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Cargo Airships Are Happening

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Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#231

Post by jandrese »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #204
xnyan wrote: post #6

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…

What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire con…

Historically the difficulty isn't in building the mast, it is in preventing the airship from being smashed into the mast by the wind. Or in dramatic cases flipping end over end because it was only moored on one location.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#232

Post by sn9 »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #136
echelon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game). >> 20 kills? Dude, you're cracked. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cracked

Except for the very online, I think meaning 5 > (slang) Crazy; crackpot. is more common in every day use than meaning 4 >(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game). Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is a use that is mostly occurring in niche online communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is incorrect [1]. There's no s…

This is an extremely online place filled with people who game or are gamer-adjacent.

This intended meaning is obvious from context.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#233

Post by scoofy »

cma wrote: post #206
scoofy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

Is it for bulkier but lightweight stuff that trains can't handle or something?

I would assume that heavier stuff would be where the demand is. Air freight is expensive, because weight is expensive, because fuel is expensive, and it's obviously an environmental disaster.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#234

Post by dylan604 »

jandrese wrote: post #227
dylan604 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe, but as you point out you lose your pinpoint accuracy and also it consumes a parachute for every delivery. Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of and you have to store enough for every delivery. The beauty of the quadcopter is that it is reusable. It can also use air brakes to help slow the descent and really only burn power on the very last bit of the delivery and then on the ascent ba…

You seem to be losing the spirit of the conversation, and that spirit is the idea is preposterous. In that spirit, being reusable is irrelevant. I'm sure if they wanted, they could figure out how to make a disposable parachute that can be composted or recycled. At that's a far as practical as I'm willing to go

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#235

Post by marcosdumay »

pantalaimon wrote: post #154
LordHeini wrote: post #73

Sounds good does not work. Reminds me of CargoLifter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter The german article states that the price the Zeppelin GmbH (yes those guys) calculated, that the costs of transportation via airship, would be about 10 times as high as conventional methods. CargoLifter used helium which is stupidly expensive, this is supposed to use hydrogen and more modern materials but i think that does…

> As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas. Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?

Yes, if you do the mechanical adjusts on the vessel. What may be much harder than expected.

But compressing the gas takes time. If you intend to leave the ship parked there until you finish this, you will need a lot more of space.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#236

Post by ttepasse »

The CargoLifter-Conendrum:

If you're want to use your cargo airship for point to point transport, you'll need ballast at the target point so that the buoyancy of the airship doesn’t change too much. CargoLifter back then used water. Their prototype could lift an armoured vehicle and lower it – while maintaining buoyancy through pumping water with an high speed pump. They planned cargo services for very remote points.

But if you’ll can transport water and a high speed pump and a mobile mooring tower to the very remote target, chances are, you’ll already can transport the cargo itself to that target.

Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#237

Post by frickinLasers »

Qwertious wrote: post #123
pclmulqdq wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible." Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had ph…

>Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Because airships are really cool.

Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.

If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#238

Post by m4rtink »

traceroute66 wrote: post #143
Thorrez wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).

> but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a bazillion $very_good_reasons. Not least safety. I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of cargo. Whilst the general public and employees are walking around the place ? When there's overhead cabling around ? Even i…

Yeah, doesn't it kida turn anything under it into a heavy cargo crane safety zone ? Like, you not let people walk at random under suspended loads & thats what a loading/unloading operation for this turns into.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#239

Post by pnut »

scottLobster wrote: post #198
justin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.

Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#240

Post by frickinLasers »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #90
frickinLasers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved... “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Ch…

Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible." Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had ph…

Well, TIL something I thought was demonstrated mid-century didn't happen until the 90s.
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