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Airships can also be useful over land even in places with dense rail/road networks if the cargo is too large for rail/road. A primary example is factory-built h
by jessriedel 4y ago
Airships can also be useful over land even in places with dense rail/road networks if the cargo is too large for rail/road. A primary example is factory-built housing: currently, such houses have to be manufactured in pieces small enough to go on a truck and then assembled on-site, increasing cost. But if you can build larger sections (or even the whole house) at the factory and just air-lift it to the site, it could be much more efficient.
- m4rtink 4y agoNote that when the airship drops a heavy load, it might shoot into the stratosphere unless an action is taken due to suddenly having so much lift. So either you have to vent potentially expensive lifting gas - or get some replacement load, such as water or even a load of rocks. Not an impossible to solve but some site preparation is needed.
- usrusr 4y agoBut it's much easier to truck in a few dozen tons of ballast than to truck in, say, a 400 ft rotor blade. Transport is seriously limiting wind power, not just because larger gets better wind but also because larger would actually get less nimby, not more: rpm scales inversely with size, and rpm is what draws our attention to where we don't want it.
- bewo001 4y agoThat was the idea of CargoLifter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter). The plan was to build an airship that can lift 160 t of oversized payload and beat train or road transport on price and speed. They ran out of money before they could build anything useful (besides a mighty hangar).