Card C00267

RBF DEFINITIONS
Air Delivery & Submarine Cities:

"You asked me how much should go into air transportation or to
building
new harbors.... Well, as for carrying passengers, ships
have gone out-- 100 percent -- no longer a way to get from here
to there; not even as local ferries. The main tonnage on the
sea is going to become the ore carriers; I think they will
probably do extremely well. They don't have loads that are
going to pollute our Earth.
(1)
"I have often pointed out the factor that if you double the
length of a ship you get four times the surface and eight times
the volume and twice as much payload-per-skin surface, which is
the
critical factor. So it might seem that it would also pay
for airplanes to get bigger and bigger, but they found that they
would have to get the runways longer and longer-- which approaches
the
point of no return. Obviously, the next phase is vertol, but
the
United states is not doing much about that as there are too
many people making money in the airplane runway business. So
we got hooked, into a pattern. The English are the only ones
who have
sarried vertol into being-- I know the Russians did too;
but the English are the ones who have shown that vertol is
completely practical. One could have very large airships and"

Tape #2 transcript, pp.6-7; RBF to W. Wolf, 15 Jun'74