221–230 of 308 posts
Articles about airship dreambuilding have been a mainstay of HN and Reddit since the early days. The tech has always been super inspiring, yet "just around the corner". It would be almost sad to see them actually become a reality.
> "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…
The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.
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…
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU. If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be…
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
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They could in theory but I'm dubious governments will be willing to shape their customs enforcement to accommodate this company. Best case I think they might be able to do a drop off at a place for customs inspections and pick them up again with a different craft once cleared.
I bet they would change their workflow if it was an Amazon warehouse. Amazon could change the rules in DC.Accomodate for certain size warehouses.
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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'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).
I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane would.
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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.
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.
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It doesn’t. The author is dreaming that airships might be able to just drop cargo off anywhere and I guess customs just happens in software somehow. Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft. But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…
Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.
The (biggest) problem that keeps airships from practical use is that they are huge sails. Big sails mean even small amounts of wind can be powerful forces acting on the airship. In the air a big push from the wind might be safely managed, but if you're near anything solid such as the ground, you can get smashed to bits. To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need both huge specialized docks with…
> There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?) Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast. Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.