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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

#51

Post by MichaelGroves »

perl4ever wrote: post #34
MichaelGroves wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship I think that may be a misleading way to put it. "Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft" When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.

I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships.

Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#52

Post by clueless123 »

How high can this ships go? How Fast?

All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)

In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )

Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#53

Post by lachstar-x »

clueless123 wrote: post #52

How high can this ships go? How Fast? All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are) In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high l…

One of the issues with getting that high is that the higher you go, the less buoyancy the airships have, and you'd need bigger ships with more gas to haul the same loads. But the sky is very big, so it might just be an economics of scale problem

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#54

Post by lachstar-x »

jodrellblank wrote: post #46
MichaelGroves wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did " Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitabl…

That is the coolest thing. Reminds me of cloudscoops mining He3 from gas giants in science fiction books

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#55

Post by trhway »

thepasswordis wrote: post #25

Okay 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…

>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.

that reminded - for the last 70+ years all over USSR/Russia that role has been carried out by this plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2 . They have been trying to modernize/replace it, and any good deep modernization or replacement project of it ends up along the lines of Cessna Caravan, though no deep modernization/replacement has succeeded yet because it is very hard to beat that combination of price, simplicity, ruggedness and utility. And i have hard time imagining what can successfully replace it in general. May be a range of smaller autonomous VTOL UAVs for much smaller payloads can take a bit of market from it. For passengers though nothing comes to mind, at least until electric planes get similar range and carrying capacity. I don't see blimps taking any of such a role though.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#56

Post by lachstar-x »

joefigura wrote: post #42
gpm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milli…

Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it. The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your pay…

Additionally, operating costs of a semi truck that's going to remote areas are incredibly huge - not only safety equipment, driver pay, but fuel costs as well - that you might be surprised how competitive airships are. Have you looked at the numbers for that? What about building your own lightweight carbon fibre container that is filled and emptied at your location, instead of dropping off the entire package?

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#58

Post by hfdskghkj »

bombcar wrote: post #48
nosianu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus t…

It’s lighter than air so the flames burn hot but the gas is going up too - and the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire. The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.

>...the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire.

Personally, I'd rather not be falling out of the sky while I'm on fire.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#59

Post by midasuni »

sandworm101 wrote: post #50
jodrellblank wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link says a 40' container weighs 20,000kg. The Hindenburg alone could lift 232,000kg [1]. Bouyant needs to go bigger. [1] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/calculating-lifting-capacity...

No. It had 232 tons of bouyancy. Most of that was taken up by its own mass. The amount it could lift , its payload, was a tiny fraction of that amount. Wikipedia says it could lift aprox 10,000kg. Roughly the 5% payload ratio of a typical space launch today.

A FH can put 63,000kg to low Earth orbit. A delta 4 heavy 28,000.

Not sure where your 200,000kg “typical” comes from, even Saturn V, SLS and Starship aren’t 200t.

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