What geographic characteristics for a world would be needed/be most beneficial for airships to be a common mode of transportation?
Airships are a hallmark of countless steampunk and dieselpunk constructed universes. Of course, in our world, they were around for a short while. I want to know what effects geographical circumstances had on this.
I feel like one thing that lead to the death of airships as a viable form of passenger transportation in real life was that it took days to travel from New York to London, especially with the advent of jet airlines. If that's true, what type of proposed global geography would be most beneficial to a strong airship industry? I'd imagine either a world full with archipelagos with numerous small islands, with many medium islands and a few large ones as well (the largest having an area approximately similar to Honshu or Great Britain;) or a world with slightly more land density, with no more than two the size of Australia. I see that an island-based world would grant short travel distances between major regional population centers, many islands would mean that railways would be only of regional importance, and airships would have the advantage of transporting people on a regional basis at a speed faster than an ocean liner.
I also am aware that the Hindenburg disaster helped kill airships; which was influenced by the USA's ban of helium sales to Nazi Germany. As helium is extracted from natural gas fields, I would also presume that, at this point in tech level, more geopolitically balanced natural gas deposits would benefit as well.
What other geographic affects would there be on airships? Do these ones here make sense?
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One disadvantage of airplanes is that they need a runway to start/land. So one thing that would discourage airplanes is a geography where you simply have no space for runways (hills/mountains everywhere). Also, airplanes depend on the availability of cheap fuel, so if you don't have that, they cannot compete against airships. So you'd need a geography with no fossil fuel deposits (or at least none which are economically viable to exploit).
Another possibility would be the lack of hard but light substances to build airplanes from.
Another thing that could discourage airplanes is if there are many birds that could interfere with the airplanes (get into the propeller/jet engine and kill the aircraft). Airships are immune to them as long as they are not directly attacked. To have many birds, you'd of course need a bird-friendly geography.
A bird-friendly geography would mean:
- many food sources "” for birds that eat insects, that may mean many lakes, and an insect-friendly climate (no cold winters, much humidity, but little direct rain), for birds eating seed it would mean many plants with those seeds.
- many places where they can build their nests "” which depending on the type of bird may mean many rocks, or many trees, or simply many open areas if the birds build their nests on the ground.
- maybe also a relative lack of land animals that could compete on the food, or eat the eggs of the birds; that could be caused e.g. by there being little continental land, but only many small islands which are too small to support animals that can neither swim nor fly. As a side effect, those would also be detrimental to building long runways.
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