[HN Gopher] Airships Rise Again (2021)
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Airships Rise Again (2021)
Author : DoreenMichele
Score : 66 points
Date : 2022-09-22 02:17 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Always will i upvote airships.
|
| I love the solar power potential! And dynamic aerodynamics. And
| come on, safe hydrogen harvested from the ocean, why not?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I wonder if it isn't possible to add a de-humidifier so it can
| remove water from air, elctrolyse it to and use to hydrogen to
| re-fill itself. Eternal balloons!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| With the huge power density of solar panels on its massive
| upper surface, why not?
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Just adding a huge amount of solar panels has other
| problems like massive thermal problems that would result in
| an expation of the helium inside. Source: I live in
| Friedrichsafen, the brithplace of the Zeppelin. Artur
| Brauchle Head of Electrics and Avionics at Zeppelin once
| told me this.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, problems that definitely need to be solved!
|
| Also, I almost went on a zeppelin this year, I didn't
| know it was possible to still book them in your town!
| voakbasda wrote:
| So use the heat to turn water to steam. Steam-powered
| airships sound much cooler anyway.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| This was initially a good laugh:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739220 . Since one
| cannot reply to that post anymore, turning the monitor off is
| not a feature of a text editor; although font color is a
| feature the length or presence of entered text is visible by
| the cursor position & neither options disable editing (append
| only?). Using a command similar to this on a POSIX terminal is
| an option to hide the input & seem to disable backspace &
| delete: echo "Thoughts?"; read -d $'\04' -s x;
| echo "$x"
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Happy to amuse!
| anamexis wrote:
| You seem to have misplaced your comment.
| netsharc wrote:
| He's linking to a post from dr_dshiv and hijacking
| dr_dshiv's comment to reply to him because the original
| post has been archived...
| Retric wrote:
| The actual request is a little more subtle:
|
| _I think just a letter or two... Anything more and I 'd want
| to edit. Anything less and I'd worry about whether it was
| working. But, I will try it with my screen off_
| downvotetruth wrote:
| y=;while read -rN1;[ "$REPLY" != $'\04' ];do
| clear;y="$y$REPLY";echo "$REPLY";done;clear;echo "$y"
| [deleted]
| karteum wrote:
| If it's filled with helium, I guess it won't scale to replace the
| thousands of aircrafts in operation due to the finite amount of
| helium on earth. If it's filled with hydrogen, then people should
| remember the Hindenburg tragedy (and R101 too, glorified in Iron
| Maiden's "Empire of the clouds")...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm old enough to have seen this suggestion refloated for going
| on five decades. It keeps on not happening, and the older I get,
| the more I understand why. There are simply massive constraints
| on large-scale airship development, construction, and operation.
| Niche applications: maybe. Widespread adoption _in the face of
| extant or potential viable alterantives_? No.
|
| More in this 9-month old comment of mine:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076>
|
| And from others in a thread from just over a year ago:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943>
|
| What I'm thinking instead:
|
| Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail,
| particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which
| would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail
| systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to
| take 10--30 _days_ by rail. This could be significantly improved
| on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes _short haul_ rail
| freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers
| tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still
| vastly more _efficient_ in terms of mass moved distance per unit
| energy, it 's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there
| seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've
| mentioned in some previous comments.
|
| Electrified _air_ transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option
| for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100
| mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed
| rail is almost certainly a viable contender.
|
| The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've
| been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for
| Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option.
| Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional
| tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined
| similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link,
| perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western
| Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of
| open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is
| provocative and not _entirely_ implausible. I 'd suspect such
| projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits
| first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's
| possible to link at least five or six continents within reason,
| and possibly even Antarctica.
|
| Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at
| conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours
| in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even
| at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be
| made (16 hours).
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel>
|
| I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any
| nibbles so far.
|
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| It would be nice. The problem is the same as self-driving cars:
| they work but ONLY in certain very constrained and limited
| application scenarios that limit their adoption.
|
| Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a
| blizzard.
|
| Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar
| severe weather.
|
| Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is
| the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack
| the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud
| because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of
| brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas
| as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| > Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology
| is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they
| lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in
| the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by
| lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your
| own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good
| ideas.
|
| I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have
| watched this play out in press releases over and over: an
| innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in _X_ ,
| where it is actually a great improvement only in section
| 3.5.227 of _X_ , and overextending it to try to revolutionize
| the entire field kills the innovation.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a
| blizzard.
|
| to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for
| white lane markers will never do well in snow country.
|
| For certain situations, different technologies are useful.
|
| Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in
| snow or rain.
|
| You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and
| self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a
| much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety
| windshield, with wipers.
|
| "Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked
| roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe"
| speed will do just fine.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Don't forget infrastructure updates and vehicle to vehicle
| communications!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > "Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly
| marked roads, _aren 't sharing with human drivers_, she drive
| at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
|
| Then you've just reinvented personal rapid transit, which has
| failed in the past because in general building totally
| separate rights of way only really works out cost-wise with
| really space-efficient modes like trains.
| kqr wrote:
| There's a corollary to your last paragraph:
|
| Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology
| is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups succeed, too!
|
| Every innovator I've talked to, when I asked them, "if you knew
| ahead of time all the problems with your original idea, would
| you have gone through the trouble?", all answer pretty much the
| same way: The only reason they saw it through was that at any
| point, they thought "That's gotta be the worst part. Now how
| hard can the rest of it really be?"
| tromp wrote:
| One fine example of persistence in the face of seemingly
| insurmountable challenges paying off is ASML development of
| EUV [1] [2] [3].
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-
| lithogr...
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/inside-asml-the-company-
| adva...
|
| [3] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories
| zizee wrote:
| > Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a
| blizzard.
|
| > Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology
| is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they
| lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas
|
| Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and
| failing to identify significant market niches.
|
| I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you
| think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive
| well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant
| portion of the worlds population has never experienced a
| blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.
|
| If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the
| reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies.
| That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to
| identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as
| your product utility increases to service broader markets.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Here's how to think about airships using numbers.
|
| You need about 1000 liters of helium or hydrogen to lift 1kg of
| cargo (the difference is only about 10%, despite the fact that H2
| is twice as light as He they are both so much lighter than air,
| that you can almost think they are weightless, so all that
| matters is the mass of air displaced).
|
| Let's say you want to lift 1 ton. You need a cube of balloon
| that's 10m x 10m x 10m. Let's put 4 of those next to each other,
| so you can lift 4 tons with a box-shaped balloon that's 40m x 10m
| x 10m. Let's make it a cylinder instead, and make the Soviet
| assumption that pi=3, we end up with a cylindrical balloon that's
| 40m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons. Since the ends of an
| actual dirigible are not quite flat, let's say you need a 50m
| long and 10m tall dirigible to lift about 3 tons. The ratio of
| lengt/height of Hindenburg was 7:1 and of Graff Zeppelin was 6:1.
| Current Goodyear blimps have a ratio of about 4:1.
|
| So our intuition building block is a dirigible that's 50m long
| and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons.
|
| Multiply that by 10 in all dimensions and you get a 500m long by
| 100m tall giant that can lift a whopping 3000 tons of cargo.
|
| Multiply by only 5 in all dimensions and you get a 250m long by
| 50m tall dirigible that can lift 375 tons of cargo. That is a
| large dirigible, but not impossibly large. That was roughly the
| size of Hindenburg: 41 m tall and 245 m long.
|
| Hindenburg was build 100 years ago. We can probably build one
| like that nowadays for much less. How about one that's double in
| size in all dimensions? I find that conceivable. And such a
| dirigible would have 3000 tons of lift. Can you imagine that? For
| comparison, the cargo capacity of the famous Liberty ships was
| about 4300 tons. You could get airlift capacity that's only
| available nowadays as sealift.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Thanks for this. This is the first reference I've seen to the
| soviet pi=3 thing. What's the origin of that?
| jstanley wrote:
| This is really interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that.
| It looks like airships are one of those things that work _much_
| better as you scale them up.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Isn't helium extremely expensive and even getting more so every
| year?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The math isnt that simple. As they get bigger the structure
| needed for very heavy lifts also multiplies. The old airships
| only carried light/small objects like people and mail. Lifting
| large individual objects is a totally differnt game. Ok, the
| new beast has a 3000kg capacity, but the crane/truss necessary
| to suspend a 3000kg object will itself weigh perhaps 1000kg.
| You then need a ballast system, separate from the crane, that
| also can hold 3000kg (big water bags or equivalent) to hold the
| airship down when it isn't loaded. That also requires more
| structure and equipment. The cargo-carrying behemoth that can
| quietly lift giant refinery parts into place is not a simple
| equation.
| sophacles wrote:
| I've been seeing some variant of this article for as long as I
| remember. The return of the airship feels like aviation's fusion
| at this point.
| pydry wrote:
| That was my first thought.
|
| Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things
| can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in
| the sky.
| arise wrote:
| They have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what
| keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into
| these projects.
|
| There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that
| airships are way too costly for their speed and payload
| capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.
|
| About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a
| moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely
| lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days
| and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
| zizee wrote:
| I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic
| problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their
| slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive
| at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a
| winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five
| times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup
| your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how
| SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive
| with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway
| around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular
| jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in
| the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial
| purchase price of the craft across more flights.
| isamuel wrote:
| I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping
| to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense
| for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end
| market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" -- think
| "yachts."
| nradov wrote:
| Wealthy people don't want a "yacht" that can only fly in
| good weather. It's hard to see how this could ever compete
| with private jets. Maybe in a few tourist areas it could
| work for sightseeing tours as an alternative to
| helicopters?
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| There's a contract for 25 of them to go into service in Europe
| within a decade I think.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| So straightforward. Trade off speed for volume. Weight carrying
| capacity is terrible, but---high ceilings, huge windows, low
| altitude (better view), minimal sound... that is a real luxury
| experience!
|
| The world's most profitable route should be LA to Vegas.
|
| It's that glass bottom ballroom, you know?
|
| But really, flying europe would be amazing. Next time I'm at the
| Bodensee in Germany, i really want to fly a zeppelin!
| nradov wrote:
| Turbulence doesn't make for a "luxury" experience. Airships
| can't fly above the weather while carrying a useful load.
| meowkit wrote:
| Given the software advances in drone stabilization, would it
| not be possible to add some sort of dynamic stabilization to
| this hypothetical airship?
| nradov wrote:
| The rotor systems typically used by small drones don't
| scale up well for use on larger manned airships. The weight
| and drag penalty would be huge, and the higher inertia
| doesn't allow for rapid dynamic adjustments to compensate
| well for turbulence.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I'm firmly in the camp of "I'll believe it when I see it" for
| modern cargo airships actually going into use. People have been
| trying to do it since cargolifter AG in Germany raised vc money
| and went bankrupt 22 years ago. Thus far, none successfully.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I really wish airships were actually viable, but it's just never
| going to happen.
|
| They seemed like a really nice way to travel, slow and sedate
| like an ocean liner, but you could take them over land.
| standardUser wrote:
| You can book a ride right now if you want. It may never be a
| dominant mode of transportation, but it _is_ happening:
|
| https://incredible-adventures.com/zeppelin-airship.html
| macintux wrote:
| Across the top: "This adventure is not currently available."
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Dreams of cargo lifting airships gave us
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
| amelius wrote:
| Sounds nice, until Amazon starts using them for freight
| transport.
| frompdx wrote:
| As with LTA, he's pushing the humanitarian applications of
| airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food
| Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention
| delivering food to famine-struck regions.
|
| Interesting, this is the same motivation the financial backer of
| the AEREON 7 had. While the AEREON 7 never materialized, a scaled
| down test aircraft known as the AEREON 26 flew, and demonstrated
| the possibility of building a hybrid airship/airplane. The book
| "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" describes the efforts of the AEREON
| corporation's attempt and failure to bring airships back into the
| mainstream of aviation. History seems to be repeating itself
| here.
|
| I would love to see airships return, and there are many
| possibilities today that didn't exist in the late 19th and early
| 20th century. However, like supersonic flight for the masses, it
| doesn't seem likely to ever return to the aviation mainstream.
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