Any chance you’d be interested in doing the math to figure out power to surface area ratios and what it would have to be to have the maneuvering capabilities of say a Cessna 172 in something like a blimp?
The point was more that heavy winds aren't an issue for a sufficiently large blimp, even without maneuverability, because the impact of the storm on a blimp is negligible.
Microburst wind speeds can hit 270km/h or more. Updrafts can hit 10,000 ft/minute or more [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downburst][https://www.britann...
- The O(1/X) acceleration property prevents a 300km/h wind from getting the blimp to speed quickly. The "entire air mass moving" doesn't change that; you'll see wind flowing around the blimp, wind becoming turbulent and reversing directions, wind losing velocity and converting to heat and sound, local portions of the blimp temporarily deforming, potential blimp damage, and all kinds of other effects from a microburst, but you won't see a high mass-to-surface-area-ratio object have its center of mass accelerate quickly from wind drag.
- The blimp _would_ need to have sufficient propulsion to counteract average wind forces over some time period. If you had a sustained downdraft with squared velocity averaging 270^2km/h over the surface of the blimp for any substantial length of time then the blimp would need equivalent upward propulsion to avoid _eventually_ crashing into the ground. For a sufficiently large blimp though, "eventually" can be extended as far as you'd like by reducing the acceleration induced by such forces and allowing you to average external forces over a longer time period before experiencing any negative repercussions.
Let X be any linear measurement of the airship (like length). The forces on the airship are proportional to X^2, and the max mass is proportional to X^3. Consequently, acceleration from wind and whatnot tends to 0 as the airship size increases (when fully loaded).
Moreover, the necessary propulsion similarly scales with X^2 (which is convenient, because that's the amount of space you have to place the propulsion), while requiring increasingly negligible fractions of the ship's carrying capacity as the ship size increases.