Did you know that there are only 25 working blimps in existence today? it’s a shocking number for something so grand and in essence is just a giant floating balloon. But the reality of it all kind of makes sense, the whole reason for so few of these comes down to cost. In our modern day, it may cost around $100,000 just to operate the aircraft for a few hours (due to it using a huge amount of helium which is quite pricy) and that without much use except for advertisement or tourism. Still , it’s such an interesting innovative piece of aviation technology that did have practical use throughout history such as the weaponized airships that saw combat during WW1. that being said for this assignment, I wanted to create another novelty item that one can assemble and display to have that little piece of history or nostalgia (more on that in a bit).

This blimp or what others might see as a dart or fishing float is recreated here and then converted into stacked and radial slices. The stacked version almost makes it look cartoonish, like a giant fish. the radial slice however makes it look like an actual skeleton frame of the aircraft, with the radial slice option removing its enitre shell and making it look very abstract.

Finally, another inspiration comes from my own childhood, Back in the day on the Nickelodeon channel, they would host an award show called the kids choice awards where kids got to vote for their favorite celebrities and in turn, they would recieve a Nickelodeon blimp shaped award while also getting dunked on with green slime. This is translated well with the radial slices and the use of orange pastic, giving one the chance to be presented a similar looking award if they please.

Finally, here is the actual stacked and revised model made using green acrylic. it came out very well and one may question what the actual form is, is it a fish? a spaceship? a blimp? you decide.