Multi occupant means multi requirements?

I'm betting this will involve certification for sure. Additionally, this will take a lot of money. When  Count Zeppelin ran short of personal funds, he got permission to start a lottery which produced gobs of money quickly.

Questions:

1. How do you fund a multi-occupant ( more than two I assume) airship?

2. How do you fund certification?

3. How many people need to be in a multi-occupant ship for it to pay for itself?

4. How do you control the CG shifts when junior runs back to the bathroom?

Well multi-occupant could be anywhere from 2 people on up. I was thinking the next step up from ultralight would be a 2 person kit airship. Do kit aircraft have to be certified? That I don't know. 

Next, we may want to do it as a certified airship. 

The difference between a two place and a three or four place airship is pretty small. So it would be easy to step up a little bit in size. 

The next step after that would be a small commercial passenger airship. Like 6-8 person maybe. 

After that, it's not really a small blimp anymore..

Even if we have success, we will probably want to stay below the size class of the zeppelin NT. 

Two or three of the Zeppelin NT have been sold and are in commercial use. Maybe we could get some numbers from them.

I want a touring airship for two plus cargo. This would probably have to be a kit. 

Hopefully we can use funds from selling UL airships to fund bigger airships.

I like that touring idea. That's why I lean toward a sport pilot version.

BTW, is there a list of everything in the forum and conferences that everyone has agreed on? I still hear comments about things not covered in the poll you took.

Well, everything we have agreed on should be in the "discussion with engineers" thread. If there are other areas that we should poll, I'm open to suggestions. 

I asked one of my friends to check out this forum. He liked a lot of what he saw. His only criticism was that different threads of thought were kind of scattered here and there among the forum sub topics. As he read through several items, there was one he wanted to go back to and he couldn't find it.

So I was wondering if it's time to review the entire forum and gather all of the requirement eggs into one basket.
For every agreement there should be a reason for that choice. If you have a list of items chosen and the reasons, it's real easy to generate requirements from the list. It also gives people a place to state misgivings  about a choice. From this you get a list of operational restraints.

To make these lists connective, I would suggest a spreadsheet.

Just a suggestion.

He's right. I actually had to copy a post out to 'my documents' so I could refer to it when needed. Some tidying now would be nice, and maybe a 'search forums' thing.
I usually just go to 'recent posts' and view from there.

I support anything that might improve organization. I have attempted this in the last week by adding new subtopics and moving a few items. The problem is that the discussion is so varied it becomes hard to categorize. And the topics wonder; even this line of discussion should be a new thread. The forum operates more like a stream of consciousness than anything else. That is probably because I don't know how to moderate very well. 

Here is a new thread for further discussion in this area.
http://smallblimps.lefora.com/2010/04/06/organize-forum/

If you review the spreadsheet I posted, by scaling up a basic design based on repeatable units, Multi occupant airships can be had with similar construction jigs and manufacturing methods.

I think a two person experimental light sport airship kit should be the next step. That way we can save money on certification, and we will be able to fly with only a light sport licence instead of a standard licence. That will save about $2k and a couple months of training (that is a guesstimate).

I thought is was half the training time that a real license. Surely that would save more than 2k$ !

Ok, it is more of a savings than I remembered. A light sport licence is about half the time and half the cost of a standard private licence. http://www.aopa.org/letsgoflying/ready/certs/categories.html

Another way a sports pilot can save money is to get certified to repair/overhaul aircraft engines.

If we're on an airship and we're not using certified engines.......

I don't know if anything that flies HAS to or not.