While most of the planes in this section are original designs, these four at the top are the work of Roland Payens, a French aero-eng who did his best work between WWI and WWII. His sleek delta-wing design showed real promise, but before he got any into full production, the Germans invaded and his career was curtailed for the duration. After the liberation, Payens realized that aeronautics had leap-frogged over him and he designed no more planes.

The Russian Antonov ANT-25bis

Which brings us back to the Connaught and Cornwall non-existent Web Home Page.

The 'Naval Airship Construction Company' got a third lease on life when I entertained the notion of building 3D Naval Airships to sell on websites for 3D Computer Pilots. I was much into designing fanciful seaplanes around that time. I had a program that allowed me to build a model that could be imported into Microsoft Flight Sims; complete with moving control surfaces that would respond to joystick commands. But all was not as simple as it seemed. The program necessary to do this was a 'lite' version of 3D StudioMax...and Max has a wicked learning curve. The 'lite' version was just as bad. Plus...when it came time to give the plane attributes like speed, rate of climb, weight, fuel consumption, etc. you were soon into writing computer code, and I have no head for that.

Once again, C & C disappeared beneath the waves. Below are a few candidates for the C & C stable; mostly drawn from fiction. With the next post, I'll bring out some of my original designs.

So…the dream of putting a real, physical, if somewhat diminished, zeppelin in the air fizzled. (such is the stuff of dreams)…literally foundered under its own weight. Followed by the comic book itself. By the time I pulled the plug, I had drawn about 20 pages of a 32-pager. The problem was, by the time I got to page 20, my drawing ability had improved to sufficiently to make the earliest pages look crude by comparison. So I re-inked first one, then another. Sometimes, only part of a page would offend me, but nonetheless I was spending more time cleaning up after myself than moving the story forward. I put it on ‘pause’ and set my sights on a few of the shorter stories I had plotted out; four, and eight pages long.

‘Hotspur” languished until the mid-nineties. Until I got computer literate. One of the first 3D objects I built was a huge Zeppelin. This morphed into “The Heir Aloft”. Now the story involved the zeppelin as a Barge-Of-State which, when given a colorful crew and passenger list identical to the Victorian Hotspur, is tasked with delivering the heir to the throne to some vague, ill-defined place where he is expected to perform some useless, largely ceremonial duty. Useless to the world at large, mayhap, but deadly serious to the cast aboard the airship where careers, honor, and life itself, is staked on whether or not the zeppelin will reach its destination. Now, since the Age of Comix had passed, I thought to start an on-line kid’s site featuring a twice-weekly, serial, on-line adventure novel. But the applications we were using back then were ill-suited to modeling seamless, human figures; ‘bones’ with which to pose/animate these figures had not been invented. Once again, the zeppelin project went dormant.

Well…no sooner had the fateful words issued from Mark Seymour’s mouth (“Hey, we could build a model of ‘Hotspur’ right here in the apartment!’) than the hard, cold, mechanical reality began to set in.

What must be kept in mind is that we were not going to build a ‘Hindenburg’ type Zeppelin [sleek, streamlined, modern, efficient…where everything is housed inside, engines and all] ; we wanted an airship that would be the height of fin-de-siècle’ design sensibility…aerodynamics be damned. We wanted a boney, primitive-but-muscular design with multi-plane control surfaces, fins, bracing wires, etc. The engines, on the exterior, were out at the ends of long girders, and could only be reached for in-flight servicing by narrow cat-walks. Not content with a control gondola poking out through the bow, we planned to install a two-story house complete with porches and exterior walkways. In fact, a series of large, external cabins with large windows were envisioned along the length of the keel. One could move from one to another from inside, but, in addition, they were all connected on the outside by walkways and ladders. Perilous, to be sure, but breath-taking. 'Hotspur' was seen by its designers as a City In The Sky.

As Mark spun out the dream, it certainly seemed doable. We would build a series of rings and link them up with a stout keel and stringers running fore-and-aft to hold a series of helium-filled balloons. Then add the superstructure, or, in this case, the under-structures. To us, this was going to be the real fun part: building all the Victorian details. We saw ourselves happily spending evenings modeling cupolas, walkways, ladders, French doors, etc. Actually, we saw the Zeppelins' gas bag as a prosaic necessity for all the decoration we hoped to lard on it. It's as if a cake is but the dull requirement to hold up the icing. After we had discussed the icing at some length, it was time to start calculating what it was going to take to get it off the ground. Remember; we had not yet decided what kind of engine to install. Some model airplane engine, to be sure; batteries would be prohibitively heavy. Nor had we decided which radio-control rig to use. (This was in the '70s: no internet, no micro-processors that will fit on your thumb-nail). Mark looked up the per-cubic-foot lifting ability of helium and started to calculate. (Take out your handkerchiefs here!)

It quickly became evident that, simply to lift itself, the gas bag would have to be 54 ft long and the rings 6 ft in diameter. This is before adding all our beloved gondolas, cabins, walkways, ladders, external engine pylons, fins, people, (this was scaled to use HO gauge people). This is before adding so much as a coat of paint. Even trying to engineer it for hydrogen, despite the hazard, was a no-go. Hydrogen is a better lifting agent than helium, but not that much better. There's an economy-of-scale if you're lifting a real Zeppelin, but not a 54 ft. model. We were skunked.

The whole gizmo

Lest the complete history be lost to, well, history, the company was actually entitled The Connaught & Cornwall Naval Rigid Airship Design & Construction Works, Ltd., but that wouldn't fit the blog template. As designed, the airship model (some twenty-feet plus, as I recall) wouldn't fit in the apartment we were sharing at the time, either, so that impeded its construction, alas. It would've been a beautiful thing...

As luck would have it, it all started with comic books, or, more to the point, ‘comix’. By the time I moved to California in ’69 I had conceived a great fascination with the Underground Comix, specifically with their idiosyncratic drawing styles, all in black and white, and utterly irreverent. I wanted to have one of my own out there in print, but my drawing skills were modest, at best. I began a new regimen: returning home from work, I’d flip on the TV (for noise), crack a cold beer, sit on the floor with my back to the couch with a drawing board on my lap, and start filling newsprint pads full of sketches of people and things. With time, these things began to sort themselves into storylines; the sketches became page layouts with speech balloons to be filled. ‘Took about six years, but at the end of it I could draw. ‘Connaught and Cornwall’ stems directly from the my first serious go at creating a full 32 page comic. It was called “H.M.S.Hotspur”.

“H.M.S.Hotspur” began when I was reading a bit of WWI history. It seems that when England’s King George V ascended the throne in 1910, he wanted the actual coronation to take place in India. (Seeing as he was King of England and Emperor of India) Parliament, however, didn’t think that would actually be legal, or, if it was, it was still definitely illegal to take the Crown Jewels out of England, and that finished that. It gave me a starting point. In my story, George V does go to India, and the Crown Jewels are transported on board a huge Zeppelin (Hotspur) which has been secretly built in northern Scotland. Sending the Crown Jewels by air makes for perfect security, and the unveiling of Hotspur at the Coronation Durbar ( an assembly of chieftains to swear fealty to a new ruler) would provide a fine show of British Imperial muscle as Hotspur dwarfs anything the Germans can put forward. On board, there is a cross section of Victorian society: lesser nobility, military, diplomats, European notables, and representatives from virtually every Crown Colony, especially India. Howsoever; not everyone on board is what they appear to be and there are those who have a strong interest in seeing that Hotspur does not arrive in India. It was this monstrously large Zeppelin that Mark Seymour decided we should build and thus gave rise to the Connaught and Cornwall Rigid Naval Airship Construction Co.