Serious question out of curiosity. Has anyone solved the lifting gas volatility problem (is the lighter the gas the more volatile)? That's the main deal breaker with all zeppelin proposals.
Cargo Airships Are Happening
271–280 of 308 posts
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#272Earlier 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.
Is that you Casey? If so, though we disagree on the future of Airships, I love what Terraform is doing.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#273Earlier 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…
Drones for end customers make more sense then
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#274cargo airships are not ever gona happen
pure unobtainium
we are domehow glosding over the imposibility of combining a transport ship with a built in mega crane,that has no fixed base or solid anchoring system
all bulk cargo operations are dangerouse enough already
cargo airships can not be engineered to work
zeeeero
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#275cargo airships are not ever gona happen pure unobtainium we are domehow glosding over the imposibility of combining a transport ship with a built in mega crane,that has no fixed base or solid anchoring system all bulk cargo operations are dangerouse enough already cargo airships can not be engineered to work zeeeero
Cargo airships are not going to replace container ships, but they may well have their niche. One such use-case is prompt delivery of supplies that are urgently needed in high quantity in underdeveloped areas. For example, delivering some grammar to the parent comment.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe that's the idea, but it deserves some polishing.
The main observation that this guy made one year ago was that airships benefit from the square-cube law. A truly gigantic airship can carry a load proportional to its volume, but experiences drag proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it ends up having very good fuel economy. But to get to this scale you need to be at least as big as the Hindenburg, preferably much larger.
But then it's difficult to see how you can deliver loads of a few hundred tons from point to point.
I think the guy would have a much better pitch if he sticks to the idea that the speed disadvantage is significantly reduced by the first and last mile overhead that impact equally both cargo jets and airships.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please reveal the impossibility of the idea?
Sure. If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft. The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed. A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage or malfunctioning equi…
Huh? In what world is a hyperloop going maybe 700mph comparable to a spacecraft reentering from orbit at 17,000mph? Also, maybe there's something I'm missing but spacecraft can and do renter from orbit intact, thus proving that this problem is solvable even when the forces at play are orders of magnitude greater. Apply your safety argument to passenger airliners or even ordinary trains and you'll see that they are also "impossible to make safety guarantees" for.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#278Earlier 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…
> Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of
We're coming up on Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo pretty soon [citation needed], so we could just do the same thing our ancestors did with flour sacks back in the day and turn them into children's clothes. Or maybe even tents for the ever-growing homeless camp-cities. The dystopian possibilities are endless!
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why bother with a parachute? Just redesign houses with bungee-net drop zones for packages. It'd probably result in less damages than the average FedEx delivery anyway.
Re: Cargo Airships Are Happening
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please reveal the impossibility of the idea?
Sure. If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft. The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed. A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage or malfunctioning equi…
> So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees.
Right, because cars and planes and trains and boats and bicycles and footpaths and airships all famously have 100% perfect safety track records, right?