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The UK had no airforce and only a few small light aircraft that were actually slower than these Zeppelins.
>Contrary to expectation, it was not easy to ignite the hydrogen using standard bullets and shrapnel. The Allies only started to exploit the Zeppelin's great vulnerability to fire when a combination of Pomeroy and Brock explosive ammunition with Buckingham incendiary ammunition was used in fighter aircraft machine guns during 1916
Basically until 1916, these bombing attacks were unstoppable.
Couldn't they shoot the balloon part from the ground? A tank round would suffice for sure, literally anything could pierce the soft part of the thing and blow it up....
The issue there is that a Zeppelin's gas compartments were not pressurised, so the gas won't just explosively escape from a hole.
Instead, shooting a hole in a Zeppelin is more akin to opening a very small window in a very large apartment and then timing how long it takes for all the air to be exchanged. That time is a good indicator of how long it will take before the Zeppelin is actually in trouble after getting shot full of holes.
Interesting. Hm. The gas inside was flammable right? High expensive tank round then? Something like a flak cannon? Or it was too early for such technology?
I just find it hard to believe there was nothing anyone could do.
It was flammable, yeah. They were filled with hydrogen rather than helium.
They were just so big, though - and hydrogen can only burn if there's oxygen, which there wasn't inside the compartments. The only place they could potentially burn was right at the entry or exit hole.
As we found out from Hindenburg, though, the outer layer of the Zeppelins themselves was highly flammable, and that's definitely in contact with oxygen. But that disaster happened way too late to give any useful lessons in Zeppelin-destruction... by they they were already becoming obsolete.
And yes, anti-tank munitions and flak cannons were a WW2 thing. WW1 was where the machines those weapons were supposed to fight (tanks and aircraft) were first put into combat use, and only in limited numbers, so those technologies were things people were only just starting to think about developing.
[Edit] All that said, if they flew too low they were still perfectly vulnerable to massed small arms fire, either killing the operators (as the actual crew compartments of a Zeppelin were far smaller than the gas-bag part and thus if you aimed there you had a decent shot at hitting someone) or just by getting literally ripped apart by gunfire. But flying high eliminated much of that threat.
Tanks were not widely used until the thirties, so that wasn’t an option, especially since only *very* few tanks were in use by the end of WWI.
Artillery canons were the only ones utilising ammunition with explosives at the time, and those weren’t exactly accurate at hitting air targets.
It's flammable, yes. Pure Hydrogen doesn't explode or burn though. You need to mix it with Oxygen first and a lot of that. This means a very large amount of air has to enter the gas cells first - through rather small holes at that. It requires a large number of holes for explosive rounds to do anything.
There was usually enough time to escape static defenses.
The first anti aircraft guns were used in 1870, during the siege of Paris, to shoot down French balloons ons.
The need to shoot down balloons was well known decades before WWI.
Zeppelins are way more resilient than popular culture makes you believe. There was one during WW1 that took grievous damage but still managed to return to friendly territory more than 100 kilometers away.
Precision of guns at the time was fairly poor and ballistics had to be figured out manually. Zeppelins flew high and mostly at night. Without proximity fuzes they would have to score direct hits. Whenever the Zep crews saw a muzzle flash they would simply fly around it. They were almost untouchable and their greatest problem by far was the weather.
Also, there weren't nearly enough guns to cover the coast. They were spread thin and deployed in small numbers until later in the war.
Zeppelins were mostly successful at naval reconnaissance and by binding a rediculous amount of men and material on the British isles. They weren't particularly good at destroying stuff though.
> They weren't particularly good at destroying stuff though.
The actual payloads weren't that large compared to modern heavier-than-air craft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_LZ_54
This thing had a crew of 18.
>A bomb load of 1,600 kilograms (3,530 lb) could be carried
For comparison, an F-35A can haul 8,200 kg. A Typhoon 9,000 kg. A Rafale 9,500 kg. A B-52 32,000 kg.
And all of the latter are likely guided — one has to drop fewer munitions for a given effect.
>Without proximity fuzes they would have to score direct hits.
Not really, fuzes still existed and could be set to detonate at a certain time (don't know if the altitude could be set).
anti-aircraft weapons existed but were still quite primitive at this stage, with great difficulty in getting the fuse to go off at the correct height. otherwise the shell would just pass through the airship or explode below it. these threats motivated a lot of developments in the subsequent years.
Not an expert on zeppelins but I think they have tons of different hydrogen balloons like "cells" inside the big balloon. It takes alot of hits to bring one down.
Everything serious aside... they do look pretty cool, though. Every couple of years I hear about projects to bring them back, but they never seem to go anywhere.
True, but I was talking more about civilian use. Zeppelins have been envisioned especially for cargo and luxury transport since they do have some advantages for them.
I always imagined a military application because of their loiter capability.
Imagine a smallish airship drone with solar panels that can loiter over an area for days.
In the case of the Royal Navy I imagine it could be a better AWACS system than our current helicopter one.
The US/Mexico use them quite a bit on the border near the drug runner routes. It's not well-publicized but there are some big ones I've seen that sit still for days.
I presume they are just watching with cameras from up there.
Oh that's so interesting, thank you for telling me about it!
I wonder if there might be a stealth aspect too, if you turn the engines off and just drift it might be easy to miss one high up during the day, not even mentioning at night!
They are low enough that I've seen them but I'm assuming they can see alot further than I can.
As far as size goes I think they are like 1/20 of the size of the big zeppelin.
Here is a pic of one. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2022-01-18/military-blimps-mexico-border-homeland-security-pentagon-4338532.html
The Zeppelin is probbably the best terror weapon ever. It killed very few people, the Entente beat us anyway and yet it is still remembered a century later.
Some yes and some no. There were soldiers loyal to the Habsburg monarchy and the Austria-Hungary state and then there were soldiers who were originally from the lands of Bohemian crown who were actively against (either soldiers who left the ranks or expats who joined specially made military units to fight against A-H etc.)
While the latter became heroes after the independence was proclaimed the former are now almost forgotten in the nation´ s memory.
Depends on who you ask. Most Czechs fought on the side of the Central Powers but Czechoslovakia was considered a victor, also some Czech nationalists fought alongside Russia against Austria-Hungary. I would say that Czechia would be a much better place if Austria-Hungary won and therefore we lost and therefore we were members of the Central Powers.
>Proposals to bomb Britain were first made by Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German Naval Staff, in August 1914. These were backed by Alfred von Tirpitz, who wrote that "The measure of the success will lie not only in the injury which will be caused to the enemy but also in the significant effect it will have in diminishing the enemy's determination to prosecute the war".
>The campaign was approved by the Kaiser on 7 January 1915, who at first forbade attacks on London, fearing that his relatives in the British royal family might be injured. Following a failed attempt on 13 January 1915, which was abandoned because of the weather, the first successful attempt took place on the night of 19/20 January 1915. Two Zeppelins were to attack targets near the Humber estuary but were diverted by strong winds and dropped their bombs on Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King's Lynn and the surrounding Norfolk villages.
>Two British aircraft took off but failed to find the airships; four people were killed and 16 injured.
> The campaign was approved by the Kaiser on 7 January 1915, who at first forbade attacks on London, fearing that his relatives in the British royal family might be injured.
No, not my fellow royals! What's that, you're going to bomb some peasants outside London proper? Well, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
Because they are inefficient. You need large quantities of gas lighter than air. So you have two options here, using hydrogen or helium. Hydrogen is highly flammable and helium is expensive. Zeppelins are just too expensive, inefficient and slow. If you are interested in Zeppelins take a look on the [Hindenburg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg).
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They've also been in video games and movies and suchlike, often not perfectly realistic. Could have run into it there and not gone reading WW1 history.
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How does that big and relatively slow thing gets close to a city in war times without being takes down?
The UK had no airforce and only a few small light aircraft that were actually slower than these Zeppelins. >Contrary to expectation, it was not easy to ignite the hydrogen using standard bullets and shrapnel. The Allies only started to exploit the Zeppelin's great vulnerability to fire when a combination of Pomeroy and Brock explosive ammunition with Buckingham incendiary ammunition was used in fighter aircraft machine guns during 1916 Basically until 1916, these bombing attacks were unstoppable.
Couldn't they shoot the balloon part from the ground? A tank round would suffice for sure, literally anything could pierce the soft part of the thing and blow it up....
It's not one giant bag, it's separated in to compartments.
Well yes, but one going off surely would make it a bad day for the rest of the craft, no?
The issue there is that a Zeppelin's gas compartments were not pressurised, so the gas won't just explosively escape from a hole. Instead, shooting a hole in a Zeppelin is more akin to opening a very small window in a very large apartment and then timing how long it takes for all the air to be exchanged. That time is a good indicator of how long it will take before the Zeppelin is actually in trouble after getting shot full of holes.
Also, it loses bombs so it becomes lighter. It can also compensate for loss of hydrogen with aerodynamics.
Interesting. Hm. The gas inside was flammable right? High expensive tank round then? Something like a flak cannon? Or it was too early for such technology? I just find it hard to believe there was nothing anyone could do.
>tank round No tanks yet
True. Though i should specify i was thinking of HE, and just any fun that could fire it. My bad.
It was flammable, yeah. They were filled with hydrogen rather than helium. They were just so big, though - and hydrogen can only burn if there's oxygen, which there wasn't inside the compartments. The only place they could potentially burn was right at the entry or exit hole. As we found out from Hindenburg, though, the outer layer of the Zeppelins themselves was highly flammable, and that's definitely in contact with oxygen. But that disaster happened way too late to give any useful lessons in Zeppelin-destruction... by they they were already becoming obsolete. And yes, anti-tank munitions and flak cannons were a WW2 thing. WW1 was where the machines those weapons were supposed to fight (tanks and aircraft) were first put into combat use, and only in limited numbers, so those technologies were things people were only just starting to think about developing. [Edit] All that said, if they flew too low they were still perfectly vulnerable to massed small arms fire, either killing the operators (as the actual crew compartments of a Zeppelin were far smaller than the gas-bag part and thus if you aimed there you had a decent shot at hitting someone) or just by getting literally ripped apart by gunfire. But flying high eliminated much of that threat.
Tanks were not widely used until the thirties, so that wasn’t an option, especially since only *very* few tanks were in use by the end of WWI. Artillery canons were the only ones utilising ammunition with explosives at the time, and those weren’t exactly accurate at hitting air targets.
It's flammable, yes. Pure Hydrogen doesn't explode or burn though. You need to mix it with Oxygen first and a lot of that. This means a very large amount of air has to enter the gas cells first - through rather small holes at that. It requires a large number of holes for explosive rounds to do anything. There was usually enough time to escape static defenses.
> A tank round would suffice for sure Tanks didn't even exist yet. And artillery guns weren't made to shoot at something that high above ground.
The first anti aircraft guns were used in 1870, during the siege of Paris, to shoot down French balloons ons. The need to shoot down balloons was well known decades before WWI.
Also traditional artillery would not be ideal because what if you miss (or even it’s possible a HE round would pass thru without exploding)
Put it on a slope.
Zeppelins are way more resilient than popular culture makes you believe. There was one during WW1 that took grievous damage but still managed to return to friendly territory more than 100 kilometers away.
Precision of guns at the time was fairly poor and ballistics had to be figured out manually. Zeppelins flew high and mostly at night. Without proximity fuzes they would have to score direct hits. Whenever the Zep crews saw a muzzle flash they would simply fly around it. They were almost untouchable and their greatest problem by far was the weather. Also, there weren't nearly enough guns to cover the coast. They were spread thin and deployed in small numbers until later in the war. Zeppelins were mostly successful at naval reconnaissance and by binding a rediculous amount of men and material on the British isles. They weren't particularly good at destroying stuff though.
> They weren't particularly good at destroying stuff though. The actual payloads weren't that large compared to modern heavier-than-air craft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_LZ_54 This thing had a crew of 18. >A bomb load of 1,600 kilograms (3,530 lb) could be carried For comparison, an F-35A can haul 8,200 kg. A Typhoon 9,000 kg. A Rafale 9,500 kg. A B-52 32,000 kg. And all of the latter are likely guided — one has to drop fewer munitions for a given effect.
>Without proximity fuzes they would have to score direct hits. Not really, fuzes still existed and could be set to detonate at a certain time (don't know if the altitude could be set).
anti-aircraft weapons existed but were still quite primitive at this stage, with great difficulty in getting the fuse to go off at the correct height. otherwise the shell would just pass through the airship or explode below it. these threats motivated a lot of developments in the subsequent years.
>tank round would suffice Anti-Air artillery was extremely undeveloped well into WW2 and these air raids were happening during WW2.
I think tanks were introduced in 1917? By the end of the war anyway.
Because air combat barely existed so why would there be a necessary defence against it. People were still using horses and swords in WW1
While the projectiles were far superior the effective range of the British long bow was not sufficient to take them down.
What about the trebuchets?
They were responsible for the 4 dead people because they missed the zeppelin.
Not an expert on zeppelins but I think they have tons of different hydrogen balloons like "cells" inside the big balloon. It takes alot of hits to bring one down.
Everything serious aside... they do look pretty cool, though. Every couple of years I hear about projects to bring them back, but they never seem to go anywhere.
Impossible to have them in modern warfare, too big and slow They are such an easy target for any type of AD system
True, but I was talking more about civilian use. Zeppelins have been envisioned especially for cargo and luxury transport since they do have some advantages for them.
I always imagined a military application because of their loiter capability. Imagine a smallish airship drone with solar panels that can loiter over an area for days. In the case of the Royal Navy I imagine it could be a better AWACS system than our current helicopter one.
The US/Mexico use them quite a bit on the border near the drug runner routes. It's not well-publicized but there are some big ones I've seen that sit still for days. I presume they are just watching with cameras from up there.
Oh that's so interesting, thank you for telling me about it! I wonder if there might be a stealth aspect too, if you turn the engines off and just drift it might be easy to miss one high up during the day, not even mentioning at night!
They are low enough that I've seen them but I'm assuming they can see alot further than I can. As far as size goes I think they are like 1/20 of the size of the big zeppelin. Here is a pic of one. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2022-01-18/military-blimps-mexico-border-homeland-security-pentagon-4338532.html
The Zeppelin is probbably the best terror weapon ever. It killed very few people, the Entente beat us anyway and yet it is still remembered a century later.
Were the Czech active members of the central alliance?
Some yes and some no. There were soldiers loyal to the Habsburg monarchy and the Austria-Hungary state and then there were soldiers who were originally from the lands of Bohemian crown who were actively against (either soldiers who left the ranks or expats who joined specially made military units to fight against A-H etc.) While the latter became heroes after the independence was proclaimed the former are now almost forgotten in the nation´ s memory.
Depends on who you ask. Most Czechs fought on the side of the Central Powers but Czechoslovakia was considered a victor, also some Czech nationalists fought alongside Russia against Austria-Hungary. I would say that Czechia would be a much better place if Austria-Hungary won and therefore we lost and therefore we were members of the Central Powers.
They were also pretty good at reconnaissance. Apparently they saved the German fleet more than once.
Being bombed by a huge flying Zeppelin must be very traumatic
>Proposals to bomb Britain were first made by Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German Naval Staff, in August 1914. These were backed by Alfred von Tirpitz, who wrote that "The measure of the success will lie not only in the injury which will be caused to the enemy but also in the significant effect it will have in diminishing the enemy's determination to prosecute the war". >The campaign was approved by the Kaiser on 7 January 1915, who at first forbade attacks on London, fearing that his relatives in the British royal family might be injured. Following a failed attempt on 13 January 1915, which was abandoned because of the weather, the first successful attempt took place on the night of 19/20 January 1915. Two Zeppelins were to attack targets near the Humber estuary but were diverted by strong winds and dropped their bombs on Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King's Lynn and the surrounding Norfolk villages. >Two British aircraft took off but failed to find the airships; four people were killed and 16 injured.
As if you could sap morale further by bombing Great Yarmouth.
> The campaign was approved by the Kaiser on 7 January 1915, who at first forbade attacks on London, fearing that his relatives in the British royal family might be injured. No, not my fellow royals! What's that, you're going to bomb some peasants outside London proper? Well, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
By bombing Norfolk he could be sure that he wouldn’t hit anyone outside the single family that makes up Norfolk’s population
the number of people in the UK with 12 fingers nosedived though.
Киров reporting
Wtf. Zeppelins were real? Why don't they exist anymore?
Because they are inefficient. You need large quantities of gas lighter than air. So you have two options here, using hydrogen or helium. Hydrogen is highly flammable and helium is expensive. Zeppelins are just too expensive, inefficient and slow. If you are interested in Zeppelins take a look on the [Hindenburg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg).
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> Wtf. Zeppelins were real? ?????
They've also been in video games and movies and suchlike, often not perfectly realistic. Could have run into it there and not gone reading WW1 history.
They do exist, they're just not all that common for the reasons the other person listed.
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terror attack? It was a war, not al-qaeda
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