Unique LTA Platform #
SkyScroll is a compound airship, which represents a completely new class of lighter-than-air craft.
In its simplest form, it consists of two cylindrical guide airships which unroll a buoyant flat envelope in the lower stratosphere.
Relatively compact at launch, it can ultimately deploy a surface area up-to 100 times greater than that of the guide airships alone.
Unlike conventional high-altitude airships, the SkyScroll guide airships can be completely filled with lifting gas at ground level. As the system ascends, and the ambient pressure drops, the lifting gas expands out of the guide airships to fill the unrolling flat envelope, making it buoyant.
Uniquely for a variable volume aerostat, the flat envelope is both the payload and the expansion volume.
Once deployed, the height-constrained flat envelope floats in the air like a raft on the sea, it does not need the airships to hold it up. In fact in theory the guide airships could detach and descend to the ground, to retrieve and deploy another flat envelope.
Extracts from the Patent #
A variable-volume aerostat, consisting of a flat envelope, joined to guide airships.
The flat envelope is deployed by rotation of cylindrical guide airships or suspended rollers.
The deployed flat envelope is self-supporting, and up-to 100X larger than the guide airships.
Ready For Development #
SkyScroll:
- Is designed to use existing materials and existing technologies
- Requires no fundamental breakthroughs in materials, manufacturing or control systems