[Steven K. Roberts] is the original digital nomad, having designed and built mobile computing for his own use since the 80s. His latest project is Bionode, a portable computing lab built into a hand truck that can accommodate a wide spectrum of needs for a person on the go.

Far more than just a portable computer with wheels and a handle, Bionode is an integrated collection of systems with power management, a sensor suite, multiple computers, NAS for storage, networking, video production tools, and even the ability to be solar charged. [Steven] also uses a laptop, and Bionode complements it by being everything else.

If one truly wishes to be mobile and modular as well as effective, then size and weight begins to be just as important as usability. Everything in Bionode has a purpose, and it currently contains a PC with GPU for local AI and machine learning work, a NAS with 14 TB of storage, an Ubuntu machine, a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant, another Raspberry Pi 5 for development work, a Raspberry Pi 3 for running his 3D printer, and a Raspberry Pi 4 for SDR (software-defined radio) work. A smart KVM means a single keyboard, mouse, and display can be shared among machines as needed and additional hardware in a thoughtful layout makes audio and video projects workable. Everything is integrated with sensors and Home Assistant with local AI monitoring, which [Steven] likes to think of as the unit’s nervous system.

Bionode is therefore more than just a collection of computers crammed into a hand truck; it’s a carefully-selected array of hardware that provides whatever [Steven] needs.

Give it a look if you want to see what such a system looks like when it’s been designed and assembled by someone who’s “been there, done that” when it comes to mobile computing. Bionode would complement something like a mobile workshop quite nicely; something [Steven] has also done before.

Thanks [Paul] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/02/26/bionod…

In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.

Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse.

Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community.

Are we seeing the end of the ‘everything device’ and the return to a more simple time?

Bored Is Good

WordPerfect 5.1 running on MS-DOS. (Credit: Daniel Pritchard, Wikimedia)
In the before times, when the iPhones hadn’t yet flooded the planet and Facebooks weren’t even a twinkle yet in some bloke’s eye, your attention wasn’t nearly as much preyed upon as it is today. Spending time on the World Wide Web wasn’t that prevalent, people weren’t yet walking around with displays practically glued to their faces, and if you wanted to do any task it took real effort.

Although I learned to touch-type on an electric typewriter and briefly owned a Brother typewriter, I was already using PCs and word processor software most of the time. Of course, this was initially on MS-DOS with WordPerfect 5.1, running first on the family 286 PC and later the IBM PS/2 386SX system that my father’s work had sold off for a pittance. Back in the single-tasking MS-DOS days it meant that once you were running WordPerfect, or games like Stunts 3D or Doom, that was all you did.

Later I’d run Microsoft Office on Windows, but with only dial-up internet available the temptation from distractions were minimal. Not until the arrival of always-online broadband internet would you have to suffer through notifications from IRC, MSN, ICQ and whatever else you had running in the background, but even then you’d not be on the PC all the time.

When it came to entertainment, such as watching TV, playing a movie or music, it would be just that one thing with zero interruptions on the HiFi set, a Walkman or TV. Along with only landline phones that you were usually not within hearing distance of, it was easy to be ‘bored’ and do some quiet reading, drawing or prod at some small wildlife in a puddle outdoors. Even game consoles were still fully offline, so couch-based gaming – optionally with split-screen – was as multiplayer as things got.

Although even during the 1990s many people had email, you weren’t expected to check your mailbox more than once a week, perhaps a few times a day for serious nerds.

The Online Cacophony

Credit: Xinmei Liu
Much of the curse of the ‘everything device’ can be reduced to the fact that everything has to be connected to some remote service or a dozen. Just imagine not having internet on your smartphone, smart TV or PC, and how it almost instantly plummets you into chronic anxiety as only just about everything is connected to some online service, or depends on data stored on remote servers.

Getting away from all this is hard, as signing up for a dozen social media services is part of social pressure, and each of these services make sure to incessantly pull you in with updates and notifications. Then there are advertisements that have become the main financing model for websites and even online services in the 21st century, which ever more intrusively barge into whatever it is that you’re trying to do.

Here the term ‘chronically online‘ along with similar terms has previously been pitched and would seem to be rather apt. Ever more people have to check their smartphone for new notifications and updates, and are constantly occupied with what is happening on social media, rather than in the real world.

Worse, you’re no longer just taking snapshots on your photo camera or recording video on a camcorder, but everything goes straight into the Cloud, from where you get pushed, harassed, and cajoled into sharing every single bit of content with everyone else, lest someone misses out on your Amazing New Experience.

Out Of Focus

The main problem with all of these chronically online everything devices is that you are never left alone with your thoughts, and thus never get ‘bored’. Everything wants a slice of your attention, with social media platforms being practically engineered to hoover up every last crumb of it, while counting on your inability to control your impulses and relying on your innate fear of missing out (FOMO), courtesy of you being a very social type of monkey.

For example, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Christina Koessmeier and Oliver B. Büttner investigated the causes behind the distracting effect from social media in particular. FOMO is a big reason, as we are social monkeys who generally like to be part of the group rather than excluded. Self-regulatory issues are many, such as preferring to pop over to a social media app or site rather than complete an unpleasant or difficult task. It feeds the reward center of your brain, even if you’re not actually accomplishing the task you set out to do.

One could argue here that the demise of the third place alongside the rise of ‘everything devices’ like smartphones has led to a situation where being chronically online is a way to compensate for the lack of real-life connections, albeit in an environment that’s mentally rather toxic due to how social media in particular works. By providing a sense of belonging – whether false or not – these online places become an important part of our identity.

That a lot of unhealthy behavior is associated with such a chronically online existence ought to be self-evident. Meanwhile the push towards ‘everything devices’ like smartphones isn’t due to corporate benevolence, but rather to trap all of us into endless subscription services, accessed via a terminal device explicitly designed to siphon off every last drop of our attention, focus, and money.

Escape The Trap

Rather than hapless insects, caught in the slowly solidifying tree sap that will inevitably doom them, we humans like to brag about our intellect and ability to innovate. Thus, at least some of us are trying to get out of this veritable tar pit of FOMO and social manipulation, even as we try to figure out what exactly went wrong down this path of Future Technology.
Motorola RAZR V3i mobile phone. (Source: Wikimedia)
The question is: how far exactly should we go back in time? This is a question that’s been on the minds of many, with a wide variety of solutions offered. The most extreme is of course the digital detox approach, whereby a person completely removes all smartphones and similar technology from their lives for a set period of time. Although showing positive effects on people’s mental health, this can of course only ever be a temporary intervention.

For many people the allure of switching away from smartphones and to feature phones (‘dumbphones’) is an appealing one. Personally this is a step that I have also taken, switching from a regular Android smartphone to a KaiOS-based TCL Flip 3 feature phone that’s slightly more full-featured than a Motorola Razr V3, but also equally as user-friendly and devoid of most non-phone functionality. Photos you take also are saved to internal memory, with no cloud storage unless you jump through serious hoops.

When you’re on a PC, it is of course much harder to escape the pull of FOMO and easy ‘rewards’ by doomscrolling or watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Here you can either focus on training your self-control, or by using a zero-distraction typing device that removes all temptation.

On the training side of things, the Pomodoro Technique can be done using a bog-standard kitchen timer to set the intervals, any of a number of online timers, special YouTube videos, or by building your own physical timer, with even just recently a few examples already popping up here on Hackaday.

Back To WordPerfect 5.1

It’s hard to argue with simply installing good ol’ WordPerfect 5.1 or equivalent on some DOS flavor in a system of your choice and typing away there. We have recently seen a SvarDOS-based environment that comes preloaded with a range of word processors and kin to get you started. Since you won’t even have networking, you won’t be distracted by anything. This can of course be replicated in a variety of freely available software, with FreeDOS and any word processor available from Archive.org being fair game.

You can also go down the ‘digital typewriter’ route, with some commercial options even being available here, such as the Zerowriter Ink. Alternatively you can go fully minimalistic with an ESP32-based writer deck, or opt for something vaguely more laptop-like. A lot here depends on how much you require in terms of formatting and editing features. Although sometimes you really just need to hammer out lots of words, in which case the portable equivalent of Notepad is fine, you may want to add at least some formatting.

Personally I’m quite the fan of the calming white-on-blue text with full word processing capabilities alongside the deafening noise of the buckle-spring keyboard of an IBM PS/2, but everyone has their own preferences. And maybe that is another benefit of breaking away from the Everything Device — you get to find out what works best for yourself.

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The USB-C port has become a defacto connectivity standard for modern devices, largely supplanting the ugly mess of barrel jacks and micro USB connectors that once cursed us. While their reliability is good, they don’t last forever, and can be a pain to replace in most devices if they do fail. However, a new part from JAE Electronics could change that.

The problem with replacing USB connectors in most hardware is that they’re soldered in place. To swap them out, you have to master both desoldering and soldering leads of a rather fine pitch. It’s all rather messy. In the interest of satisfying the EU’s new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), JAE Electronics has developed a USB-C connector that’s easier to replace. Rather than being soldered in, the part is simply clamped down on to a printed circuit board with small screws. As the part is torqued down, small gold-plated contacts are compressed into pads on the PCB to make the necessary contact.

The connector is fully compatible with USB 4 version 2.0 (don’t ask us how they number these things anymore). It comes in single and dual connector versions, and is capable of USB PD EPR at up to 240 W (5A/48V). The part does have some drawbacks—namely, the footprint of the metal-shelled part is somewhat larger than most soldered USB C connectors. Whether this precludes its use is very much an application-specific matter for product engineers to decide.

In any case, if you find yourself designing hardware with heavily-used USB C ports, you might find this part useful. It’s not widely available yet, but some parts should be landing at Mouser in coming months. We’ve explored some of the ways USB-C connectors can be fouled and damaged before, too. Sound off with your opinions on this new part in the comments.

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Thanks to [James] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/02/26/easily…

The guitarist Jimi Hendrix had a unique sound which has influenced countless musicians over the decades. He achieved it through mastery not only of his instrument, but of the complex feedback relationship between amplifier, environment, and guitar — coupled with a series of effects pedals including some then-unique ones made for him. Musical commentators have pored over his work for decades, but a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum is particularly interesting as it examines things from a technical perspective.

It centers around an electrical simulation of Hendrix’s effects chain, and makes an assertion that’s obvious on consideration but not the usual take on a Hendrix performance; that in his hands it became a wave synthesizer rather than the instrument itself. Certainly for anyone with an interest in analogue audio electronics as they pertain to musical synthesis it helps in placing the influence of the different circuits on the sound, and in hearing the familiar performances in a new light.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone take a modelling approach to a guitar effects chain, indeed it’s obvious something missing from the work above is the guitar itself.

Header image: Gemeente Rotterdam (Stadsarchief) CC-0.

hackaday.com/2026/02/26/the-en…

Over the last few centuries, behavioral psychologists have documented all kinds of ways of modifying our actions and the actions of various animals. From the famous Skinner boxes to many modern video game mechanics, animals and humans alike can learn through the addition or subtraction of various rewards and punishments. And it doesn’t only impact simple actions either; [Everything is Hacked] took this idea to the extreme, using painful electric shocks to teach himself to avoid making blunders while playing chess.

This positive punishment system uses a medical device called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to deliver an electric shock to the skin. The electrical jolt is routed through a custom-built, conductive chess board where each square is isolated from the others and controlled by its own relay. The pieces are conductive as well, so if one is placed on a square where it shouldn’t go a relay will switch on to quickly provide the behavioral modification. The control logic is provided by a Raspberry Pi running the Stockfish chess engine, and it keeps track of the locations of the positions of all the pieces by using MX switches in the base of each square on the board.

This project took [Everything is Hacked] over a year to get into a working condition, including having to rebuild the entire project twice after mishaps with baggage handling at an airline. But he was able to demo the board to the Open Sauce tech festival and even took it to his local park to play chess with the local hustlers. Unfortunately, he reports that he spent more time reworking and rewiring his board over that year than he did improving his chess game, so unfortunately he still hasn’t been able to win any of his money back yet. Perhaps combining this project with a chess-playing robot would help.

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Way, way back in the days when men wore beards and wide-lapelled suits in exotic colors, only NASA had access to photovoltaics and ‘solar’ meant solar thermal. In those days of appropriate technology, it was thought that the ultimate in thermal mass was a phase-change material– a salt or wax that in melting and re-freezing could hold far more heat than plain rock or water, which were more often used. Well, now that it’s the 21st century, we’ve got something even better. As Ars Technica reports about a recent paper in Science Magazine, Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) energy storage can blow that old stuff right out of the water.

Molecular energy storage? That’s where the sunburn comes in. A sunburn occurs because proteins in your skin are denatured– kinked, twisted, and knocked out of shape– by ultraviolet light. The researchers realized that those kinky proteins are pretty energetic: like a spring, they’re storing energy in their distorted structure. Even better, certain chemicals, like the pyrimidone in the study, don’t ‘relax’ the way a phase change material does. It’s not a matter of warming up and giving up the energy stored in the molecular structure when cooling down– the energy needs coaxed out, in this case by an acidic solution.

That poses problems for a closed-loop system, since you’d be continuously diluting the pyrimidone with heat-releasing acid and neutralizing base. On the other hand, 1.65 MJ/kg of energy storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re collecting it with nothing more technically advanced than a fluid running through clear tubing. Conveniently enough, researchers found a way to make this stuff liquid at room temperature.

Comparing the heat in this MOST storage material to electrical potential in a battery is a case of apples and oranges, but in terms of pure energy density the pyrimidone cooked up for the paper is in the same range as Li-Ion batteries. There is some self-discharge, in that the altered “dewar” state of the pyrimidone decays naturally, but with a half-life of upto 481 days, you could imagine storing up a tankful UV-altered pyrimidone all year round to provide your winter’s heat.
There’s not much power making it to surface in the UV, but lower energy photons cannot effect the transition.
It’s not perfect. Right now you get about 20 “charge cycles” before the molecules break down, but then, if you’re using this for seasonal load-spreading, a two-decade service life is nothing to shake a stick at. It’s only collecting energy from the UV range of the spectrum, which is a tiny fraction of the energy from our sun. The quantum efficiency of the molecule is rather poor as well– it takes a lot of photons to get a dewar transition.

With solar photovaltaics being as cheap as they are, thermal builds are few and far between– even solar water heaters are powered by PV these days. Of course if you’re somewhere that doesn’t get much sun, you could always go for wind power instead.

Thanks to [zit] for the tip! If you’ve seen a bright idea in the wild, or have one yourself, our tips line is open rain or shine.

hackaday.com/2026/02/25/the-mo…

There was a time when only the richest ham radio operators could have a radio with a panadapter. Back in the day, this was basically a spectrum analyzer that monitored a broad slice of the receiver’s intermediate frequency so you could see signals on either side of the receiver’s actual frequency. Today, with SDR technology and computers, this is an easy thing for receivers to implement. But what if you want to refit a classic radio? It isn’t that hard, and [Mirko Pavleski] shares his notes on how he tackled the project. You can also check it out in the video below.

The plan is simple. A FET amplifier taps the radio’s IF stage before the first IF filter. This provides good isolation and buffering. Then, an emitter follower stage provides a matched output to the SDR through a low-pass filter. The SDR remains tuned to the IF frequency, of course. The rest is essentially software and procedures.

Of course, your exact connection to your radio will differ unless you have the same receiver shown in the video. A modern scope with an FFT should be able to help you quickly locate a good spot, though.

Of course, you could just listen through the SDR, but that doesn’t seem sporting but that’s what it looks like he does in the demonstrations. Essentially, he’s using the radio’s RF system via the first IF mixer, then letting the SDR handle the rest. But you could just use the display and tune the radio instead.

If you really wanted a cool system, you could frequency count the internal frequencies and display the correct frequencies in software. Then you could also track the current frequency. This would make it seem more like a traditional panadpater and less like just replacing most of the radio’s features with an SDR.

We’ve seen these before, of course. Many times.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/25/adding…

Random numbers are very important to us in this computer age, being used for all sorts of security and cryptographic tasks. [Theory to Thing] recently built a device to generate random numbers using nothing more complicated than simple camera noise.

The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which [Theory to Thing] first paired with a temperature sensor as a source of randomness. However, it was quickly obvious that a thermocouple in a cup of tea wasn’t going to produce nice, jittery, noisy data that would make for good random numbers. Then, inspiration struck, when looking at vision from a camera with the lens cap on. Particularly at higher temperatures, speckles of noise were visible in the blackness—thermal noise, which was just what the doctor ordered.

Thus, the ESP32 was instead hooked up to an OV3660 camera, which was then covered up with a piece of black electrical tape. By looking at the least significant bits of the pixels in the image, it was possible to pick up noise when the camera should have been reporting all black pixels. [Theory to Thing] then had the ESP32 collate the noisy data and report it via a web app that offers up randomly-generated answers to yes-or-no questions.

[Theory to Thing] offers up a basic statistical exploration of bias in the system, and shows how it can be mitigated to some degree, but we’d love a deeper dive into the maths to truly quantify how good this system is when it comes to randomness. We’ve featured deep dives on the topic before. Video after the break.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/25/random…

If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the top of the part, emitting a small amount of plastic to smooth the surface. [Make Wonderful Things] asserts that you don’t need to do this time-consuming step. Instead, he proposes using statistical analysis to identify the optimal settings to place the top layer correctly the first time, as shown in the video below.

The parameters he thinks make a difference are line width, flow ratio, and print speed. Picking reasonable step sizes suggested that there were 19,200 combinations of settings to test. Obviously, that’s too many, so he picked up techniques from famous mathematician [George E. P. Box] and also used Bayesian analysis to reduce the amount of printing required to converge on the perfect settings.

Did it work? Judging from the video, it appears to have done so. The best test pieces looked as good as the one that used traditional ironing. Compared to ironing, the non-ironed parts saved about 34% of print time. Not bad.

Of course, there are variations on traditional ironing, so your results may vary.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/25/stop-i…

One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation he uses to control his smart home.

This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that surely pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together.

[Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how.

It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.

This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January.

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hackaday.com/2026/02/25/contro…

Climbing is a cool sport. With that said, like everything, it’s even better if you integrate lots of glowing colorful LEDs. To that end, [Superbender] worked up this fun climbing wall that features interactive lighting built right in.

Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.

[Superbender] uses the lighting for fun interactive games. One example is called Hot Lava, where after each climbing pass, more holds are forbidden until you can’t make the run anymore. Chase the Blues is another fun game, where you have to climb towards a given hold, at which point it moves and you have to scamper to the next one.

We’ve featured similar projects before from other inventive climbers. Video after the break.

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One of the more promising 3D printing technologies that hasn’t quite yet had its spotlight is volumetric 3D printing. Researchers from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, have developed a new method that uses a high-speed periscope instead of rotating the printing volume — resulting in print times of less than one second.

Normal volumetric printing uses a rotating volume of photosensitive resin to print nearly any geometry desired. However, this method presents issues when printing at high speeds. If you rapidly rotate a liquid, it won’t exactly stay still. So why not rotate the projector itself? This change also allows the use of less viscous resins, which is particularly useful if you want to pump fluid around.

Why would you want to pump around liquid? Scalability of course! Printing in seconds while pumping the results into a collection vessel would allow for mass production more flexible than traditional ejection methods. The researchers manage to keep quality high with some fancy algorithmic correction, which allows for accuracy on the scale of μm.

While this technology still doesn’t find a common space among average hobbyists, this may soon change…especially with these mass manufacturing capabilities. For similar volumetric printing capabilities, check out xolography.

hackaday.com/2026/02/25/sub-se…

It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.

If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.

The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time.

Rigid? Count (Zeppelin) Me Out

Airships come in multiple types: rigid, non-rigid, and semi-rigid. Most people — my past self included — assume that the rigid type is more advanced. Unlike rigid airships, which are stabilized by an aluminum skeleton (or a wooden one, in the case of the Schütte-Lanz ships of the Great War), a blimp’s shape is maintained by gas pressure alone. Just a balloon with motors, if we’re being uncharitable. This limits the maximum speed, as the aerodynamic pressure of moving through the atmosphere increases with the square of the airspeed, and must always be lower than the internal pressure of the gas bag. You can’t even pressurize the gas bag much to compensate, because then the density of the lift gas gets too high to actually, well, lift.
Putting a skeleton inside your airship– like this one in USS Akron– seems like such a good idea, but history suggests otherwise. Image: US Navy
Put a skeleton in there, and your airship can be much, much larger. It can go much faster. It can become a flying aircraft carrier, like the ill-fated USS Arkon, and its ill-fated sister ship, USS Macon. The U.S. Navy has only ever fielded five rigid airships; only one survived long enough to be decommissioned. It is with no disrespect to the brave men and women who served– and lost their lives– aboard those silver giants that we dismiss them from our narrative here. They were a worthy experiment, but a failed one. By contrast, the U.S. Navy fielded 166 blimps in the Second World War, and only a handful were lost, mostly during ground handling, and one to enemy action.

So, how was an N-class blimp, also known as a ZPG-2, in the designation system of the day, or SZ-1A after 1962, able to ride out a storm much worse than the one that sank its rigid-framed predecessors? It’s probably precisely because it lacked that rigid frame. The non-rigid envelope of the blimps could bend, buckle, twist, and alter their shape in response to strains that would break the keel of a Zeppelin. Non-rigid airships can quite literally flex on their rigid cousins when it comes to airworthiness.

The flexing skin of a blimp turns the entire gas-bag into one giant de-icing boot to boot, keeping yet another weather hazard at bay. Icing is a great danger to aircraft: when conditions are just wrong, like during the January storm described above, it’s easy for the weight of ice to build up and bring down any aircraft without an effective de-icing system. De-icing boots are one such system: rubber membranes, typically on the leading edge of the wing and tail surfaces of an airplane, that are inflated to flake off ice. On airplanes, they’re addons, but it’s a built-in bonus to flying a blimp.

Of course another key advantage of non-rigid airships is that they’re just plain cheaper. Being smaller, they require less crew, less ground crew, and smaller hangers, but a small rigid would have the same advantage. More importantly, especially during wartime, is that a Zeppelin requires everything you’d use to build the equivalent blimp, plus all the Duraluminum (or other material) going into its rigid frame. Logistically speaking, blimps were a no-brainer if the US wanted to field a lot of airships, and at one point they certainly did.
This hangar was designed for two Zeppelins, but fit a lot more blimps during the war.
Image: US Navy

But Why?

Unlike a certain (in)famous penguin, the US Navy knew exactly what it was doing when it ordered the N-class airships after World War Two. As stated, they had over a hundred blimps in service during that conflict, and racked up more Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) flight time than any other organization has before or since: 550,000 hours split over 55,900 sorties in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. While the institutional knowledge is long gone, it’s safe to say that in those days nobody knew airships like the U.S. Navy knew airships.
The one ship escorted by blimp was torpedoed by U-boat. That’s a pretty good record.
Image: US Navy
The vast majority of the wartime fleet — some 135 examples — were of the K-class. These ships were designed with a specific mission in mind: antisubmarine warfare. Blimps vs subs wasn’t a new idea; the Americans had worked with the Royal Navy’s u-boat hunting blimps in the First World War. Though the Royal Navy gave up on the idea after the conflict, interest remained on the other side of the Atlantic, and history shows the Yanks were right to persist with it. Of roughly 89,000 ships in blimp-escorted convoys, only one, the tanker Persephone, was sunk, ironically off the coast of New Jersey, not terribly far from the Lakehurst home of LTA.

The sub-hunting blimps were perhaps making it up as they went along. On paper, though, the airship is ideal for the role: without needing to burn fuel to stay airborne, it can have absurdly long loiter times. Its low speed is of no issue when shadowing convoys that have to move at the speed of the slowest merchant vessel– even the HX series “fast convoys” didn’t exceed 13 knots (24 km/h). Blimps of the K-class could cruise at 50 kn (92 km/h), and dash at up to 68 kn (125 km/h), which proved more than sufficient to keep up.

When the class was designed in 1937, its ability to cruise low and slow was ideal for hunting submarines with the Mk.I eyeball, but by the time the K-class was fielded in numbers in 1942, they were also equipped with first-generation radar, magnetic detection coils, and even primitive sonoboys after 1943. The class proved flexible and continued to be upgraded with the latest equipment until the last “K-ship” was retired from active duty in 1959.
Mocked up in yellow, the sonoboys and bombs are easy to spot on this surviving gondola at the National Museum of Naval Aviation.
Image: “Blimp” by Pedro Vera, CC-BY-2.0
At 251 ft 8 in (76.73 m) long, with a gas-bag diameter of 57 ft 10 in (17.63 m), the K-ships could lift a crew of 9 in relative comfort, with fuel to feed their twin Pratt & Whitney R-1340 radials for 38 hours of normal operation. Idling the engines and making use of air currents could extend that number by quite a lot compared to cruising steadily, of course. As stated above, in wartime the K-ships carried magnetic detectors, sonobouys and radars for U-boat detection, along with four depth bombs and a .50 cal machine gun for weapons.

If four bombs doesn’t sound like much, well, that’s probably why no U-boats were recorded killed by Navy airships. On the other hand, the main mission of the blimps was to protect convoys, not to sink subs. “Damaged and driven off” was good enough, especially when the blimp could track the wounded u-boat from above and direct other assets like destroyers to make the kill, as often happened. There was a larger M-class designed during the war that was half again the size of the K-ships and could thus carry eight depth charges, but only four were built before the conflict ended.
While it had perhaps not the most dignified post-war career, Puritan’s control car survives at the New England Air Museum.
Image: Akron Beacon Journal, via The Lighter than Air Society.
Post-war, one K-ship by the name Puritan was sold back to Goodyear and equipped with 1,820 incandescent light bulbs to serve as a floating ad ticker, which perhaps shows the versatility of the design. Alas, ad revenues did not cover the cost of keeping the 425,000 ft³ (12,035 m³) envelope filled with precious helium. Civilian blimps since have been of more modest size.

The LTAs that Aren’t

Speaking of precious helium, in order to conserve that lift gas, the Navy actually operated their blimps as Lighter-Than-Air craft as little as they possibly could, both during and after the war. An annoying thing about airships is that they get lighter the longer they fly as they run down their gas tanks. It is possible to run an engine on a hydrocarbon gas with a density similar to air, like the “blau gas” used by the Graf Zeppelin in the 1920s, but this has one major drawback: it’s a major logistical headache to require a special fuel for a relatively small number of units. Though there was one prototype with a blau gas style fuel in the 30s, the US Navy put logistics first. For the war and several years afterwards, everything that the Navy flew would burn AvGas, at least until the jet age made things annoyingly complicated for quartermasters.
Landings– like this one on CVE-120–were a lot easier when you weren’t fighting the full lift potential of that big gas bag.
Image: US Navy
Without special fuel, the issue of excess lift can be mitigated by condensing water from the exhaust, but that doesn’t quite balance out, so the problem still remains on long flights. Eventually one must either vent helium to reduce lift, which is wasteful, or take on ballast to make up for lost mass, which can disrupt operations. The alternative the US Navy preferred was to fly “heavy”.

Yeah, it turns out hybrid airships– craft that combine lift gas with aerodynamic lift–aren’t a new idea. You might not think of the teardrop-shaped gas bag of a classic blimp as an airfoil, but with a little airspeed just a modest nose-up attitude– what a pilot would call ‘angle of attack’–the blimp can get considerable dynamic lift. By accepting the tradeoff of requiring a takeoff run, the blimps could get into the air with enough dynamic lift to account for the expected fuel burn, and come back to base with only so much lift capacity that could be cancelled out by trimming the ship downwards.

The Cold War Era

Even in death, they served. This K-ship proved that 5 miles was too close to 5 kT in the Plumbob-Stokes test.
Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Field Office
After the war, most of the K-ships were crated-up and decommissioned, and their air and ground crews were amongst the first to be demobilized. “Most” does not mean “all”, and once the thrill of peace turned into the uneasy truce of the Cold War, Uncle Sam was glad to have those airships. The Soviets had submarines, too, after all.

Rather than continue with building more of the M-class, the decision was made to update the existing stocks and produce improved K-class ships for the immediate post-war period. The wartime ships that were not decommissioned were updated with better electronics and a 20% larger gas bag, getting the designation ZPK2 and then a further upgrade to ZPK3 standard. Fifteen new K ships were built by Goodyear after the war and delivered starting in 1953 under the designation ZPK-4. The last revision of that design, ZPK-5, was built with an inverted “Y” tail instead of the standard cruciform to allow for greater nose-up attitude during the ‘heavy’ takeoffs mentioned above. Twelve ZPK-5s were built by Goodyear and delivered from 1955.

While the K-class was being modernized with better sensors and weapons, the US Navy’s LTA program recognized that it could not simply coast on legacy wartime engineering.They therefore commissioned Goodyear for a clean-sheet design that would be another 50% larger than even the four M-ships, which were kept in service until 1956. These new airships would become the N-class whose all-weather adventures this article opened with.
Diagram of a ZPG-2W N-class blimp. The antisubmarine ZPG-2 lacked the height-finding radar on top of the gas bag, but had the same dimensions otherwise. Image: US Navy
While the ZPG-2W whose triumph we described above were built to serve the airborne early warning role, most– twelve out of seventeen–of the “Nan ships”, as the class was called, were initially designed as bigger, badder sub-killers in case war broke out with the Soviets.

They had better down-looking radars– the AN-20, the best available at the time–much improved sonobouys, more sensitive magnetic anomaly sensors, and homing torpedoes. In war games against US and allied diesel-electric subs, like the GUPPY class, they proved very effective indeed, as did the improved K-ships. Against the new, nuclear-powered USS Nautilus, they were much less successful, but so were fixed-wing and helicopter assets. Doctrine that relied on spotting subs while recharging at snorkel or on surface was ill-suited to deal with a ship that could run submerged for months.

Improving on the control arrangement of the ZPK-5s, the Nan ships were built with an X-shaped tail to allow for even greater pitch angles during takeoff without tailstrikes. The ruddervators on the X-tail could also be controlled by one pilot, compared to earlier blimps which needed separate operators for elevator and rudder. The largest difference in design was perhaps the buried engines: unlike previous Navy blimps, which used radial engines hung from the gondola, the ZPG-2 Nan ships kept their two 800 HP Wright Cyclones indoors. This was supposed to allow for maintenance during flight, and it allowed the engines to be coupled together via a clutch, allowing single-engine cruising. As the air-early-warning blimps proved in 1957, these were all-weather craft.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) squadrons gave a similar demonstration in 1960 with “Operation Whole Gale” during which the Nan ships provided 24/7 coverage for two full months, again in the teeth of winter’s worst weather. In spite of their best efforts to make use of wind and storms, no submarine got past the blimps during the operation.
ZPG-2 “Snow Bird”, departing NAS South Weymouth, Mass. on its record-setting flight in March 1957. Image: US Navy
The post-war record of the US Navy’s blimps is full of such impressive moments. The service was very much looking to prove itself, and so jumped at opportunities to demonstrate the blimps’ capabilities. Arctic expeditions? A Nan-ship proved its worth on 24-hour patrols between Churchill, Manitoba and Resolute, Baffin Island– the last airship to cross the Arctic Circle. Another stunt in 1957 set a record for unrefueled flight: a circumnavigation of the Atlantic basin from Massachusetts to Portugual, North Africa, and finally ending in Florida that took 264 hours and spanned 9,448 nautical miles (17,500 km). Guinness will tell you that Graf Zepplin’s 71-hour 6,384.5 km trip from Fedrickshaven to Lakehurst holds the record for airship flight, but that’s seriously out-of-date. For a rigid, sure, that’s the record, but for any LTA? Blimps win. Blimps actually win all the airship records save for speed and size, and none of those records stand from the “golden age” of the 1930s.

Takeways

That’s maybe the lesson here. Blimps win. I consider myself something of an aviation geek, and have multiple books on airships. All of them tell the same story: blimps were a sideshow, Zeppelins were the pinnacle of airship engineering, and it all ended with the Hindenburg. That’s the story everyone knows, just like everyone knows that airships are useless in any kind of bad weather.

What everyone knows is wrong. The problem with the story we all know is that it ends 24 years early, and leaves out more flights than it includes. Add in those 24 extra years of innovation, and the blimps come off looking a lot better in comparison.

The last flight of a US Navy dirigible with a US Navy crew was in August 1961. The ZPG-2 Nan ships were followed by a larger ZPG-3: bigger again, with a larger, more capable AN-70 radar hiding in the gasbag, the ZPG-3 was the largest blimp ever fielded. Its capability didn’t matter– there was no money for blimps. Imagine a line of Admirals standing before the US Congress, hats in hand, and one asks for money for nuclear-powered submarines to smite the enemies of Uncle Sam with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles wielding atomic fire, and the next man in line wants money for blimps. Airships seemed positively old-fashioned in comparison, and money was tight. The blimps were cut.
A giant ZPG-3W sits at its mooring mast, while a ZPG-2W takes off and a K-ship hovers in the background. Only two ZPG-3s were ever built. Image: US Navy
Yes, they provided an all-weather ASW and AEW capability nothing else could match… but other assets, ships and airplanes and helicopters, could do 90% of the job without requiring the expensive, dedicated infrastructure the blimps did. Airships were cut from the U.S. Navy the same year as seaplanes and the Regulus cruise missile program. You might say they’re the only things ever destroyed by the Polaris missile subs, but that’s arguably a good thing.

All the hot venture capital money is being sucked up by the AI bubble right now, and even if it wasn’t, the trendy thing in aviation is electric vertical takeoff and landing. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an airship renaissance just around the corner– there is always an airship renaissance just around the corner. That it never results in anything but prototypes is irrelevant. LTA is just too enticing a technology to ever give up. If we ever are to get that renaissance to bear fruit, though, we’re going to have to have better stories.

If you’re focused on the Hindenburg going down in flames, or the Akron and Macon breaking up over water, airships seem like a bad bet. If you remember the Nan ships bouncing and wiggling their way through January snowstorms, manned by Navy “squids” with the one-winged dirigible badge on their breasts, then LTA starts to sound more reasonable.

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