Talk:SS class airship

"Sea Scout" or "Submarine Scout"?

Here are some references for "SS" standing for "Submarine Scout" rather than "Sea Scout": Ian Castle, British Airships: 1905-30 (p.16), Global Security: Great War RNAS Airships - S.S. (Submarine Scout), Submarine Scout Class, United States Naval Aviation, 1919-1941: Aircraft, Airships and Ships Between the Wars, by E. R. Johnson, MacFarland & Co Inc 2011 (p.300), Royal Naval Air Service Pilot 1914-18 by Mark Barber, Osprey Books 2010, British Airships: Past, Present and Future by George Whale Salwasser Verlag 2011 (p.48). Alansplodge (talk) 19:16, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:L class blimp which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 04:15, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggested move, but what to?

We Brits refer to craft such as this one as "non-rigid airships" and, when we title information about them, we use the term "airship." The "SS" stands for "Sea Scout." The term "blimp" is slang and never used in titles by reliable sources. See for example Ege, "Balloons and Airships", Blandford (1973). Since Wikipedia is global, we should avoid purported Americanisms and respect national usage. Suitable article titles might be SS class airship or Sea Scout class airship, but which? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:18, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

What's wrong with blimp, per WP:COMMONNAME? Mjroots (talk) 18:16, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

In the UK, "blimp" is never used in titles by reliable sources, at least, as far as I can tell. That means that for article titles WP:COMMONNAME excludes "blimp". Ege, Wragg (Historical dictionary of Aviation, History Press, 2008), Jane's 1980 and Almond (Aviation: the early years, Getty Images/Ullmann 2011) all use "airship" in titles and "airship" or "non-rigid airship" in the text. Ege and Wragg note that "blimp" is slang, while the others do not use the word at all. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 20:56, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Note loads of similar named blimp/airships at Template:RNAS blimps so should be considered together. MilborneOne (talk) 18:19, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

what did happen to the discussion on this topic at WikiProject Aircraft, btw? just seemed to fizzle out. I'd say that SS-class rather than Sea Scout, the abbreviations seem to be fairly widely used. Not that I've much to hand, but Robin Higham used only the initials in The British Rigid Airship & so do the IWM in the catalgue of pictures entries.TheLongTone (talk) 18:40, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Lots of US-based editors claimed that "blimp" was the correct title in America, supported by blanket assertions and a few web sources which on inspection turned out to be at best ambivalent and at worst gave those editors an air of PoV cherry-picking, but rather than produce better sources they shouted me down in unison. I gave up on them. No doubt they would give a different account of themselves, but I'd prefer to stick to discussing UK usage in the present context. BTW, what terminology ("airship", "blimp", etc.) do Higham and the IWM catalogue use for titles, captions, etc.? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 20:56, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

The IWM call them airships in the majority of cases, but there is the odd blimp. Higham calls them blimps, but then he's American, and the topic of the book is rigids. The Putnam book on US naval aircraft, a British publication on an American topic, calls them airships. I haven't got the equivalent volume on English naval aircraft to hand, but I will eat my cycle helmet if it calls them blimps. Etymologically, I'm pretty sure that the SS-class ships were flying before the word was coined. They may have been generally referred to as blimps by RNAS people, but the official title must be airship. A search of the National Archive catalogue] turns up (apart from the eponymous Colonel]] references which look like either US craft or possible tethered aerostats: there are 16 hits. Airship returns nearly 5000 files & over 1,300 from WW1. All the RNAS bases are airship stations. & so on. Anybody trying to maintain that blimp is proper nomenclature for British naval non-rigids is flogging a dead duck.TheLongTone (talk) 23:36, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

On closer inspection, Ege indexes them as SS-class. Under Sea Scout he writes, "See SS class". Ah, and here's an interesting comment when discussing them: "Colloquially they always were referred to as 'Blimps'. Over the years several explanations have been advanced about the origin of this word. the most common is that in the military vernacular the Type B was referred to as 'limp bag', which was simply abbreviated to 'blimp'. An alternative explanation is that on 5 December 1915 A. D. Cunningham, R.N., who designed the SSZ type, flipped the envelope of a non-rigid airship with his fingers during an inspection, which produced a sound that he pronounced as 'blimp'; and that the word then caught on as the nickname for all small non-rigid airships." Anyway, I shall go with SS class airship and see whether the world explodes under me again. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:31, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

The move seems to have gone unchallenged. I'll move the other British types over in due course, there are a good few. C class is a bit awkward because there is an American C-class blimp. Strictly the UK type should be C class airship - to disambiguate them one could just put a "For..." link at the start of each article. Would that be OK? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:14, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

General usage seems to use a hyphen, eg SS-class. The articles I've looked at seem to have redirects in place using "....airship"..17:15, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, this is where WP:RS are the only way to settle the matter. Ege does not use hyphens. Norris, writing about the Short flying boats in 1966, uses "C" class (his quotes). Where is this "general usage" to be found? Not in American publications, I trust — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:58, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

[Update] Been thinking and having a look round t'interweb place. It all looks pretty arbitrary. For example the Flight archive reveals all of C, C- and 'C' used indiscriminately, even on the same page. But for our purposes I'd suggest a distinction can usefully be drawn between say "C-class" which is just the designator that comes after "B-class" as against "C class" which is the abbreviation of "Coastal class". We also have "Coastal Star class" which looks typographically awful when represented as "C*-class" rather than the usual "C* class", while the expansion of "NS-class" to "North Sea-class" or "North-Sea-class" is also untenable: it is "North Sea class" and hence "NS class". — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 22:10, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Just to muddy the waters, documents in the PRO refer to eg S.S. class airships. It's not an issue I can get very passionate about, as long as they are airships not blimps!TheLongTone (talk) 23:09, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

correct title

correct title is SS-class airship--Arado (talk) 12:12, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

What gas?

Nowhere does the article mention what the ballonets were filled with. Hydrogen? Helium? Hot air? This is a pretty fundamental fact that should be at least mentioned somewhere. Mnudelman (talk) 03:24, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

The given figures of gas volume and lifting power indicates hydrogen. In fact nobody but the Americans had helium. I'll update the article to make hydrogen explicit. Rcbutcher (talk) 07:58, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

The main envelope was filled with hydrogen. However the ballonets were filled with slightly compressed air taken from the outside. British non-rigid airships often just had an airscoop collecting some of the propwash from the engine. Two airducts with a non-return valve took this to the the front and back ballonets.

The compressed air expanded the ballonet, which in turn compressed the hydrogen, which keeps the envelope structure rigid. Also, the pilot was able to vary the amount of air in the fore and aft ballonets (which effectively acted as ballast) to make small adjustments in the trim of the craft.

The British always used hydrogen during WW1. Larger airship stations manufactured it on-site with a chemical plant. I have no references to hand unfortunately, as I'm in the middle of my breakfast. Catsmeat (talk) 08:38, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

D'uh, I should have the OP's question more carefully. Thanks for the detail. The article does state : "The envelope contained two ballonets of 6,375 cu ft (180.5 m3) each instead of just one as used on the prototype. These were supplied with air from the propeller draught via a scoop...". So it does imply ordinary air. Would you like to update the article explaining the functioning and purpose of these ballonets ? Rcbutcher (talk) 09:58, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Ah, I thought it was just the opposite -- that the ballonets contained the lifting gas and the envelope was pressurized with ambient air. That was part of my confusion. Thanks for the clarification. Mnudelman (talk) 15:19, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm sure that ballonet is linked: if it's not I'll fix it. Dont think it needs a lengthy description in the article.TheLongTone (talk) 14:15, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

That's fine. It's rather confusing because zeppelins are apparently structured in the opposite way to these airships; in a zeppelin the lifting gas is contained within separate gas bags inside a shell, with ambient air outside the bags. I had known about that configuration but not about the ballonet configuration. Mnudelman (talk) 15:08, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

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