keeping up with the old ones?”
“It’ll be tricky,” Vera answered. She was much more serious now than usual, as she pondered the technicalities of this question. “We’ll still need a full-size mooring mask to dock them. But we’ll have to add more medium-grade cables, and train more dockies on how to grab the keel where there’s no rigid structure.
Sydney made a note of this too. “But you can do it, right?”
“Oh sure, no problem!” Vera snapped her fingers.
“Good!” Sydney smiled. “Then this trip was a success. Do I want to know how you got this info?”
Akari, Vera, and I looked at each other. I didn’t particularly want to tell the big boss about how I caused a commotion that almost got me arrested, and it seemed the other two weren’t in a hurry to tell the story either.
Seeing our hesitation, Sydney waved her hand. “Never mind, I don’t need to know. Good work, you three!”
And with that rare bit of praise, I was finally allowed to go home and rest. The next day, I returned to my regular job on the docks. It was an exciting experience getting to fly to a foreign country, but for now, I was happy to be on firm land again.