Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am blind. What typo?
"Crack engineer" means an engineer who is smart and capable. "Cracked engineer" means an engineer who is insane.
It's just how the kids and the terminally online are saying it these days
Cargo Airships Are Happening
111–120 of 308 posts
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#112> Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-seed round... This typo is perfect.
I don’t think it’s a typo. There’s an emergent usage of “cracked” meaning “awesome”.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.
> market segment So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?
Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained by land transport.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of electric airships, you can run an electric condenser, extracting atmospheric water vapor.
You're both missing the forest for the trees, when the airship is electric obviously you don't have to add ballast while flying because you don't have to compensate for burnt fuel.
The ballast is for cargo, which needs to be picked up and dropped off. Fuel is just a potential solution.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#115> Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-seed round... This typo is perfect.
[deleted]
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was blau-gass was unpressurized propane, which is a little more dense than air. But I guess according to that article it's slightly less. I'd expect that, like a lot of problems zeppelins had in the 1920s, burning hydrogen would be more feasible with modern technology. I'd also point out that the thing that made hydrogen dangerous in those airships was that the skin was two layers. The inner skin was…
The way the cutaway images on their site look, the bouyant members would be nestled in the actual structure in large tanks. https://www.shipbyairship.com/
This actually makes me think these people are unserious. This is an obsolescent airship design. ZeppelinNT, Airlander 10, and Lockheed P-719 all use the semi-rigid design with integral gas bags.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#117> "But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage." How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through custo…
I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).
How will the airship and its cargo clear customs at a random warehouse with presumably no staffing of border agents?
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of electric airships, you can run an electric condenser, extracting atmospheric water vapor.
This idea of extracting water from air keeps coming back, but every time someone tries it, they learn of the same thermodynamic limits. It is extremely energy-intensive to extract water from the air, and it only really works if the climate is humid enough that there is water in the air to extract. This is exactly what a dehumidifier does, and the off-the-shelf version you can buy at home depot is no more than 5-10x w…
Do we even need to extract the water? The point is to capture weight, and the only reason to liquefy the water is to store it more efficiently, by volume.
Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient, storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just compressing the hydrogen.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#119The 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…
At some point in the future the real cost of operating with fossil fuels will catch up.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of electric airships, you can run an electric condenser, extracting atmospheric water vapor.
That seems like it would be really bad for energy efficiency: now you need batteries large enough for propulsion during the whole trip, plus extra for extracting water vapor. Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination when you drop the cargo?
Because that's less flexible and there may not be water at the destination in the first place. That said, Flying Whales are trying to do exactly that, because ballast tech just isn't capable enough yet.