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To: Reagan DuBose who wrote (4239)	8/13/1998 1:28:00 AM
From: Mr. Adrenaline	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10852

Oops! I did basically the same thing you did, but when I rechecked my numbers, I couldn't get the same answer as I had gotten before. Apologizes to all. I should have at least written them out before I punched them in to a calculator. As penance, I brushed up on my spherical trig, and came up with the "exact" equation for calculating the horizon to horizon distance (which will be the diameter of a circle on the face of the spherical Earth, compared to the flat approximation we had been using): D = Deacos(Re/(Re+h)) Where: De is the diameter of the Earth Re is the radius of the Earth h is the altitude of the blimp When you take the acos (arc cosine) be sure that the calculator is set to "radians". Using this method gives a horizon to horizon to diameter of 645 mi. This number frankly amazes me that it is so high. I guess one reason that I didn't feel the need to double check my 40 mi number was that I had read on their Web page that two would be needed "for metro areas like Tokyo". So much for my supposition that they would need 3,000 to compete with G. Payload is not my strong suit, so I'm going to quit now before I dig myself in deeper.. ;-) I too feel fascinated with this, and hope that no one is growing weary of the topic. The reason I am fascinated by it is that it would be such a difficult problem to solve. I don't think those problems are entirely insurmountable, but I do think they would be cost ineffective. Regards, Mr A