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Cargo airships could be big

elidourado.com

141–150 of 385 posts

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#141
post #55

The airship renaissance is the fusion of transportation world. It's always ten years away. Seriously, I've been hearing about the great promise of modern airships for twenty years. Where are they? Are there any airships operating commercially now outside of niche applications?

If US, China and Taiwan situation escalates and US imposes a naval blockade, this can be used to effectively circumvent it. Perhaps China should invest in this.

China has been investing in (non-sea) logistics routes for over a decade. It's called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

To be clear, developing sea routes is also an aspect of it.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the relevant sound is rrrrrrip .

airships have multiple cells though, a single rip wouldn't doom the entire thing

But what caused the airship to rip? If it was wind, then you now have that same destructive wind ripping through the inside of your airship through the hole.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is a non-renewable resource drilled out of the ground, of which there is a global 'crisis' shortage[1]. Hydrogen is easy to make in vast quantities and cheaper. But more importantly, while they have similar lift capacities on paper (Helium ~90% of Hydrogen), in practice they don't - https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/ has an explanation and calculations. Hydrogen lift airships set off fully infl…

If fusion power takes off, could you produce helium as a by-product?

There's a fusion startup called Helion near Seattle working on this, it'll be really exciting if it pans out at scale.

This video was a fascinating watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#145
post #55

The airship renaissance is the fusion of transportation world. It's always ten years away. Seriously, I've been hearing about the great promise of modern airships for twenty years. Where are they? Are there any airships operating commercially now outside of niche applications?

If US, China and Taiwan situation escalates and US imposes a naval blockade, this can be used to effectively circumvent it. Perhaps China should invest in this.

Now you've got me wondering if composite frame airships could be made transparent to radar.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#146

Great analysis. A few random thoughts 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and…

> 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and the inner foil would be only 1cm or so, so 99.9999% of the helium would be inside the inner foil. The gas between the two foils would in time become mixed with air, but the amount of double leakage would be negligible. The weight of the double foil would also be negligible compared to the overall weight of the structure.

I assume someone else can address this better, but given how expensive and limited helium is, I don't think we can just write off losses by comparing airships to party balloons. Foil party balloons look noticeably less inflated after a week or two. I have no idea how much gas is being lost, but that seems much more than a trivial amount to the point where I don't think a second envelope is going to help you much. It will have the same outgassing problems as the inner envelope, but will add additional weight and air resistance, both of which will reduce the maximum payload. Relatedly: is it cheap to extract the helium trapped in the outer envelope?

Given the quantity of helium needed for an airship fleet, is topping them up regularly even an option? I'd assume it would need dramatically more helium than is currently being produced, and there's only so much helium available to us without using something like hydrogen fusion.

In college I briefly worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory on an experiment with the Relativistic Heavy Ion collider. That collider has a set of giant collection tanks next to it so that (at least as it was explained to me) in the event of a superconductor quench event, they can try to shunt all the remaining liquid helium coolant into storage in order to limit how much of the valuable resource they lose. I imagine the amount of helium they're using would be peanuts compared to the amount required for a cargo fleet.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#147
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1 ATM of air is the same amount of material as 33 feet of water which provides a great deal of protection from charged particles. I doubt enough charged particles can penetrate to the surface that it’s a meaningful issue. I’ve seen many books etc suggest the earths magnetic field is required, but I haven’t found direct evidence for it doing anything beyond protecting the ozone layer.

>1 ATM of air is the same amount of material as 33 feet of water which provides a great deal of protection

"Amount of material" isn't what's relevant. It's closer to "number of atomic nuclei."

A certain mass of air is less shielding then the same mass of water. By number density, air is mostly nitrogen atoms, whereas water is mostly hydrogen atoms. Overall this means that per kilogram, water contains 2.4x as many atomic nuclei as air.

--

Of course there are bigger problems with Venus cloud cities. At the 50 km height where the pressure is 1 atmosphere, the temperature is 75 °C (167 °F). At the 55 km altitude where the temperature is 27 °C (81 °F), the pressure is 0.5 atmospheres.[0]

As a bonus, both these altitudes lie deep within the layer of sulfuric acid clouds (50-80 km).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#148

I'd like to draw your attention to " killing 35 of the 97 people on board in the inferno. " The Hindenburg had 7 million cubic feet of Hydrogen gas. It was the biggest aircraft disaster of its time. It had such rudimentary technology that the cockpit looked more like a sailing ship than an aircraft[1]. Despite that, well over half the passengers jumped out the windows[2], ran away and survived with few or no injuries…

Everybody always focuses on the Hindenburg, but it's not as though helium airships were much safer. In some scenarios they were marginally safer, but the deadliest airship disaster of them all was the USS Akron, a helium airship. 73 dead and 3 survivors, vs the Hindenburg's 36 dead and 62 survivors. As for marginally safer: There were some cases of helium airships breaking up due to weather and people surviving the r…

> But even with helium, airships are still very fragile and dangerous.

True. But with high speed landing and takeoff aeroplanes are extremely dangerous too.

Thousands of gallons of high octane fuell in the tanks on board does not help

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#149

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?

Tie things to string and dip them into the acid clouds. Upload the results to youtube for profit.

Re: Cargo airships could be big

#150

The article completely omits trains. That is glaring. I had this steampunk like plan when I was in college to have huge hydrogen cargo airships pulled by trains to haul large bulk items (fully assembled houses, building parts, large trees, fully assembled combines, etc). A literal skytrain. Some new lines would have to be created a way to handle going through tunnels etc. I think now I would have a drone be able to c…

Trains can’t cross oceans or cover long distances or dynamically change routes
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