Talk-Polywell.org

I think you need to draw a distinction between fighting house and industrial fires, and fighting forest and wild fires. Outdoor fires are usually fought with aircraft and blimps are certainly too slow for this. House fires in rural areas. . .I dunno. The notion of refilling a pumper works, but still would be much faster (which is much, much better) with a helo than with a blimp.

Blimps historically have very few uses because they have so many limitations compared to aircraft. In general, their only significant advantage over winged vehicles, including helos, is that they can stay up for very long periods of time with relatively little fuel. Forcing them into roles that do not take advantage of this is generally not a good idea.

For instance, there have been many attempts the last few decades to revive the blimp for use in selective foresting, or removing specific trees from a forest without clear cutting. Heavy lift vehicles are necessary for this so you'd think the blimp a natural. On the contrary, the Skycrane proves to be a much better vehicle for this function despite the fuel costs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-64_Skycrane

Certainly one of my favorite aircraft of all time. (A robotic, M-E powered version would be perfect for placing the largest of shipping containers all around our planetary system.)

Blimps are after all, not a very good idea for more than a joyride. Ultra-long duration recon is an exception to the rule--which is the only role USAF sees for blimps.

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"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Well, my thoughts on the blimp come from it's ability to lift a potentially significant size load (10-50 times current airlift), near or at, vertically, fly a semi straight line (at 2-6 times ship travel speeds) and land at or near veritically. The Walrus program (DARPA) was intended to prove the technologies necessary to do this. The vision being to lift supplies or entire units from their source (only needing a field), move them directly to where they are needed and drop them off (again, only needing a field). No boxing up, no containers, no rail or truck travel to a port, no loading onto a boat, no 30-60 day voyage through choke points to another port, to be offloaded by cranes (easily sabotaged), to transport via rail or truck to the acutal desired location. Now when the desired location is enemy held territory, obviously you drop off some distance away and "work your way in". Just as you would do today, except no port, no cranes, no unpacking, etc. Time from activation to actually doing something; significantly faster, I mean significantly. Like better than twice as fast. In the case of humanitarian relief, all you would need is field and the blimp itself could become a base of operations. Something that big sitting in a field next to your village, helping you, has to make the kind of impression we would want.

Remember, the idea behind the Walrus program was that technological advances were such that the past limitations for launching and landing large blimps could be overcome. (And yes, they did discuss self defense issues, which is why it was seen more as a logistical and recon platform, not csankos's vision of bombs and laser raining down hell on the very populations who we are trying to convince we support.) I am guessing that since they did not go to the next phase in the Walrus program, the previous statement proved to be not true.

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Famous last words, "Hey, watch this!"

Getting back to the original topic, I've been thinking some more, and I could definitely see a hybrid approach in areas where there is never enough water (CA, NM, AZ, NV, Middle East, North Africa, etc).

You already mentioned AWGs being used in Saudi Arabia, I'm just extending the idea, because cheap energy means it becomes practical in places that don't have massive oil reserves. Using AWGs means that you deplete your reservoirs/aquifers slower during times of insufficient rainfall, but you keep using traditional transmission to get the water produced by AWGs to rate payers.

I've often thought that what big-city fire departments should do is to require that hydrants be placed on the outside of various levels on high-rise buildings. Along with that, they should develop a helicopter that can plug into the hydrant and squirt the water into the building from the outside thru broken windows. This could keep the building cool enough to permit other fire fighters to actually dowse the fire from the inside.
The twin towers might still be towering if such a system had been in NY.

First I think he said UAE, not SA. There is a difference in that the UAE is pretty much all populated along the coast and that provides a significant humidity source. If you've ever been to the coast of the Persian (ok, Arabian) Gulf, you know that in the summer time, you walk out of your nice, air-conditioned house in the early morning and before you get 10 feet you are dranched because the temperature is 80 degrees and the humidity is 100%.
NOTE I SAID AIR-CONDITIONED. If you use air conditioning in that area, you are pretty much going to do AWG also. You can't cool the air to 70ish degrees around there without wringing out a lot of water.

We have high elevation customers who have water pumped up to them when it is dry and there is no surface water in the upland rivers. Its pumped over 2000' feet of elevation at significant cost. If you had AWG's mounted on the water tank you could fill it that way. Would be a good cost comparison to do AWG or pumped from a well. Here in Maui the water department is the #1 consumer of electric by a healthy margin, so water can be very energy intensive even as it is now.

it has very little to do with water-- a lot to do with the turbulance of the air around skyscrapers (a reason why carriers have to be very careful with island design). flying around a building, especially in a built up area, and even ignoring the effects of smoke and fire is extremely hazersdous, especially when you consider a collission is going to have unpleasant objects landing on the firefighters below...