Adamantine Airship

[pylfer]

Is it even possible to make an adamantine airship? Colossal sized vehicle, plated/made wholly from adamantine...?

If so, what would the cost of that be? I assume a couple of million gold.

Wrap your mind around that :<

[Brambleman]

Put it next to the lead balloon, and the screen door submarine.

[Adamantine Dragon]

Back in my college days, the "bonus" question on one of our tests was something like:

"What surprising property would a ten pound hollow steel ball with a radius of two feet and an internal vacuum have?"

I'm sure I've got the dimensions wrong and I'm not gonna do the math to make it right, but the answer was:

"It will fly".

Adamantine is even stronger than steel, so making an airship out of one would actually be no problem other than cost. And I should know about adamantine...

[Robb Smith]

it'd probably be ad-hoc, I don't think Adamantine is priced by the pound anywhere, cause it's not exactly something you can just go to a store and buy.

well, not most stores at least.

[Ashram]

A colossal airship made of adamantine, for one, would cost several millions of gold considering the adamantine golem, a Huge construct costs 600,000 to make in addition to 100,000 for the body, and probably only the outer hull would be made of adamantine, considering other metals and materials would be necessary to build a functional ship. This is of course not mentioning the magic that would be necessary to make the sucker fly, depending on if you're going for sci-fi or fantasy, sort of like the whole Numeria thing.

Also, you'd probably need to make a lot of trips to the Elemental Plane of Earth to find so much adamantine.

[Brambleman]

The adamantine golem also is supposed to take more adamantine than exists on most worlds.

A combination of Mythral and adamantine could reduce the cost to something more manageable.

and, the apparatus of the crab is pretty close to a screen door submarine :)

[Ashram]

Brambleman wrote:

The adamantine golem also is supposed to take more adamantine than exists on most worlds.

A combination of Mythral and adamantine could reduce the cost to something more manageable.

and, the apparatus of the crab is pretty close to a screen door submarine :)

Which is why you'd have to go to the Elemental Plane of Earth, which has infinite adamantine as long as you're capable of dealing with things that live there.

[Chobemaster]

I guess the amount of lift from a unit of helium is something that can be looked up. What weight do you want to lift? Call that L1 That weight + the weight of the adamantine itself and the rest of the basket (call that L2)etc tells you the volume of helium you need. Assume that's in a sphere for ease of math.

So then all you need is a way to model the minimum thickness of adamantine that can withstand that force. I'm sure there's some table of engineering constants by material that gives strength/thickness, just use whatever the best thing we actually can make as the reference for adamantine.

Then it's a relatively easy algebra calculation of surface area of the calculated volume sphere that generates lift L2. The surface area x the thickness = the volume of adamantine required.

[Chobemaster]

1. I'm disappointed in our multiclass engineer/gamers.

2. Since I'm untrained in Engineering, I had to make some guesses...

I don't think you'd make a true sphere to do this, I think you'd do a geodesic dome with a skin. The thicknesses of material I get w/ a sphere lead me to believe it's impossible otherwise, but let's proceed.

I assume adamantine has a density of 500 lbs cubic foot. Steel is about 490 depending on what kind, and the rules say nothing about adamantine being heavier or lighter. Slightly denser feels right to me, though.

Comparing the lift power of helium of 0.63 lbs/cubic foot I got from How Stuff works, using a skin thickness of 1/64 inch (which seems too thin to hold the weight, to me, but I am not finding a quick way to calculate this even for real materials), a 36' radius sphere would weigh 10,602 lbs and lift not only itself, but also 1528 lbs of gondola and PC's.

[LazarX]

Brambleman wrote:

Put it next to the lead balloon, and the screen door submarine.

On Mythbusters...Using lead foil, Adam and Jamie constructed a cube-shaped balloon with 10 foot (3 m) edges out of lead. Even without pure helium inside it (a mixture containing air was used to limit buoyancy and reduce the possibility of tearing), the balloon was buoyant enough to support a basket along with some ballast.

[rat_ bastard]

Hardening spell.

seriously, you will save a funky crapload of money and the the same general result.

[Brambleman]

okay, serious hat on now.

In order to get your craft off of the ground, it needs lo have a lower net density than that of the atmosphere. Having the interior filled with a lighter than air substance will help lower the net density of the craft.

Adamantine is a dense, but strong material. Ideally, this strength will not just be hardness, but also tensile strength, allowing a rigid skin of adamantine that will not buckle and fold.

the ideal shape of volume to surface area is a sphere, as per the Dido problem. But a static shell of adamantine offers no buoyancy control.

To counteract this, ridgid airships consist of a structure that contains several lifting cells inside. So an adamantine airship would probably have a shell of adamantine that protects the internal lifting cells. The question is then, how large must an airship be to support a shell of the thickness to keep the desired armour qualities of adamantine? (40 hp/ inch)

Those among you with the inclination could probably derive the formula, but i would just hazard a guess at "incredibly immense"

The cost would be dependent on how thick the plating is, which determines the size of the craft.