181–190 of 308 posts
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> 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.
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You're failing to see the secret that is exposed by the fact that their Chief Engineer comes from hyperloop. They're going to dig tunnels connecting all their destinations and run the airships underground in a vacuum sealed network. No atmospheric drag at all! Bingo!
How can you call yourself an engineer and work on the hyperloop. Literally only takes about 30s of thought to realize it is an impossible idea.
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim: "If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..." How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the warehouse on arrival in-country s…
Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park" while airborne, but at least there were concepts of boarding/unboarding in the air as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.
"I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction." What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?
• Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built or on order worldwide
• These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units)
Major shipping lines:
• Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2024-2025)
• OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity
• MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships and smaller vessels
• CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)
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Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that doesn’t obviate the need for physical inspections, but it should make them faster.
Sure, but why does that only benefit airships and not conventional airplanes?
This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.
[flagged]
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"When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...
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Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author explicitly claims that airships can be faster than airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs, warehousing, and trucking. > 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…
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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.
Well, this discussion is in the context of airships, so there's no question that everything that doesn't require potential energy to defeat gravity and to stay in position is more efficient. 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 necess…
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html — Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sne…
In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypass customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime. And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit rebuttal. It merits mockery.
Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here, programming; suddenly think that everything else is less complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap" and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.
That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My bad there.