Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
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Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#2I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this sort of transportation need.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#3Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#4Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did.
Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#5Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today. Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the destination.
There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape.
This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read through it.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#6Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#7How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order to be profitable?
The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be interested to hear how this is all being taken into account.
[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#8Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
They responded to my question about this here:
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#9This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the leap" however!
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#10Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow.
Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about the motors they are using (energy -> drag work).
Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something like 300km/h.
TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse