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Keep in mind, there's not "The" airship to be designed for "The" mission. Reqiurements differ widely, and so does the design approach.>>>
Definitely! Everyone has their pet designs. Mine is a solar-powered lifting body dirigible[!]
The design project should have many branches so that potential designers could choose the design which turned them on the most and therfore they would contribute more than they would for somebody else's favorite design. Soon, one design would develop momentum and move ahead of the others and that would attract more helpers and it would move even faster.
I see a designers' webpage with thumbnails of Sketchup 3D models of all submitted designs. Visitors could download the underlying Sketchup file and modify and improve it to their liking and offer it back to the webmaster. There's the bottleneck; someone's going to have to judge if the offer is good enough to publish. Otherwise some goofballs will want to publish their crap designs. Maybe their stuff could be put on an "honorable mention" page so that their ideas won't be totally ignored. And there might be a grain of merit in them.
But I love the co-operative design concept. [see my moribund near space elevator design effort at members.aol.com/beanstalkr/project/
The process could be called WikiDesign. The Wikipedia is successful, so could wikidesign! cheers for high flight, Nav in Key West
