A vacuum airship is a rigid airship, inside the shell of which a technical vacuum of a given depth is created and maintained, as a result of which, in accordance with Archimedes' law, an aerostatic lifting force arises as the difference between the Archimedes force and the weight of the apparatus as a whole. This is the definition and theoretical substantiation of motion for the apparatus.
This has been invented for a long time. For example, an appendix to the Niva newspaper, December 1891:
However, even before that, in 1670, the Jesuit Francesco Terzi de Lana published the book "Prodromo, ouero faggio di alcune inuentioni nuoue premeffo all'arte maestra" ("Preceding, that is, Description of some new inventions, foreshadowing the Great Art"), in the 6th chapter which he described a ship with a mast and a sail on it. This vessel, according to Lana, could fly, supported by four copper pre-evacuated spheres with a diameter of about 7.5 meters each and with a thickness of their copper wall about 0.1 [4] mm. Francesco Lana believed that such an aircraft could be lighter than air.
In 1887, Arthur De Bausset published a book and tried to raise money for a cylindrical vacuum airship by organizing the Transcontinental Aerial Navigation Company of Chicago. However, his patent proposal was rejected.
In 1974, the London Patent Office published application no. 1345288 MKI B64B 1/58 Pedrick AP "Aircraft Improvement Provided by Evacuated Balls or Other Shape Evacuated Vessels". The invention lies in the fact that the shell of the ball must be double. Air is pumped out of the inner sphere, and gas is pumped into the cavity between the inner and outer spheres (hydrogen or helium will come off). According to the inventor, this gas must maintain the given shape of the shell from being squeezed by the atmosphere (the priority of this idea belongs to de Bossay). Both spheres are fastened together in many places.
However, the matter did not come to the practical implementation of this invention (due to the insufficient strength of the material of modern shells) and to this day there is no information about the widespread use of this invention.
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To ensure the integrity of the evacuated Lahn spheres under the pressure of the Earth's atmosphere (using even modern structural materials), it would be necessary to increase their wall thickness, which would lead to a violation of the buoyancy condition. Lana's ball must have sufficient strength and rigidity so that atmospheric pressure does not crush it, and be light enough (mass) of the structure to take off due to aerostatic lift.
In connection with the above, in 1993 in Russia an invention was developed and patented for a device for creating a lifting force of a vacuum airship, where it was proposed to apply dynamic compensation of atmospheric pressure to facilitate its shell. The theoretical part of the invention has been published. The results of these studies instill optimism in the issue of ensuring the possibility of creating a flight model of a vacuum airship.
Currently, there is no published and patented data on the further development of the idea embodied in this invention.
So it turns out, while it is technically impossible to implement it, or in fact it is not really necessary?