Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515
Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again
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
#22This has been on here a few days ago. I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the payload. I belive it's 675 lbs. That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, and bring it home in one piece.) It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of material though, but not near power lines.
I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the airship and maintenance.
Put differently, if they’re cheap enough you could just buy 100 and ship 67,500 lbs a day.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#23[deleted]
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near power lines. 675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving places that are currently served by…
Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly inefficient, particularly in low density areas.
It's very easy to compete with a truck in some areas of Alaska: they simply aren't reachable by road!
If freight has to be brought in either by boat or by plane, an autonomous blimp suddenly sounds like a great alternative.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#25Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane?
So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into?
The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#26I thought this was the Buoyant that makes the Linkerd service mesh. "Middle-mile delivery" and "cargo airships" must be new cloud metaphors. I was so confused.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#27Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane? So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into? The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's a…
You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this.
The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense.
It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few million dollars for one of those, and the quote in this thread is a few hundred thousand dollars for an airship). You need 0 pilots to move those 4 around instead of 1 to fly the airplane, and the claim seems to be that it's more fuel efficient per kilogram-meter so those 4 should take less fuel too. Moreover you're getting increased flexibility because if you only need a fraction of the weight, you don't need to send all 4. You also get vtol take-off and landing with the airships.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#28Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane? So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into? The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's a…
Resupply to mountain tops that would require a helicopter.
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#29This has been on here a few days ago. I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the payload. I belive it's 675 lbs. That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, and bring it home in one piece.) It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of material though, but not near power lines.
I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the airship and maintenance. Put differently, if they’re cheap enough you could just buy 100 and ship 67,500 lbs a day.
Or to be put evem more differently, 100 airships could ship less than 2 40-foot shipping containers. (At least according to https://www.technogroupusa.com/size-and-weight-limit-laws/ , though I suspect density would be the limiting factor.)
Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
#30Can 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849
That... doesn't give me much optimism. They were asked about wind but they answered the question they wish they'd been asked (fog).