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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article describes electric airships
The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of electric airships, you can run an electric condenser, extracting atmospheric water vapor.
Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination when you drop the cargo?
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...
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...
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 o…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, we have much better weather forecasting than we did last time we tried airships for realsies.
Severe turbulence in clear conditions is increasing due to climate change: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...
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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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, we have much better weather forecasting than we did last time we tried airships for realsies.
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.
