Questionable Questing

That technology is massively more advanced, and even it wasn't intended to go for years. Importantly it also wasn't going to be manned. Anything you intend to have manned has a whole lot of new problems to deal with when you change the duration of mission from hours to days to months.

True. Overall though, weeks airborne shouldn't be a problem (they already make flights lasting days) and a few months seems plausible because unrealistic steampunk automation is a thing here.

Anyways, is anyone else ticked off by Sirroco going full SJW Social Engineering on us?

Weeks airborne instead of days means you need things like exercise facilities to prevent muscle atrophy, more sophisticated plumbing, and a magnitude more water and food storage. You also likely have to do a lot more maintenance while things are running instead of while they're shut off.

I wouldn't say Sirrocco is going SJW, but the sudden demand for a wife when the benefits are nebulous at best is pretty annoying.

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/sole-survivors-steampunk-survival-horror.7549/page-16#post-1948635

"we could completely rewire the way gender roles and sex are handled in our little enclave."

If this isn't a prelude for radical social engineering, what is?

He's definitely plotting radical social engineering. I don't disagree there. I just don't think he's going SJW about it. I mean he's still planning on female roles being connected to housework and child rearing more, just changing how they go about it.

That post that I linked has an undertone of culturally normalizing prostitution (reasonable) and paternal uncertainty (what) and communal childcare as well as his earlier posts telling us to find a hot-babe-supergenius-feminist...

Blech. Onto more interesting things - because airships can be operated at neutral buoyancy, shutting off the machinery for maintenance isn't the biggest issue.

-Continued:

Steampunk automation could shrink the crew rosters, meaning the same amount of food & water holds much longer. Hell, you could build a bigger airship with multiple sets of machinery, so you could run on one engine while the other is maintained or something.

I actually like the idea of normalizing prostitution and communal childcare. I don't see paternal uncertainty or a flying pig wife as very reasonable though.

Airships operating at neutral buoyancy is eh. While the goal is neutral buoyancy in practice you never actually hit perfectly neutral buoyancy.

Multiple sets of machinery mean you could have afforded to build multiple smaller airships at that cost that could be doing a wider range of jobs. Multiple smaller units gives you more flexibility.

Same. Prostitutes aren't evil (often a net public good) and childcare is usually a net public good.

Some missions, however, cannot be handled by a small airship. Transoceanic missions take days, at least. Large cargo, long range exploration, etc.

Days not weeks and certainly not months. Every bit of space and weight you add to endurance means less on cargo as well. Those can still be serviced when they return to base.

I feel you're not accounting sufficiently for the fact radium power doesn't require anywhere near as large of a fuel fraction found on most vehicles.

Even with *conventional IRL tech, using hydrocarbons*, an aircraft has stayed airborne (via refuelling) for a ludicrous 64 days and 22 hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_endurance_record

The fact an aircraft can remain airborne that long with hydrocarbons undercuts the value of a nuclear aircraft.

Plus you're forgetting that nuclear reactors are usually quite huge. So space and weight savings aren't always there until you're doing ridiculous long missions.

That was with airborne refuelling, which is a logistical demand we cannot meet.

Airborne nuclear engines have been built at similar scale to conventional aircraft engines, and in this universe you already have nuclear engines small enough to power mecha. Also, an airship requires power/weight ratios closer to waterborne ships than jet aircraft.

Yet you'll find that nuclear and oil powered waterborne ships and submarines have fairly comparable performance until you are getting 8,000+ kilometers range. Because the nuclear reactors are pretty enormous. An airship doesn't need range to go that far really because we're unlikely to be connected to anyone so far away.

Airborne refueling is less a problem because with airships they can land to move fuel from a tanker wherever there's a patch of flat ground, no need for a runway. Plus there's not going to be a whole lot of people left around to make an issue of you landing on their lawn.

What? You'll find there are far less fuel depots after the apocalypse. Most naval reactors are bulky because of conservative design; aircraft nuclear powerplants (ala Pluto) and Soviet metal cooled reactors were orders of magnitude more compact.

Nuclear innovation has been stifled due to anti-nuclear sentiment, laws and regulations, not because of fundamental problems with nuclear technology (which exist, mind you, just they don't hinder reactor scaling)

You can still run a tanker airship. Just fill its cargo hold with fuel.

Project Pluto produced a more compact reactor because it had no radiation shielding at all. They designed the cruise missile to withstand being constantly irradiated. That's a problem if you want to build an airship to transport crew and cargo you intend to use later.

Project Pluto required a massive energy throughput to ram the airframe through the atmosphere at ludicrous velocities for extreme durations.

That's completely unnecessary on an airship that probably never passes propeller aircraft in top speed, so a higher amount of rad shielding combined with a smaller engine (again, in a universe where nuclear mecha already exist) seems feasible.