Steampunk Mars/ Cold War crossover

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Unfortunately this is a thing liftwood would not do. An air freighter as large as a sea freighter would have a lot more drag than a conventional airplane of smaller size. To go just as fast it would have to have proportionately bigger engines and fuel use.

You could get away with somewhat less drag from not having wings. It's not certain that this works out in liftwood's favor though. Only a lift mechanism with virtually no volume avoids any drag penalty. You get drag from wings and you get drag from gas bags and you get m9ore drag from the gas bags which is why lighter-than-air craft are special niche only these days.

So it could depend on how bulky liftwood is. It's possible that it would impose drag penalties as large as or even greater than that of wings.

Lift without expending energy is good and without the crippling drag penalties of gas bags is even better but you're nto going to get away without drag penalties.

True, you couldn't really fully match the speed of modern planes, but you could get quite a bit faster than ocean travel for the same personnel/cargo capacity and reasonable fuel use.