The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria.
Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an observer during the Civil War, where he made his first balloon ascent. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Zeppelin became a popular hero for leading a daring mission behind enemy lines.
But that war also led to the unification of Germany into the Prussian-dominated German Empire, and as a Wurttemberger Zeppelin was politely frozen out of the highest positions in the new regime. He retired as a Lieutenant General and found himself more or less at loose ends.
So he turned his attention to aviation. Zeppelin had a good technical education from the university at Tubingen, and approached the subject analytically. Zeppelin realized that everyone else was building their airships too small. He proposed to make the square-cube law work to his advantage.
(Everyone know about the square-cube law? If you double the linear dimensions of an object, the surface area increases four times -- the square -- while the volume increases eight times -- the cube.) An airship's weight is all on the surface, but its lift comes from volume. Zeppelin decided to quit messing around with little hundred-foot sausages of rubberized silk and build something that could carry a serious payload. Rather than relying on his own back-of-the-envelope estimates, he hired engineers and used his remaining clout and personal fortune to commission new engines and materials.
His LZ1 was 420 feet long, with 17 gas cells holding 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas. The gas cells were contained within an aluminum framework covered with canvas, and the whole thing was powered by two powerful Daimler gasoline engines. It weighed in at about 13 tons.
As with any prototype, there were problems: the ship was overweight, it needed a stronger skeleton, the engines were unreliable, and the whole thing needed better pitch and trim controls. But it flew, and it pointed the way toward the large, fast airships of the next four decades.
Characters in a steampunk adventure who want to fly long distances need something like the LZ1 or its more successful descendant the LZ3 of 1907. These provide space for a decent cast of characters, and the speed and range to let them get into trouble nearly anywhere in the world. In alternate histories, Zeppelin-style airships crowd out airplanes for passenger transport, and somehow manage to avoid becoming obsolete in the jet age.
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