[HN Gopher] Cargo Airships Are Happening
___________________________________________________________________
Cargo Airships Are Happening
Author : elidourado
Score : 176 points
Date : 2024-10-14 16:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.elidourado.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.elidourado.com)
| oatsandsugar wrote:
| Time to order a leather hat, goggles and a scarf.
| thecrumb wrote:
| I see this brought up every few years but nothing ever seems to
| happen. I used to live not far from the Weeksville station in NC
| and would occasionally see flights from there. Would love to see
| these all over. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-
| dirigible-han...
| fl0id wrote:
| This. Anybody remember cargolifter?
| myspy wrote:
| I still remember seeing the big hall in a Galileo broadcast
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter-Luftschiffhalle
| user_of_the_wek wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with Cargolifter, this might be a
| useful start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
|
| I remember when i had a students job, some older colleague
| told me he sunk a nice sum into this. Foolishly, maybe!
| metalman wrote:
| Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind
| happens,ie :anywhere this has been hammered flat on numerous
| aviation engineering forums the only way around the guaranteed
| ground handling debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for
| anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where
| the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind
| so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff one possibility
| is airship to ocean ship transfers where wind drift can be
| managed.....sort of could be made to work for passengers snd
| small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast
| still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk
| frickinLasers wrote:
| I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a
| solution.
| peterashford wrote:
| Yeah, dude was head of Hyperloop. Nailed that one
| frickinLasers wrote:
| I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers
| here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also
| hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly
| thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying
| rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried
| before, too many problems that can never be solved...
|
| "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss
| of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Apples and oranges. Of my many engineer friends none of
| them thought the hyper loop was viable, it's an absurdly
| bad idea. Like installing compressed air jets in cars for
| faster acceleration. Another one of Elons missives.
|
| Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there
| enough demand for economic viability. That was always
| going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open
| question but it at least appears plausible.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Even if they solve most of the technical issues could
| this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under
| what circumstances?
|
| It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need
| to transport freight to places with no access to
| sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is
| there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such
| areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..
|
| > Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no
| loss of enthusiasm
|
| Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are
| many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on
| something that's a dead end (and this was the general
| consensus for the past 80 years or so)
| usrusr wrote:
| Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the
| roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship
| would operate in a market segment that does not even
| exist without them.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > market segment
|
| So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large
| ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be
| transporting?
| usrusr wrote:
| Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines
| would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which
| implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained
| by land transport.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be
| dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer
| believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The
| ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are
| ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the
| engineering is "impossible."
|
| Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years
| they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had
| physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried,
| they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships
| also have a physics problem that make them absurdly
| expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this
| is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics
| has been studied. This time is not different unless you
| have solid reasoning.
|
| Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example:
| Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard
| engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was
| also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge
| that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low
| reliability).
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be
| dumb and/or impossible?
|
| Because airships are really cool.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog
| post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across
| the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.
|
| If they can't do that, at least they could be
| competitive.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Ships are simple and cheap. Airships are known to combine
| the drawbacks of ships (slow, weather-dependent) with the
| drawbacks of airplanes (needs to be light so it can fly).
|
| That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of
| freight carrying out of business. The main reason people
| use air freight today is to get something from one
| continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do
| that.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Great, form an airship club. Stop throwing $100 million
| after $100 million of your investors' cash at your hobby.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| Well, TIL something I thought was demonstrated mid-
| century didn't happen until the 90s.
| dralley wrote:
| Hyperloop succeeded at exactly what it was meant to succeed
| at, which was planting just enough FOMO to get a handful of
| rail projects in California delayed and ultimately
| canceled.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are tons of dumb startups that were created by former
| SpaceX people. Having worked at SpaceX doesn't magically turn
| you into a superior person that can solve all problems. But
| having worked at SpaceX is a great way to convinced investors
| to give you money.
| jordanb wrote:
| Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid
| structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure
| can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.
| usrusr wrote:
| It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being
| on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting
| for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than
| strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two.
| For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a
| gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more
| niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really
| can't exist before matching transportation.
|
| The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the
| revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's
| tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger
| than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling
| containers between China and the rest of the world that's still
| tiny.
| 00N8 wrote:
| One challenge I've heard of is: If you carry 100 tons of cargo
| from point A to point B in an airship, for the airship to return
| to point A, it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or
| ballast), or it needs to vent (or compress) lifting gas, in order
| to maintain the correct buoyancy. I wonder what the best approach
| is here, & how it affects the economics? Is water ballast safe &
| cheap enough, or is there a better way?
| jordanb wrote:
| Yeah although typically they used water ballast, which is cheap
| and easy to find.
|
| One thing worth considering is going back to hydrogen as a
| lifting gas. Not only is it a better lifting gas than helium
| and much cheaper, it could be used as fuel.
|
| An airship that burned its own lifting gas would have the
| curious property of getting heavier the further it traveled.
| This could be countered by dual-fueling it and also have
| engines that burned heavier-than-air fuel like kerosene or
| propane. The hydrogen engines could burn the lifting gas at the
| same rate as the kerosene engines burn the ballast-fuel.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The Graf Zeppelin burnt Blaugas[1] because it's about the
| same density as air, so as the fuel tanks emptied the
| buoyancy didn't change. See [2] for other things the
| Zeppelins did, which says " _The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin had bi-
| fuel engines, and could use gasoline and Blau gas as a
| propellant. Twelve of the vessel 's gas cells were filled
| with a propellant gas instead of lifting gas with a total
| volume of 30,000 cubic metres, enough for approximately 100
| flight hours. The fuel tank had a gasoline volume of 67
| flight hours. Using both gasoline and Blau gas, one could
| achieve 118 hours of cruise time._"
|
| That article mentions that the Zeppelins experimented with
| burning Hydrogen lift gas as fuel "without much success" but
| doesn't add detail.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blau_gas
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy_compensator_(aviat
| ion...
| jordanb wrote:
| My understanding was blau-gass was unpressurized propane,
| which is a little more dense than air. But I guess
| according to that article it's slightly less.
|
| I'd expect that, like a lot of problems zeppelins had in
| the 1920s, burning hydrogen would be more feasible with
| modern technology.
|
| I'd also point out that the thing that made hydrogen
| dangerous in those airships was that the skin was two
| layers. The inner skin was the gas bags, which were very
| fragile, and then the rigid structure and the outer skin to
| protect the fragile bags. This was a problem because
| hydrogen could accumulate and mix with air between the
| inner and outer skins. The outer skin also was quite
| flammable. Nowadays, we can make materials that are both
| strong enough to serve as an outer skin and impervious
| enough to serve as a gas bag for lifting gas, so modern
| airships have only one skin and nowhere for the lifting gas
| to mix with air inside the structure.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| The way the cutaway images on their site look, the
| bouyant members would be nestled in the actual structure
| in large tanks.
|
| https://www.shipbyairship.com/
| jordanb wrote:
| This actually makes me think these people are unserious.
| This is an obsolescent airship design. ZeppelinNT,
| Airlander 10, and Lockheed P-719 all use the semi-rigid
| design with integral gas bags.
| usrusr wrote:
| Uncompressed propane would have simply been called
| Propangas I think. That term had been established well
| enough in the second half of the century and while the
| Zeppelin-era was before that, I doubt that the term
| changed much.
|
| But if you aim for a buoyancy-neutral fuel, you can just
| add hydrogen to the mix, as little or much as you need.
| That custom blend then would be precisely the thing you
| don't invent a creative name for but just use a color
| code ("the blue one").
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| To move in the opposite direction you could use photovoltaics
| to electrolyze lifting/fuel hydrogen from water. Up there
| above the clouds you'd have pretty good conditions for solar
| if you could make the panels light enough.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| > it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or
| ballast) ... in order to maintain the correct buoyancy.
|
| Sounds perfect for a cargo situation. Add new cargo as old
| cargo is removed.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| As I understand it, it's common for a cargo ship to unload
| full containers and take on empties for the return voyage.
| Are cargo vessels holds always partially full vs. empty
| containers, bouncing between ports?
|
| Would this issue even be a problem for fixed routes? If
| you're always taking full containers between two points, that
| is.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Rather than taking a huge shipment, delivering it, and having
| to deal with an empty airship, maybe it's better to think of it
| as a slowly drifting warehouse. Drones can handle delivery and
| restock across short distances, and the airship doesn't land at
| all. This would let you maintain a more or less consistent
| mass.
| danpalmer wrote:
| That's cool, but also a quite different business and
| operating model where storage and delivery multiplexing are
| much more of a thing than with air freight.
|
| The other problem is the drones. For this to work you'd be
| shipping either regular TEU containers or the air freight
| equivalent (not sure what they're called but there's a
| standard shape I believe), however no drone available today
| can move either of those. That means new drones, new shipping
| form factors, or both, and those are both hard problems that
| you probably don't want to face when already trying to launch
| a new freight modality.
| xg15 wrote:
| Awesome idea, but as you say, seems more like a sort of
| "last mile delivery vehicle" than cargo transport.
|
| You could imagine some sort of futuristic flying Amazon
| warehouse/drone carrier: It would be pre-stocked at a
| distribution center, with packets already arranged in a way
| that they can be picked up by drones individually. Then it
| floats over a neighborhood while the drones deliver the
| individual packets to the homes below.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I was thinking of these as an alternative to having a
| distribution center. They're just always traveling on a
| few routes determined mostly by prevailing winds, making
| big circles around the planet. If you live on one of
| those routes, you can last mile delivery directly from
| the warehouse as it passes overhead. If not, the drones
| are loading/unloading a train or some such.
| xnyan wrote:
| The (biggest) problem that keeps airships from practical use is
| that they are huge sails. Big sails mean even small amounts of
| wind can be powerful forces acting on the airship. In the air a
| big push from the wind might be safely managed, but if you're
| near anything solid such as the ground, you can get smashed to
| bits.
|
| To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need
| both huge specialized docks with extremely strong mooring
| structures to keep wind from smashing the airship into whatever
| is near it, and a system (such as a 3-axis propulsion system on
| the airship) that is capable of counteracting wind force acting
| on the airship when it's near the ground or other solid objects
| and not docked.
|
| Despite the many attractive advantages of airships, there's yet
| been anything like a good solution to this problem. There are
| other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo
| and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly
| compress your gas?), this is just the biggest.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop
| off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air?
| Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?)
|
| Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same
| thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
|
| Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is
| underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the
| zeppelins did.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the
| zeppelins did.
|
| Citation? Would not the condenser need to burn fuel, thus
| lightening the ship?
| imoverclocked wrote:
| You are carrying fuel and using oxygen from the atmosphere
| to combust it. When it's hot, it's a gas. By simply cooling
| it and recovering most of it, you are potentially left with
| more mass than you started off with... and Oxygen is
| relatively heavy.
| sethherr wrote:
| The article describes electric airships
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of
| electric airships, you can run an electric condenser,
| extracting atmospheric water vapor.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| That seems like it would be really bad for energy
| efficiency: now you need batteries large enough for
| propulsion during the whole trip, plus extra for
| extracting water vapor.
|
| Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination
| when you drop the cargo?
| Qwertious wrote:
| Because that's less flexible and there may not be water
| at the destination in the first place. That said, Flying
| Whales are trying to do exactly that, because ballast
| tech just isn't capable enough yet.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| You're both missing the forest for the trees, when the
| airship is electric obviously you don't have to add
| ballast while flying because you don't have to compensate
| for burnt fuel.
| Qwertious wrote:
| The ballast is for cargo, which needs to be picked up and
| dropped off. Fuel is just a potential solution.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Why condense water from fuel or the air then when you can
| just connect to the local municipal water system? You're
| already at port!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This idea of extracting water from air keeps coming back,
| but every time someone tries it, they learn of the same
| thermodynamic limits. It is _extremely energy-intensive_
| to extract water from the air, and it only really works
| if the climate is humid enough that there is water in the
| air to extract. This is exactly what a dehumidifier does,
| and the off-the-shelf version you can buy at home depot
| is no more than 5-10x worse than the thermodynamic limits
| - those generate a pitiful amount of water for a lot of
| energy intake.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Do we even need to extract the water? The point is to
| capture weight, and the only reason to liquefy the water
| is to store it more efficiently, by volume.
|
| Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient,
| storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster
| waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like
| an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just
| compressing the hydrogen.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| The article describes diesel electric airships.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The fine article shows them lowering a container from a
| crane. I'd love to see them connect the crane to an
| electric generator and actually regen the potential
| energy of the container into electricity.
| jandrese wrote:
| It has to be more energy efficient to re-compress your
| lifting gas back into storage bottles. What do modern
| airships do? This has to be a solved problem.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I think they're aware of all these problems because they do
| mention almost everything you said in the linked post thinking
| through the idea: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships
|
| Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything
| hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they
| actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be
| aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo
| efficiently.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Reading that article I see no proposed solutions to this sail
| problem. They mention wind as an issue for delivery times but
| not safety. There's also no acknowledgement that the "scaling
| law" that makes building huge airships lucrative also makes
| these problems worse.
| wang_li wrote:
| You're failing to see the secret that is exposed by the
| fact that their Chief Engineer comes from hyperloop.
| They're going to dig tunnels connecting all their
| destinations and run the airships underground in a vacuum
| sealed network. No atmospheric drag at all! Bingo!
| withinboredom wrote:
| How can you call yourself an engineer and work on the
| hyperloop. Literally only takes about 30s of thought to
| realize it is an impossible idea.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Please reveal the impossibility of the idea?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Sure.
|
| If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets
| from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air
| in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be
| like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft.
|
| The same problem exists underground, the weakest points
| being the stations themselves which can be bombed.
|
| A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage
| or malfunctioning equipment) would mean people suffocate
| inside after a matter of minutes.
|
| So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is
| impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees. In
| other words, literally any other mode of transport would
| be safer, including a hydrogen-filled dirigible.
|
| So, sure, the concept itself might be possible, but an
| engineer doesn't concern themselves with possible. That
| is for scientists. An engineer considers what is
| realistic AND possible, because that is an engineer's
| job: to make the possible real. This cannot be real;
| literally no regulator would ever sign off on it.
| alluro2 wrote:
| I don't particularly defend feasibility of Hyperloop, but
| did want to point out that your comment sounded awfully
| like when people were ridiculing the idea of human
| flight, landing on the moon etc... Finding engineering
| solutions to what looked as "impossible" challenges were
| some of the best feats of humanity so far.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| Right, I am not saying they're right or wrong (not
| something I would know anything about), but it seems
| they've been vaguely aware of the issues from the start.
| Namely, _before the SpaceX engineer and starting the
| company._
| fulafel wrote:
| I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much
| more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds,
| and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day
| forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and
| predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail
| ships.
| eptcyka wrote:
| The article is talking about atlantic freight trips - middle
| of the ocean is not one of those places with light winds.
| dole wrote:
| "Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic in 1936
| -- its first and only full year of service -- with ten
| trips to the United States and seven to Brazil."
| withinboredom wrote:
| A modern ship can make the same number of trips and not
| be dependent on weather at all.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Even a light wind with a giant sail area is dangerous. An
| _empty_ 20ft shipping container weighs about two tons. If it
| 's hanging from an airship and the wind causes it to shift
| even a foot it'll kill you dead if it hits you. If it hit a
| light frame building it would bust right through a wall. It
| would also easily knock down a non-reinforced cinder block
| wall.
|
| A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an
| incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship
| makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with
| a helicopter.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a
| couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is
| preposterous, so why not just lean into it?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Solar powered airships floating around the world, following
| the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by... catapult
| or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over
| populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we're
| in Solarpunk world.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Jet packs and tax free shopping as next step. Wait for your
| friendly airship to come around and go get your duty free
| stuff somehow... Surely there is some places they can visit
| on the way so it counts...
| jandrese wrote:
| Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones? There have
| already been pilots projects where Amazon does delivery by
| drone in a couple of places. I don't think they were a
| success, but an airship adds some constraints that might
| make the more viable. Downside is the copters needs to
| return to whatever altitude the ship is currently cruising
| at, which might be close to their ceiling.
|
| But on a side note my first reaction to the headline of
| this article was "no they are not". Airships have a number
| of fundamental drawbacks that I don't think we are any
| closer to solving. Ultimately they're as slow as a cargo
| ship, can only carry a relatively small and light payload
| like an airplane, require specialized ports like ships and
| airplanes, and are expensive to build and operate. They
| just don't have a viable niche.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones?
|
| But if you drop them via cheap parachute, you wouldn't
| need anything to return. I bet they'd only be slightly
| less accurate delivery than what their "don't give a
| damn" delivery system in place now.
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe, but as you point out you lose your pinpoint
| accuracy and also it consumes a parachute for every
| delivery. Your customers end up with a whole bunch of
| cloth to dispose of and you have to store enough for
| every delivery. The beauty of the quadcopter is that it
| is reusable. It can also use air brakes to help slow the
| descent and really only burn power on the very last bit
| of the delivery and then on the ascent back up, where it
| is no longer burdened by the package.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You seem to be losing the spirit of the conversation, and
| that spirit is the idea is preposterous. In that spirit,
| being reusable is irrelevant. I'm sure if they wanted,
| they could figure out how to make a disposable parachute
| that can be composted or recycled. At that's a far as
| practical as I'm willing to go
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I avidly wait for that factorio mod!
| DowagerDave wrote:
| or the final panel of an xkcd comic!
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| how about people? why only freight?
|
| enter the Jump-o-cabin, press The Button, be catapulted
| into airship 3, fly to somewhere else, get parachuted
| down..
|
| Bonus: the just-landed Jump-o-cabin can be used as free-
| standing toilet. uh, Was already used as...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I like the people delivery idea. Maybe wrap them in
| bubble wrap, and then drop them with a smallish parachute
| like NASA did with the Mars lander.
| numitus wrote:
| I calculated, than the airship with 100tonns capacity, and
| wind speed 25m/s require 25tons trust to compensatecthenwind.
| It is Boeing jet engine, not Electric fan require.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've seen some YouTube videos converting Boeing jet engines
| to electric, but you have to smash that like and ring that
| subscribe bell to be able to see the build
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship
| wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your
| gas?
|
| As long as it's just one small bubble with hydrogen, you can
| flare it off or combine with oxygen from the air outside to
| reduce lift.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring
| structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A
| giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with
| some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be _that_
| difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million
| dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so
| difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire
| concept nonviable.
| jandrese wrote:
| Historically the difficulty isn't in building the mast, it is
| in preventing the airship from being smashed into the mast by
| the wind. Or in dramatic cases flipping end over end because
| it was only moored on one location.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Interesting. Why a mast and not just the ground? Pull up
| the mooring lines (probably more than the amount needed to
| actually hold the ship, for redundancy), connect them to
| the ship, then pull on the lines with winches until the
| ship is on the ground. That's basically how seafaring ships
| work... are there any unique challenges with airships?
| jandrese wrote:
| The unique challenge is that everything is way up in the
| air and constantly moving around.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I think this has actually great potential for fruit transports.
|
| Many countries export and import fruits from neighboring
| countries, because goods like fruits need a riping process and
| time, and storage space locally is more expensive than
| transporting them via container ship.
|
| For example, almost the same fruits that are exported from Hawaii
| are simultaneously imported from Chile, and vice versa. Both
| nations grow those natively, but storage space on the ground is
| more expensive than shipment.
|
| If this was part or focus of the airship freighting company, I'd
| see great potential there. Not even that, they wouldn't even need
| to transport anything, if they could invent a storage space in
| the air that's tax free, or maybe even offshore above the water.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _if they could invent a storage space .. offshore above the
| water_ "
|
| like, a boat?
| cookiengineer wrote:
| On water: More like atlantis, with a harbor and a loading
| dock.
|
| Above water: maybe rope-anchored airships.
|
| What I wanted to point out is that taxes are ground based,
| meaning the volume that's available above the ground usually
| is not used because of physical limitations of buildings and
| construction.
|
| You could increase that efficiency of recurring costs for
| land vs storage space with airships.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I don't see how storage space in airships could come
| anywhere as cheap as storage space on land even taking land
| taxes into account. Airships are not cheap and would need
| regular maintenance. I guess the water analog of a
| warehouse would be a barge to get perhaps you're thinking
| more of an airbarge concept. Even still, warehouses are
| cheap in a way that flying things are not.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Well, this discussion is in the context of airships, so
| there's no question that everything that doesn't require
| potential energy to defeat gravity and to stay in
| position is more efficient.
|
| The most efficient solution is btw not doing anything,
| and just leave the goods where they are produced, and
| stop producing too much for the own population. I'm
| pointing out that the concepts of finance and economies
| don't necessarily come hand in hand with what's more
| efficient to build. Otherwise people would use trains and
| not cars and planes.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Color me confused. I do not understand what point you're
| making - it appears to be all over the map until the end
| where it makes no point at all.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I just want to say that fruits need a ripening time because
| they are picked too early to accommodate transportation.
|
| Fruits picked ripe from the tree are significantly tastier and
| probably healthier.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Meet ethylene.
| dpflan wrote:
| What is the current target use-case for this company's airships,
| the use-case that will get them a consistent business that will
| allow them to grow?
|
| What is the target operating speed considering cargo weight?
|
| How much cargo can such an airship carry at its target operating
| speed such that this is more efficient than air-freight and land-
| freight?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Read the article dude
| dpflan wrote:
| Yes, this seems like the best paragraph from the article
| related to those questions:
|
| Airship Industries is designing its vehicle to dominate
| transoceanic air freight. It checks all the right boxes. It
| shortens end-to-end freight delivery time. It lowers freight
| handling costs, delays, and breakage. It's highly profitable
| on a unit basis. It lowers fuel burn and carbon emissions by
| 75 percent without any sustainable fuel breakthroughs.
|
| How many shipping container can a single airship carry?
| satisfice wrote:
| The article said nothing about weather hazards or the fact that
| it's a big fat target for a war drone to bring down.
|
| It's not just an easy target to hit, it's a symbolic target.
|
| Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of
| the sky did not appeal to the public... and too many of them
| fell.
|
| Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft,
| but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe.
| Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Luckily, we have much better weather forecasting than we did
| last time we tried airships for realsies.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Severe turbulence in clear conditions is increasing due to
| climate change:
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-
| turbulenc...
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Turbulence for an airliner is going to be experienced
| differently for an airship. I'm not sure what to expect,
| TBH, but the difference between a plane moving at Mach 0.8
| and an airship moving at 80 mph will definitely be real.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There has been no increase in air turbulence accidents per
| passenger mile over the past 30 years despite a quadrupling
| of air traffic (so more chances to encounter turbulence).
|
| https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-
| studies/Documents/SS2101....
|
| _After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there
| was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part
| 121 accidents during this period [1989-2018]._
|
| The BBC article cites a modelling paper. In a conflict
| between real data and a simulation, real data should win.
| dudisubekti wrote:
| But even then, forecasted storms mean more delay to the
| already-slow airship.
|
| Also the airship is simply too slow to dodge any sudden
| severe weather, even if they saw it coming hours before.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Perhaps. Airships will likely want to travel along jet
| streams since the wind speeds can outpace the airspeed of
| the airship. The neat thing here is that weather that will
| be problematic can be predicted days in advance, not just
| hours. Even 2 hours gets you pretty far in an airship in
| wind-calm, especially compared to (say) container ships.
| When you aren't in wind-calm, you can probably take
| advantage of winds by choosing your altitude wisely.
| MitPitt wrote:
| > too many of them fell
|
| How many of them fell? Tried searching this up and barely any
| fell. Very few deaths too.
| dudisubekti wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
|
| This list is quite comprehensive I think
| hluska wrote:
| That's a good article. I found this one:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-8
|
| The L-8/Ghost Blimp took off with a crew of two from San
| Francisco in 1942. They found an oil slick (which was the
| last time either crew member was known to be alive) and
| then drifted before it crash landed in front of a home in
| Daly City.
|
| I had never heard of this event before now and it's a heck
| of an interesting late night rabbit hole. Thanks for the
| link!
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| A partial list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents.
|
| The list of Zepplins is also enlightening:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins
| stubish wrote:
| This effort is just starting up? Flying Whales expect to have an
| airship in 2025 and be operational in 2028 per
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/outback-town-launches... .
| Not that this is a race; better if several companies succeed.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember Airship Industries (1979):
|
| >The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced
| materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and
| contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
|
| >Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was
| seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was
| moored in high winds.
|
| And various other things not really working till they went bust
| in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries
|
| I wonder if Airship Industries (2024) will do any better?
|
| Their ships don't looks very different - old co
| https://www.airliners.net/photo/Airship-Industries/Airship-I...
|
| New co
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
| 1propionyl wrote:
| >Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was
| seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was
| moored in high winds.
|
| "Well the front's not supposed to fall off, for a start."
| fernly wrote:
| Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this
| claim:
|
| "If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side
| and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
|
| How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As
| TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company,
| a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the
| warehouse on arrival in-country so the customs inspectors can
| look at it and assess duties. The article seems to envision the
| airship dropping down directly at the destination address, which
| would be that nation's customs agency's worst nightmare.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Yeah--I came here to highlight this too. I think all the legacy
| systems around international shipping won't permit direct to
| consumer pick up and delivery. Unless someone can show me an
| existing example?
| mmooss wrote:
| Some international logistics businesses pickup from and ship
| directly to customers. They are well-practiced in avoiding
| customs delays and have extensive experience with non-
| traditional transport, such as semi-submursibles.
|
| Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily
| to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or
| is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an
| airfield near the factory?
| nevi-me wrote:
| That feels like a different scenario. Intuitively I would
| expect some pre-arranged clearance process that is valid
| for some period to avoid say daily paperwork lodging. Even
| the inspection process could be streamlined if there's some
| trust between the authorities and the regularly shipping
| parties.
|
| It still doesn't address the case where a random small
| business receives a container full of their latest items
| from a supplier.
|
| The first thing I funnily thought of with direct-to-
| customer was narcotics. If countries don't inspect goods
| coming in (assuming that countries with a risk of narcotics
| being shipped out have already lost), then it makes for a
| great muling opportunity, or just wholesale shipment.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The facts parts are sent and delivered daily doesn't mean
| they travel in 1 day.
|
| Frequency != latency
| mcculley wrote:
| In the U.S., a shipping company that is also a registered
| "Importer/Exporter of Record" can move stuff directly.
|
| I ran a tugboat business and we had all of the required
| paperwork to file directly with U.S. Customs.
|
| In many cases, we moved cargo too big to be transferred at a
| port or terminal.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I ran a tugboat business
|
| Wildly OT, but this company and informed discussion is what
| kept me on /. and keeps me on HN.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports?
|
| Probably no different from private airfields, you have to file
| customs paperwork before arriving, and they can send inspectors
| out.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Not quite how it works. (At least, not in the US).
|
| Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
|
| Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for
| designated points of entry is so that the customs officials
| can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at
| times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare
| animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that
| happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined
| and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe
| me.
|
| Most important, and relevant in this context is the third
| issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs
| officials and passengers and cargo are _always_ subject to
| the same inspections /regulations as they are at any
| commercial airport.
|
| So the original question is valid, how are they handling
| customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion
| any faster than anyone else?
| pistoleer wrote:
| FBO = fixed base operator = private jet terminal or service
| provider at airports that caters to general aviation (non-
| commercial) flights. FBOs provide services like fueling,
| hangar space, and sometimes even customs clearance for
| international flights.
| conductr wrote:
| So they build operate their own airship FBOs? Honestly
| seems like the smaller hurdle to jump if all the
| engineering problems are solved, they will find a way to
| navigate this too. It's a bit naive to assume they will
| comply with existing constraints versus defining what the
| airship industry would need. They won't roll this out
| globally on day one, the largest and most obviously
| profitable areas will be source/destinations are probably
| easy to guess. They could even do their proof of concept
| it less regulated markets before coming to the US later.
| Plenty of room to solve these problems later.
| csomar wrote:
| Also the customs exist at both ends. Usually, you have to do
| preliminary enforcement too. That's what DHL does at least.
| Still, most of your time "wastage" will happen at customs and
| there is no technological innovation for that. There is no way
| any (or most) governments will allow you to by pass them.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's down to the laws of the country and the government could
| make an exception to go direct if they want for special items.
| One of the things the airships might make sense for is huge
| wind turbine blades that are too large to go by road. The
| government might well do it for that kind of thing.
|
| But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England
| to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might
| think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK,
| fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market
| and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the
| UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France
| then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would
| be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also how many hours you save compared to truck/van? You still
| have to load it to one to drive it to where ever airship is
| moored, and then unload it, load to airship. Fly that to
| destination(weather depending). And same. Or you could drive
| from start to end. At certain distances it might make sense,
| but I think those might be somewhat limited.
| xg15 wrote:
| Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the
| airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park"
| while airborne, but at least there were concepts of
| boarding/unboarding in the air as well:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
| rtkwe wrote:
| They could in theory but I'm dubious governments will be
| willing to shape their customs enforcement to accommodate
| this company. Best case I think they might be able to do a
| drop off at a place for customs inspections and pick them up
| again with a different craft once cleared.
| DonnyV wrote:
| I bet they would change their workflow if it was an Amazon
| warehouse. Amazon could change the rules in DC.Accomodate
| for certain size warehouses.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's a chicken and egg problem. You have to get big
| enough to move enough cargo to make it worth getting
| special accommodations or go through the paperwork of
| being a proper import/export business to self report.
| acdha wrote:
| Is that really so different from how customs officers go on
| board trains now?
| BWStearns wrote:
| I agree with most other criticisms in the thread about the
| feasibility of this, but your suggestion is not _totally_
| crazy. There are airports where you can land _if_ you give
| customs a heads up that you'll be flying there from abroad
| and they'll send a dude. The only one I've interacted with is
| in the Bahamas but I don't see any reason it's a showstopper.
| There're a lot bigger showstoppers on the critical path for
| this project than that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That sounds _expensive_.
| maw wrote:
| _If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side
| and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can
| actually beat today's air freight service on delivery time._
|
| I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat
| today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same
| (ahem) overhead at either end?
|
| Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes
| sense, though.
| danielheath wrote:
| Airships don't require a runway; a century ago they could moor
| to skyscrapers, or ships at sea.
|
| If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from
| one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source
| airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible
| flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but
| buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice)
| could easily add 2-3 days latency.
| maw wrote:
| That makes it make more sense. Thanks.
|
| You're right that there are big regulatory issues still.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina
| disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they
| can do!!! Someone needs to advise these folks, they are desperate
| for non-road transportation up there... (western NC AND Eastern
| TN).
| tim333 wrote:
| I wonder what
|
| >Lighter Than Air, a company owned by Google's co-founder,
| begins testing Pathfinder 1, a next-generation airship that
| could revolutionize air travel, cargo transport, and the
| movement of humanitarian aid.
|
| are doing with their ship? I think it's built and sitting
| around. (https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-
| cities/gallery/2023/1...)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina
| disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they
| can do
|
| They currently are showing the world what cargo airships can do
| ( _ie_ nothing). The world just perpetually doesn 't want to
| listen.
| Animats wrote:
| The article on the site is vague, but if you go to the company's
| site, and examine the images, you can get a close look at the
| airship design. The image on the web site [1] is higher
| resolution than the web site needs, and you can zoom in if you
| open the image directly.
|
| The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four
| 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. This is comparable to a B-747
| freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400
| million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be
| lower.
|
| Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
|
| It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping.
| Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel.
| Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of
| 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs,
| they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.
|
| [1] https://images.squarespace-
| cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...
| Sammi wrote:
| For the curious the search string you want is "Maersk cargo
| ships in Loch Striven".
| user_of_the_wek wrote:
| I searched around a bit and it seems they have been gone from
| the Loch since 2011:
| https://inflatableboatjourneys.blogspot.com/2011/07/kyles-
| of...
|
| Or maybe they are back? There aren't a lot of sources I could
| find.
| pier25 wrote:
| At some point in the future the real cost of operating with
| fossil fuels will catch up.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Battery cargo ships make a lot of sense, since you can slow-
| steam far slower without losing efficiency, with an electric
| motor.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four
| 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
|
| Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or
| it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton
| cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500
| ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
|
| If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers
| will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full
| long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the
| airship would load several times as many containers.
|
| This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those
| 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than
| they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume
| into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga
| XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are
| pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those).
| Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to
| cube out.
| Animats wrote:
| > Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe,
| or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500
| ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo".
|
| From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long.
| That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the
| Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
| fergie wrote:
| Articles about airship dreambuilding have been a mainstay of HN
| and Reddit since the early days. The tech has always been super
| inspiring, yet "just around the corner". It would be almost sad
| to see them actually become a reality.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Unrealized futurism predating both in magazine form was Popular
| Mechanics and Popular Science hype of Moller skycars as the
| original goat, and virtual reality being a close second.
| adolph wrote:
| Jet packs seem to be getting actually closer, maybe perpetually
| 5 years off instead of perpetually 10 years away.
| floppiplopp wrote:
| To summarize: "It'll surely work this time. Please invest."
| verzali wrote:
| Is there an actual problem here that airships solve? Is getting
| cargo across the Pacific one or two days faster (and that's
| presumably a best case, since airships are heavily weather and
| wind dependent) actually that valuable? I would have though the
| scale of international shipping would anyway mean its pretty
| cheap to set up a continuous stream of cargo, which airships
| would struggle to replicate in any efficient way.
|
| Honestly, it sounds like a cool thing to work on, but this
| article is not convincing about the potential market. I can
| easily imagine former SpaceX and Hyperloop engineers thinking a
| cool technology will simply find a market, but that's not really
| what Elon Musk did with SpaceX.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Vaporware hype.
| LordHeini wrote:
| Sounds good does not work.
|
| Reminds me of CargoLifter:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
|
| The german article states that the price the Zeppelin GmbH (yes
| those guys) calculated, that the costs of transportation via
| airship, would be about 10 times as high as conventional methods.
|
| CargoLifter used helium which is stupidly expensive, this is
| supposed to use hydrogen and more modern materials but i think
| that does not make a factor of 10.
|
| Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a
| lifting gas". So good luck with that.
|
| As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
|
| Old Airships had either rain collectors (yep really) or piston
| engines which burned gas with a similar density to air (which
| digs a lot into your carrying capacity and volume).
|
| Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons
| CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water
| collection running.
|
| This article and the linked website have no idea how to solve the
| propulsion problem. There is some stuff about turbines going with
| the the old Zeppelin approach, of burning gas. Or something about
| solar cells, which obviously would not work because solar cells
| are rigid and heavy but this is supposed to be semi rigid. And
| you would need heavy batteries too.
|
| Also airships sink when they get wet. And it gets warm the gas
| expands and it rises. You need ballast to account for that; this
| is large so it will do that a lot.
|
| Don't forget how stupidly large these things are and thus how
| much wind is a problem. The linked website claims a predicted
| length of 388 and width of 78 Meters minimum!
|
| So maneuverability is going to be a large problem, you can
| overcome this by adding lots of propellers everywhere but that
| add weight and uses fuel.
|
| Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of
| engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some
| delivery center...
|
| Since wind might be coming from every direction you need a
| landing circle (!) of roughly a km in diameter. This is why old
| Zeppelins landed at large (!) airstrips or sometimes on masts
| attached to skyscrapers.
|
| Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be
| moved onto the ship.
|
| That ballast has to go somewhere, so the ship either needs water
| tanks (again loss of carrying capacity). Or the landing strip has
| some attachable ballast (how do you transport that back and
| forth?).
|
| If you have the infrastructure to accommodate this thing you can
| be reached by truck or rail, which is cheaper, not depended on
| weather and so on... And weirdly enough you can be reached by
| cargo aircraft which is a solved problem!
|
| Door to door delivery was exactly what CargoLifter was supposed
| to do. But it was basically a more expensive and clunky
| helicopter. Thus it failed.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| > As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
|
| Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, if you do the mechanical adjusts on the vessel. What may
| be much harder than expected.
|
| But compressing the gas takes time. If you intend to leave
| the ship parked there until you finish this, you will need a
| lot more of space.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| No. They absolutely are NOT happening. In fact, this is one of
| the very few technical solutions I'm very confident to state is
| never happening.
|
| 1) The economic model is unproven so even initial costs will be
| far too high to pay of debt incurred to manufacture, market, and
| maintain and they're not competitive with extant mass-market
| alternatives on cost & time out-of-the-gate with no clear pathway
| to even being niche competitive, let alone having mass-market
| adoption. And no, the Airship cruise industry is never going to
| take-off (heh) because there wouldn't be any extant "ports of
| call" (unlike with sea-going cruise ships) and no way to
| economically stimulate their construction.
|
| 2) Inclement weather mitigations (aside from docking, re-routing
| (delaying), or rescheduling (also delaying)) are virtually non-
| existent so there's a much higher trip variance which eats into
| fuel, time, labor, and ultimately a far higher cost variance
| which (as a 2nd order effect) leads to an overall MUCH higher
| cost to operate ANY route compared to conventional cargo or
| mixed-mode transportation. As a historic model, look at the air
| cargo transport costs in the transition from mandated multi-stop
| piston engine refueling and in-weather flying in the late 1930s
| to single-hop above-the-weather flying in the gas turbine "jet
| age" of the late 1940s. It's not JUST that jets were much faster,
| they were also far more predictable to service routes AND had far
| lower maintenance costs. A lower, slower, and less predictable
| airship with higher maintenance costs and, at best, a handful of
| percentage points off of the dollars/mile/ton figure with a
| higher initial cost outlay doesn't merit investment.
|
| 3) Safety is still a huge issue for any airship attempting
| station-keeping or full-authority-navigation close to any ground-
| effect altitude which is, unfortunately, also the airspace where
| any accident is likely to cause the most collateral damage. No
| other form of transport has this problem and, with current tech,
| would seem insolvable without turning the airship into a poorly
| performing version of a plane or rotor-craft.
| eesmith wrote:
| Agreed. I've been reading about the return of airships since I
| was a kids in the 1980s. The fundamentals haven't changed.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As it turns out, ships are just really good at shipping. People
| keep trying airships with no fundamental tech or economic
| breakthroughs and they should all expect the same result.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Even grifters seem to run out of new ideas...
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired
| a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-
| seed round..._
|
| This typo is perfect.
| ralfd wrote:
| I am blind. What typo?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I assume the word "cracked"?
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| "Crack engineer" means an engineer who is smart and capable.
| "Cracked engineer" means an engineer who is insane.
| n_jd wrote:
| It's just how the kids and the terminally online are saying
| it these days
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Cracked founders!
| cthalupa wrote:
| Not even particularly new. I remember seeing it used
| talking about Counter-Strike pros in the early 2000s
| echelon wrote:
| > (slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video
| game).
|
| >> 20 kills? Dude, you're cracked.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cracked
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Except for the very online, I think meaning 5
|
| > (slang) Crazy; crackpot.
|
| is more common in every day use than meaning 4
|
| >(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video
| game).
|
| Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge
| dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is
| a use that is mostly occurring in niche online
| communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is
| _incorrect_ [1]. There's no such thing. Words is words.
| Usage _is_ meaning. But I think I am justified in my
| belief that it is still relatively uncommon.
|
| [0] The OED wanted money to show me their list of
| meanings.
|
| [1] Although it is almost assuredly a mishearing of
| "crack".
| sn9 wrote:
| This is an extremely online place filled with people who
| game or are gamer-adjacent.
|
| This intended meaning is obvious from context.
| echelon wrote:
| It's generational. Gen Alpha increasingly use "cracked"
| to mean talented.
|
| Even "S-tier" has crept into the non-gamer vernacular. My
| wife and her friends - not gamers - are using it.
|
| TikTok spreads this stuff like wildfire.
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/discover/what-does-cracked-mean-
| in-sl...
| lazide wrote:
| Nothing says fun times like a mad rocket scientist!
| Finbarr wrote:
| I don't think it's a typo. There's an emergent usage of
| "cracked" meaning "awesome".
| staticvoidstar wrote:
| Cracked is coming form Irish slang? As in the `craic is 90`.
| Pronounced `crack` [0]
|
| [0]: https://ireland-calling.com/irish-slang-craic/
| LaGrange wrote:
| They did survive SpaceX, after all. You'd expect a few scars.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week
| or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air
| carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and
| destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs
| broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the
| risk of theft or breakage."
|
| How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to
| go through customs and such, and still go through local truck
| delivery
| Thorrez wrote:
| I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture
| shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse
| (avoiding trucks).
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How will the airship and its cargo clear customs at a random
| warehouse with presumably no staffing of border agents?
| patl wrote:
| Maybe it's still a customs/border facility. It can just be
| inland now, away from the very expensive waterfront/costal
| property
| dylan604 wrote:
| Would that inland facility still have a 100 mile
| jurisdiction boundary around it as well?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Yes, of course, with a grid of these facilities across
| the country.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| the reason that property is so expensive is because
| that's where the people are. There's no point in avoiding
| the biggest cost of air freight - getting goods to
| consumers who don't live near the limited freight hubs,
| if you land it in the middle of nowhere and now need to
| ship by rail or truck AND last mile delivery
| nickff wrote:
| There are lots of people inland and away from sea ports.
| Many hubs of industry (such as Wisconsin which makes many
| mechanics' tools) could take advantage of this if it were
| available.
| closewith wrote:
| Not that I put any credence into the idea in the article,
| but for your particular question, the same way it occurs
| now at airports - bonded warehouses.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Which airports have bonded warehouses but do not already
| host customs facilities or agents?
|
| I think that has to come after, not before.
| closewith wrote:
| I don't know if you're aware, but bonded warehouses are
| customs facilities. The vast majority of goods never pass
| through a Government customs facility.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| In which countries are they legally identical, or even
| mostly identical, to the customs facilities commonly
| found in international airports?
| nickff wrote:
| I am not the parent, but they did not say bonded
| warehouses were identical to government customs
| facilities at airports.
|
| > _" Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Hence why I also said 'or even mostly identical'?
|
| If it's only vaguely similar in fact, then that seems
| hardly convincing.
| ozim wrote:
| Implementation details /s
| LaGrange wrote:
| Easy, put it on a starship instead, and fire it off like a
| ballistic missile at the target warehouse.
| hazmazlaz wrote:
| I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No
| nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an
| aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random
| warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have
| to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane
| would.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Next article: Transparent Airships Are Happening
| nickff wrote:
| I am not sure what US law on the matter is, but many
| countries have what are known as "bonded warehouses", which
| store uncleared goods within the destination country. Are
| you a customs expert? If so, please comment on whether the
| US has an equivalent.
| emmelaich wrote:
| There's also 'free trade' areas within China that allow
| transfer without import and export tax and other
| innovations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Free-Trade_Zone
| anticensor wrote:
| Not a customs expert, but a short research suggests
| bonded warehouses do indeed exist in the United States:
| https://openjurist.org/title-19/us-
| code/section-1311/bonded-...
| dash2 wrote:
| I mean, the US just lets Chinese spy balloons wander
| aimlessly through its airspace :-P
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly
| off at a warehouse
|
| Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a
| bazillion $very_good_reasons.
|
| Not least safety.
|
| I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated
| environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of
| cargo.
|
| Whilst the general public and employees are walking around
| the place ?
|
| When there's overhead cabling around ?
|
| Even in perfect weather, with no wind, no rain, its still a
| dumb-as-shit idea.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, doesn't it kida turn anything under it into a heavy
| cargo crane safety zone ? Like, you not let people walk at
| random under suspended loads & thats what a
| loading/unloading operation for this turns into.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about
| taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a
| bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either
| end.
| dash2 wrote:
| No, the article is saying "actually I was wrong about being
| longer and slotting in between airplane and cargo ship; we
| can be as fast as planes, but cheaper, and take a big slice
| of that whole huge market". Which is why they need to explain
| why airships won't also have customs etc.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow
| the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment
| without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.
| danw1979 wrote:
| It doesn't. The author is dreaming that airships might be able
| to just drop cargo off anywhere and I guess customs just
| happens in software somehow.
|
| Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune
| from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo
| aircraft.
|
| But what is clear is that you should "possibly invest" in his
| syndicate which is funding all this...
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from
| what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that
| doesn't obviate the need for physical inspections, but it
| should make them faster.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue is customs isn't going to happen at some random
| factory / job site. International mail looks point to point
| from and end users perspective but as far as the government
| in concerned it's all going throw a small number of
| locations as it enters the county. At least relative to the
| number of street addresses.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sadly, the US still receives 95% of all postal imports
| through 1 of 5 international service centres: Chicago, IL;
| Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY, and San
| Francisco, CA
|
| Northwest = NO YUO!
|
| Technically 22 other places are supposed to accept
| international mail, but in reality, the other 5% go through
| Newark (for some surface mail), Hawaii, Guam and American
| Samoa.
|
| This creates some long detours.
|
| https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-
| reports/international-...
| loeg wrote:
| Sure, but why does that only benefit airships and not
| conventional airplanes?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I don't expect it will, I'm just surprised whenever my
| parcel shows it's been cleared by customs before it has
| even left the origin country. (And that's not a timezone
| bug, it's explicitly described as a remote authorization,
| a preauthorization, or something like that.) Customs
| (partly) in software is not an absurd idea, was my point,
| I have no opinion on airships other than acknowledging
| their inherent coolness.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Manifest approvals has been a reality for a while. But
| that works because, not despite, the bottlenecks.
|
| Countries know goods must flow through certain choke
| points so they can essentially quality control the
| manifests.
|
| Remove that and pre-authorised customs will go again.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| A smuggler's dream.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| They don't need to be immune from the same fluctuations in
| fuel costs. But if they use less fuel per ton, then a rise in
| fuel prices should benefit them more.
| dbingham wrote:
| Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered.
| That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would
| also resolve the issue with refueling.
| sn9 wrote:
| Or you could just have a Terraform fuel plant synthesizing
| fuel colocated with every landing site.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of
| them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much
| worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
| loeg wrote:
| That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author
| explicitly claims that airships can be _faster_ than
| airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs,
| warehousing, and trucking.
|
| > For air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week
| or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air
| carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and
| destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a
| customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost,
| delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.
|
| > Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5
| days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to
| look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a
| customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer
| on the other, _you can actually beat today's air freight
| service on delivery time_.
| dovin wrote:
| I'd imagine the author knows that you can't just sidestep
| customs, and it does feel a bit disingenuous that they
| didn't call that out. But hey, it's a pitch for money first
| and foremost. I'd imagine that they're just giving a
| complete list of things that slow down air freight and that
| internally they have plans for tackling each one, like not
| having to unload cargo to get it through customs and so
| using the airship as its own trucking vehicle post-customs.
| dash2 wrote:
| Maybe the key phrase here is "If you can pick up goods
| directly from a customer on one side and deliver them
| directly to a customer on the other". So he's imagining
| that big enough companies will have their own airship port,
| and presumably plug in customs to that.... So then the next
| question is, how big does an airship port have to be?
| Presumably it doesn't need huge runways?
| DowagerDave wrote:
| Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air
| freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship
| model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on
| an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that
| investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or
| intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas
| manufacturing/shipping model.
| scoofy wrote:
| Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a
| lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing
| airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.
|
| The need for specific geological features dramatically limits
| the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs.
| If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major
| city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to
| the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
| cma wrote:
| Is it for bulkier but lightweight stuff that trains can't
| handle or something?
| scoofy wrote:
| I would assume that heavier stuff would be where the demand
| is. Air freight is expensive, because weight is expensive,
| because fuel is expensive, and it's obviously an
| environmental disaster.
| emmelaich wrote:
| My reading is that it doesn't _solve_ it, it just indicates
| there is a market for non-urgent freight in which airships
| could compete.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| That exists and it's called ocean freight. Air freight is
| where you pay a premium to get a small amount of stuff there
| NOW. Ocean freight is what you use when you need 15 shipping
| containers of stuff there in a couple of weeks.
|
| Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an
| open question, and it's the business case of these airships
| for better or worse.
| d--b wrote:
| Nice! I guess one of the side effects is that air pirates are
| finally going to be a thing! Yay!
| vaylian wrote:
| Is your crew hiring?
| danielovichdk wrote:
| This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about
| anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope
| someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships
| globally, because it points only in one direction.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I get very similar vibes to this from that group of crypto
| losers that bought that old cruise ship intending to do a
| libertarian sea-stead on it. Turns out, running a ship is
| _hard,_ in a number of ways that you could 've found out with
| even a cursory amount of research.
|
| The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with
| the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."
|
| Edit: Love all the people coming to downvote me yet no one has
| yet replied to defend the group spending near 10 million
| dollars to buy a ship when not a single person involved knew
| what was involved with running a ship. Stay salty my friends.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html --
|
| Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-
| examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive.
|
| When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be
| shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the
| rest of the community.
|
| Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet
| tropes.
|
| Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
|
| Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. That tramples curiosity.
|
| Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did
| you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened
| to "The article mentions that".
|
| Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or
| post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead.
|
| Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but
| please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community--
| users should have an identity that others can relate to.
|
| Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to
| emphasize a word or phrase, put _asterisks_ around it and it
| will get italicized.
|
| Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling,
| brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades
| discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about
| abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
|
| Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If
| a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious
| comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please
| don't also comment that you did.
|
| Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
|
| Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never
| does any good, and it makes boring reading.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful
| discussion, even here. Sometimes people get (or try to get)
| a boat-load of money to do a thing that's bad from first
| principles, because they lack experience in the relevant
| field. In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make
| fun of, because it's funny.
|
| In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of
| the problems the author claims unless they just bypass
| customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime.
| And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing
| nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit
| rebuttal. It merits mockery.
|
| Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also
| really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get
| really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here,
| programming; suddenly think that everything else is less
| complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap"
| and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing
| literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.
|
| That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My
| bad there.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful
| discussion, even here.
|
| Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN
| is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity,
| and _not_ for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going
| on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or
| ideological battle.
|
| And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a _reason_ for
| them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The
| main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized
| place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-
| ish decades of existence and significant user growth is
| because of those guidelines and dang 's impartial
| commitment to implementing them.
|
| Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive
| amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a
| cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-
| pasted above) can see that.
|
| > In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun
| of, because it's funny.
|
| Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto
| losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say
| on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of
| a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual
| curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-
| less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse
| and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on
| Twitter.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I get why someone will have the conservative position. I even
| get that someone enjoys schadenfreude at people who are not
| conservative. I just don't get why someone who has low risk-
| tolerance would come to a startup forum to express their low
| risk-tolerance.
|
| That would be like if I spent any amount of time on child-
| free subreddits or on forums about stanced cars.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Well for one, the topics covered on here are far broader
| than just startups. And for two, a lot of the ones that are
| startups are actually interesting, they're trying to solve
| actual problems. In fact, putting aside the incompetence,
| this one I would say falls into that category.
|
| That said, not all ideas are created equal, and IMO at
| least, this one is not, and what makes it fall short is so
| obvious that I have trouble treating it as a serious
| proposition on the part of the people behind it, let alone
| one worth putting money into.
| simonw wrote:
| "I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new
| (water) ships globally, because it points only in one
| direction."
|
| What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it
| point in?
| danielovichdk wrote:
| New container ships being built is around all time high. Look
| it up.
|
| It points to that the business is not only doing good but
| that investments is being made, heavily.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If the economics work, I'd imagine the best time is when
| there are the most ships built since that indicates unmet
| cargo demand.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| It's a cyclical industry, so whether it "points" or peaks can
| be argued, but in 2021 561 container ships were ordered vs
| 114 in 2020
|
| * Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built
| or on order worldwide
|
| * These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-
| foot Equivalent Units)
|
| Major shipping lines:
|
| * Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery
| 2024-2025)
|
| * OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity
|
| * MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships
| and smaller vessels
|
| * CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the
| last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development
| of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same
| way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial
| regulation.
|
| On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a
| technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the
| industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance
| was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry
| that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000
| years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will
| still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
| justin wrote:
| CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain
| computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near
| the top of the tech S curve.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an
| incremental improvement that was largely a matter of
| funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and
| customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.
|
| I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland
| fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to
| do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve
| into nothing once any real-world application is attempted.
| I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for
| startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but
| I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives
| itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions
| without incident.
|
| I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make
| batteries obsolete.
| pnut wrote:
| I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not
| see how technological change has occurred within your own
| single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful
| way to an individual's life trajectory until the last
| century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and
| with such significant future implications, it's
| impossible for me not to just stand in awe.
|
| Whether the specific proof of radical change you're
| waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the
| next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to
| everything that came before it.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think it's more like the Western economy is silently
| crashing than technological development having reverted back
| to ~19th century rate, although the latter is said to be
| happening too - something feels wrong about tech lately.
| burnte wrote:
| I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT
| guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post
| and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to
| pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.
| wejick wrote:
| There's oversimplification of how logistic is working. For
| example it's not gonna happening solving last mile delivery using
| this airship, not even mentioning the pickup.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| In the render it shows the airship directly loading while
| hovering above a warehouse. This is currently not allowed under
| FAA regulations and would require a regulatory change. Not being
| able to do that makes a lot of the business model assumptions
| questionable.
| 6510 wrote:
| It is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. I imagine there
| must be at least one landlocked country interested in the
| adventure.
|
| Someone long ago did a napkin calculation for me showing a hard
| vacuum airship made of reinforced concrete can work if you make
| it big enough. What are a few miles on the cosmic scale?
| cbeach wrote:
| On a related note, I recommend this short presentation by Hacker
| News regular @simonw on the history of airships, including a look
| at the future of airships:
|
| "When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...
| Log_out_ wrote:
| https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter
|
| What has changed?
| ttepasse wrote:
| The CargoLifter-Conendrum:
|
| If you're want to use your cargo airship for point to point
| transport, you'll need ballast at the target point so that the
| buoyancy of the airship doesn't change too much. CargoLifter back
| then used water. Their prototype could lift an armoured vehicle
| and lower it - while maintaining buoyancy through pumping water
| with an high speed pump. They planned cargo services for very
| remote points.
|
| But if you'll can transport water and a high speed pump and a
| mobile mooring tower to the very remote target, chances are,
| you'll already can transport the cargo itself to that target.
|
| Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
| graybeardhacker wrote:
| I feel there were very good reasons that airships were abandoned.
| I don't know what those reasons were, but unless they enumerate
| the reasons and explain why they have now solved them, I will
| assume they are also going to fail.
|
| According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make
| airships work before the modern resurgence:
|
| The early experimental phase (1780s-1850s), The pioneering era
| (1850s-1900s), The golden age (1900s-1930s), A post-Hindenburg
| decline (1930s), Cold War military uses (1940s-1970s), and A
| modern resurgence (1990s-present).
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