Neither airship nor plane..

I really must thank Mike for forwarding that link of gigantic aeroplanes for reference, it really help inspire and propell the look of these aeroplane/airship hybrids that I had been hard to define as of late... These are various aircrafts for the British and French strato fleets.
The very top one is a giant floating air port. It has two flight decks on the successive top two decks, and a Terminal/Tower on the port side of the craft, where airships can dock portside via terminal bridges (like today's airports) which file into a main airport enclosure. The lower decks under the flight and on the other side of the terminal, are service, maintenance decks and the helium ballast tanks which keep this airship afloat. A passive behemoth, it serves mostly as a refuelling and docking port for traditional airships and smaller air craft like those beneath it for the Royal Air Force.
The bottom right one was originally the path I was exploring - the standard WWII era type bombers with their top wing being the inflated helium floating ballast. After looking at the reference link, I got inspired to actually increase the volume of the airplane fuselage and let the wings retain their engine profile for! You'll love this - Wind power! So the ballast in the fuselage keeps the buggers aloft, and the engines collect power from the high presure winds and also propells the airships to wherever they need to be! In general, the overal size of these crafts compared to their actual WWII counterparts would be alot more roomier - say 3-5 times. So that they would actually be comparable to naval corvettes.
Here is a rough colourized detail of the bulkied up Lancaster. In a newer sketch I've got post scanning, there are more turrets and details that depicts the larger scale of these crafts.
This here are sketches for the US Strato fleet, inspired by the 1936 Boeing Stratoliner, which subsequently inspired this whole strain of sketches. You can see with the evolution line in the middle lower left, the original Boeing Stratoliner (slightly larger than to scale) the USS Akron which was an actual US Navy Airship that sank in a storm (with the senior staff of the US Navy's Airship division, which led to the demise of Airships in the US entirely) And the hybrid of the two ideas, the Stratofortress which is a giant airship with wings. It would have loads of carrying and cargo capacity and six aircraft carrier like hangar doors along its side.
In this sketch you can also see a sketch of Joseph Mallord William Turner's "the Fighting Temeraire" which I unwittingly sketched whilst roaming the National Gallery. Premonitionally, you can see how it relates to how the RAF aircrafts hull in the previous sketches mimic it, both in size, shape and function. here is an idea of the stratofortress with some dimension to it. I think for the US stuff they'll keep their shiny metallic silvery finish, with striking yellow tailfins and various from the late war period. But keep the giant print of 'US ARMY/US NAVY" and white star with red center and blue background from it's early period.

I've got more coming, I'll try and post these in good spacing with my fellow colleagues!