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Cargo Airships Are Happening

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Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#261

Post by credit_guy »

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…

His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.

If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#262

Post by cookiengineer »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #189
cookiengineer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Color me confused. I do not understand what point you're making - it appears to be all over the map until the end where it makes no point at all.

I guess what I was trying to say is that we first have to kind of agree on a common description of what we describe as the best solution for the problem of storage space.

Is it financial costs only? Is it energy costs over time? Is it taxes over time? Is it physical space vs ground area ratio? Is it popularity and convenience (like in the car vs train case)?

You were arguing that warehouses are cheap to build, but that only works far outside densely populated areas.

A lot of countries are settled more densely than the US due to sheer lack of available land. So if we want to describe this problem correctly, we'd also have to account for South-East Asian, or South-American, or Polynesian, or European countries in my opinion.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#263

Post by perilunar »

sn9 wrote: post #229
dbingham wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.

Or you could just have a Terraform fuel plant synthesizing fuel colocated with every landing site.

The fuel plant doesn't have to be colocated with the pickup/delivery sites — you can do a fuel stop en-route if needed.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#264

Post by perilunar »

credit_guy wrote: post #261
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…

His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it. If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only…

I think the idea is to pickup at the source and deliver direct to the destination, eliminating the warehousing and trucking completely.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#265

Post by perilunar »

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…

> Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#266

Post by LordHeini »

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?

No really because the gas helium or oxygen, is super low density (in fact the lowest 2 density gasses there are). This means that you would need a compressor which can on one end suck super large volumes of gas but sill achieve high compression. Those are heavy and need lots of energy which you don't have on an airship.

I looked up some compressor manufacturers. And got roughly the following:

Large helium compressors, which compress like 2000 liters of helium per minute to 200bar, weight around 2 tons and consume power in the order of 60kw.

Not sure if 2000 liters per minute is the right amount but you get the idea.

So even if you can fit that thing on your airship, the 60kw power plant and all its accompanying fuel does not fit.

And remember you are doing this because of fuel usage the first place! So you would be using fuel to compress gas which you have to compress because you are using fuel...

Usually gasses like this are compressed (and liquified) via something like the Linde process:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle

That is industrial scale and does not go onto anything that moves...

And you would need to store your compressed gasses somewhere too.

All of this is super complex, heavy, requires stupid amounts of energy and thus is way to costly to do on something that flies.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#268

Post by wh0knows »

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…

The copters can fly into a net suspended from the airship, rather than needing to gain all the altitude themselves.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#269

Post by joelignaatius »

Consider a cargo airship operated remotely. The propulsion would be based on solar powered fans. Even if it took weeks to cross the ocean it would need essentially no cost to operate (or incredibly little) compared to operating a ship. If one blows up (hydrogen is volatile) you'd dump all the cargo on the ocean but you wouldn't be dumping tons of diesel fuel and the frame of the the ship is smaller than a ship. If you can do it without a crew you've essentially made shipping almost free except for loading and unloading at ports. AND you can put ports in areas that don't have access to inlets to the oceans or good shorelines. The most difficult part is the volatility of the lifting gas. You might have to load and unload cargo on platforms away from the coastline to prevent explosions. As for the hydrogen itself, the balloon can create it's own lifting gas by separating hydrogen from the atmosphere with an onboard chemical electric apparatus (presumably) if it ends up leaking hydrogen on its voyage. Lifting gas volatility has always been the biggest problem.

Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening

#270

Post by rtkwe »

acdha wrote: post #163
rtkwe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that really so different from how customs officers go on board trains now?

There are a limited number of rail crossings they need to work with and it's conveniently on the ground. This company is pitching direct shipper to receiver deliveries via air so getting agents onto the ships is a lot harder and the company wants to drop off directly at customers all over the country meaning no proper port of entry. There are ways to do that but they're regulated as import/export businesses.
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