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Airships would make a fantastic, greener alternative to a cruise ship. I suspect winds to be its biggest sticking point.
by Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Airships would make a fantastic, greener alternative to a cruise ship. I suspect winds to be its biggest sticking point.
- ecpottinger 5y agoI have gone on a of number cruises, especially on the Alaskan cruise and Panama cruise the one thing I never heard from anyone was "I wish they traveled faster.". There is a number of trips that a slow and quiet trip would make for great fun.
- ThePadawan 5y agoDuring the uncertainty of when/if ports would reopen across Europe, some UK cruise companies went so far as to simply offer "cruises to nowhere". I.e. they would set off the usual ports, but not head for continental Europe, just sail out to a calm spot with agreeable climate and hang out there for a while.
- thefounder 5y agoWhy did they leave the port at all?
- gambiting 5y agoBecause I can't imagine people are happy to pay to sit for a week in an industrial dock in Portsmouth. Also sailing to warmer waters means you can sit on the outside deck/balcony and enjoy the sun. Again, not exactly the things UK ports are well known for.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoI'm going to guess that there are laws that make that pretty undesirable. For example: There were (and maybe still are) gambling ships on the Ohio river and on Lake Michigan - all of which docked in Indiana. Unfortunately, such gambling was illegal in Indiana. The ships had to leave dock and go out a little on the water. Suddenly, the gambling was legal. There are probably dozens of these laws that encourage leaving the dock, especially if you are going into international waters instead of simply between states.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoYes, the LA to Las Vegas gambling air cruiser would be a profitable route. Sunsets would be fantastic!
- TylerE 5y agoThe problem is scale. The Hindenberg design, despite being 800ft long, only accommodated 50 passengers, in TINY cabins (6.5' x 5'). The entire cabin was 6000 sqft. Even the "cheap" cabins on a modern cruise ship are ~150sqft each, and all have private bathrooms.
- hutzlibu 5y agoBut we do have lighter materials to build with, avaiable today? So a same size blimp could give more room. And why not just build bigger blimps.
- adrianN 5y agoCruise ships are absolutely massive. They're floating cities, housing and feeding thousands of people. The new materials would have to be very light indeed to scale from 50 to 5000 passengers.
- hutzlibu 5y agoI would be fine with 50-150 people per module. And then you can maybe meet in air. Combine them or seperate them. Land or go up very high. Drift where the wind blows. The sky is big.
- LeonM 5y agoYes, we could make a larger cabin with the same weight constraints using modern composite materials. But even with lighter materials, you would still not be able to accommodate more passengers comfortably. The majority of weight-per-passenger will come from water (which every passenger needs for showering, toilets, food preparation). You would need to land regularly just for passenger hygene reasons. So I still don't expect blimps will be a 'comfortable' alternative to cruise ships. Random fun fact: The Hindenburg had a grand piano made from aluminium, as a regular piano would have been too heavy.
- hutzlibu 5y agoI think there is usually lots of water in the sky. You could just pipe in a cloud ...
- rob74 5y agoThen any sufficiently interesting city in the world will be able to experience the joys of regularly being invaded by cruise tourists - yay for that! Fortunately airships won't be able to hold quite as many passengers as a cruise ship...