Dear Willi & Aquilius:
The PIPE here again...and from what I remember about the wing AND nose-engined, "non-R.VI" Zeppelin-Staaken Riesenflugzeuge, which WERE only produced as "one-off" examples, from the VGO I onwards, ONLY the nose-engined R.IV example survived to the end of WW I.
Aquilius, that R.30/16 aircraft actually "pointed the way towards the future" in at least a couple of ways...that exact aircraft was ALSO fitted, for a while during its existence, with what could have been the very first example of a
variable-pitch propeller setup (four of them being used) in aviation history, and most likely were ONLY ground-adjustable-but I COULD be wrong about the ground-only adjustability part...
...and also, apparently, during the development of a "certain" minor WW II Luftwaffe twin engine bomber prototype, the idea of a fuselage-mounted engine operating a single mechanical supercharger for all the other, propeller-spinning engines on the aircraft, might have been remembered from the R.30's installation...from the entry on Wikipedia at
Henschel Hs 130 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ...
"The Hs 130E was a re-working of the Hs 130A with the Höhen Zentrale (HZ)-Anlage system in place of conventional superchargers. HZ-Anlage installed a third engine in the fuselage, a DB 605, the only purpose of which was to power a large supercharger to supply air to the wing-mounted DB 603B engines. Such a system had first been tried some twenty-five years previously, on the R.30/16 example of the Zeppelin Staaken R.VI bomber."
...and that info came straight from the pages of my copy of
German Combat Planes, written by Heinz Nowarra and Ray Wagner way back in 1971.
It COULD be a while before I'm able to get back to work (laid off in Sept. 2008)...but I'm not sure IF anyone might have known about what two sorts of experimental items that the R.30 had on it, that would "resurface" up to two decades later...AND about the R.IV Z-Staaken giant being the only nose-engined example from that series, to survive the Great War...
Yours Sincerely,
The PIPE!