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Cargo Airships Are Happening

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Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#191

Post by jandrese »

bee_rider wrote: post #156
dylan604 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?

Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.

Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones? There have already been pilots projects where Amazon does delivery by drone in a couple of places. I don't think they were a success, but an airship adds some constraints that might make the more viable. Downside is the copters needs to return to whatever altitude the ship is currently cruising at, which might be close to their ceiling.

But on a side note my first reaction to the headline of this article was "no they are not". Airships have a number of fundamental drawbacks that I don't think we are any closer to solving. Ultimately they're as slow as a cargo ship, can only carry a relatively small and light payload like an airplane, require specialized ports like ships and airplanes, and are expensive to build and operate. They just don't have a viable niche.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#192

Post by DowagerDave »

voidUpdate wrote: post #93

> "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…

Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#193

Post by scoofy »

voidUpdate wrote: post #93

> "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…

Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.

The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#194

Post by dylan604 »

jandrese wrote: post #191
bee_rider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.

Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones? There have already been pilots projects where Amazon does delivery by drone in a couple of places. I don't think they were a success, but an airship adds some constraints that might make the more viable. Downside is the copters needs to return to whatever altitude the ship is currently cruising at, which might be close to their ceiling. But on a side note my first react…

> Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones?

But if you drop them via cheap parachute, you wouldn't need anything to return. I bet they'd only be slightly less accurate delivery than what their "don't give a damn" delivery system in place now.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#195

Post by throw10920 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #190
QuantumGood wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here. Sometimes people get (or try to get) a boat-load of money to do a thing that's bad from first principles, because they lack experience in the relevant field. In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny. In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypa…

> Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here.

Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity, and not for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or ideological battle.

And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a reason for them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-ish decades of existence and significant user growth is because of those guidelines and dang's impartial commitment to implementing them.

Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-pasted above) can see that.

> In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.

Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on Twitter.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#196

Post by DowagerDave »

patl wrote: post #132
MichaelZuo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will the airship and its cargo clear customs at a random warehouse with presumably no staffing of border agents?

Maybe it's still a customs/border facility. It can just be inland now, away from the very expensive waterfront/costal property

the reason that property is so expensive is because that's where the people are. There's no point in avoiding the biggest cost of air freight - getting goods to consumers who don't live near the limited freight hubs, if you land it in the middle of nowhere and now need to ship by rail or truck AND last mile delivery

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#197

Post by marcosdumay »

bee_rider wrote: post #156
dylan604 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?

Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.

I avidly wait for that factorio mod!

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#198

Post by scottLobster »

justin wrote: post #176
scottLobster wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation. On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pa…

CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.

Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.

I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.

I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#199

Post by dotancohen »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #129
sethherr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article describes electric airships

The article describes diesel electric airships.

The fine article shows them lowering a container from a crane. I'd love to see them connect the crane to an electric generator and actually regen the potential energy of the container into electricity.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#200

Post by DowagerDave »

bee_rider wrote: post #156
dylan604 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?

Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.

or the final panel of an xkcd comic!
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