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Cargo airships could be big

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Re: Cargo airships could be big

#281

Post by sophacles »

chatmasta wrote: post #171
stopping wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a single tracer bullet, if it's filled with hydrogen.

Surely you could design some redundancy into the hull? It's not like the ship needs to be one giant gas bubble. It can be a mesh of a few hundred bubbles that could each pop without bringing the whole thing down.

Surely you could design your tracer bullet launcher around repeatable processes, so that you could send a few more shortly after?

Don't even need to pop all the bubbles. Just enough for lift < weight. Gravity automates the rest.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#282

Post by pfdietz »

meindnoch wrote: post #17
splitrocket wrote: post #12

This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...

And what are we going to do there? Mine sulphuric acid from the clouds?

Yes, for the deuterium, which is enriched by two orders of magnitude over the value here on Earth.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#283

Post by Ankaios »

twawaaay wrote: post #32
marcosdumay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have plenty of atmosphere, so radiation isn't a problem. (The problem is everything else, as usually is the case on space.)

Venus has plenty of atmosphere above the surface, but not above the point where there is 1 ATM of pressure. In case of Earth most of protection comes from our magnetic field. The reason is that magnetic field sweeps ALL charged particles coming from the sun while atmosphere only stops some. When a particle drops into atmosphere it has a chance to collide with an air molecule, the deeper the higher the chance. But the…

The mass of atmosphere above Venus' one-bar pressure line is significant—it's similar to the atmosphere mass above sea level on Earth.

Also, our atmosphere is much more important for protecting us from energetic particles than Earth's magnetic field. The atmosphere can stop everything the magnetic field can, and more.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#284

Post by 0xB31B1B »

oofta-boofta wrote: post #274
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sergey Brin airship project is Lighter Than Air (LTA), in case any one was wondering. https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7d...

How much do you want to bet the employees working on this were apart of the anointed 12k that just got laid off

LTA is not google/alphabet affiliated

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#285

Post by water-your-self »

oofta-boofta wrote: post #274
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sergey Brin airship project is Lighter Than Air (LTA), in case any one was wondering. https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7d...

How much do you want to bet the employees working on this were apart of the anointed 12k that just got laid off

Given that i cannot find anything to suggest it is a subsidiary, I would stake a healthy sum that they did not particiapte in the Google layoffs

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#286

Post by water-your-self »

likpok wrote: post #252
lesuorac wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if the alternative transports also don't work in bad weather I'm not sure you can use some failures to disqualify airships. So long as they work "more" days of the year it's a better solution. Weather doesn't really sneak up on us anymore.

Aircraft are substantially more resistant to bad weather: you can fly an airplane into a hurricane. Aircraft are also a lot faster -- it's unlikely that a thunderstorm will catch up with you (max speed of a storm is something like 50-80 mph) and trips are a lot shorter. Airships are much closer to the storm speed and may need to stay aloft for several days. That makes it more likely that they'll hit unexpected weathe…

Its not unexpected that a california resident, one accustomed to fairly temperate weather, would invest heavily into airships.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#287

Post by Ankaios »

nostromo wrote: post #277
splitrocket wrote: post #12

This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...

I like the plan to have robots build a very tall mountain platform on Venus that would allow us to walk around outside on another planet, in a t-shirt and jeans (and a respirator, as you mentioned). You could probably even grow plants on this mountain top. After the base is established, we could start trying to terraform the atmosphere to make more of Venus inhabitable. It's crazy to think that high-altitude Venus is…

The mountains aren't tall enough, unfortunately. The highest peaks reach about 10 km above the mean radius, while the "nice" part of the atmosphere is 50-ish km up.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#288

Post by smegger001 »

oofta-boofta wrote: post #274
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sergey Brin airship project is Lighter Than Air (LTA), in case any one was wondering. https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7d...

How much do you want to bet the employees working on this were apart of the anointed 12k that just got laid off

one does not lay of the team of a pet project of the confounder/board member with controlling interest in your company lightly.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#289

Post by dredmorbius »

bboygravity wrote: post #197
snovv_crash wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strength to weight ratio of a carbon fibre scaffolding would be far superior to steel.

Isn't the clothy stuff the problem though rather than the scaffolding? Same on most sailboats: what makes them get into trouble is not the hull cracking but rather the sail tearing up in a storm or the mast snapping off and making them uncontrollable / sink. (Im guessing out loud here, statements probably wrong)

For airships, the entire structure (frame, envelope, gas bags) are at the limits of materials engineering. Failure of any of the components is both likely and catastrophic to the craft.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#290

Post by smegger001 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #110
meindnoch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what are we going to do there? Mine sulphuric acid from the clouds?

Build a second basket for our eggs. There are obviously better baskets than Venus though. I'd sooner choose an orbital habitat.

its not one or the the other though it is very possible to do all of them. build floating Venusian bubble cities, make O'Neill cylinders orbiting around every celestial body of note, while building tunnel cities on mars and the moon and hallow out asteroid and build Stanford Torus in them . We are planet of over 7 billion people we can do more than one thing, and the more varied and distant the baskets humanity is spread to the better.
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