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Airships Rise Again (2021)
- dr_dshiv 4y agoAlways will i upvote airships. I love the solar power potential! And dynamic aerodynamics. And come on, safe hydrogen harvested from the ocean, why not?
- marcodiego 4y agoI wonder if it isn't possible to add a de-humidifier so it can remove water from air, elctrolyse it to and use to hydrogen to re-fill itself. Eternal balloons!
- dr_dshiv 4y agoWith the huge power density of solar panels on its massive upper surface, why not?
- Kelteseth 4y agoJust adding a huge amount of solar panels has other problems like massive thermal problems that would result in an expation of the helium inside. Source: I live in Friedrichsafen, the brithplace of the Zeppelin. Artur Brauchle Head of Electrics and Avionics at Zeppelin once told me this.
- voakbasda 4y agoSo use the heat to turn water to steam. Steam-powered airships sound much cooler anyway.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoYeah, problems that definitely need to be solved! Also, I almost went on a zeppelin this year, I didn’t know it was possible to still book them in your town!
- tomcam 4y agoSure, but did you have a credible source? Seriously, those must have been some unforgettable conversations. I'm a little envious.
- downvotetruth 4y agoThis was initially a good laugh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739220 . Since one cannot reply to that post anymore, turning the monitor off is not a feature of a text editor; although font color is a feature the length or presence of entered text is visible by the cursor position & neither options disable editing (append only?). Using a command similar to this on a POSIX terminal is an option to hide the input & seem to disable backspace & delete: echo "Thoughts?"; read -d $'\04' -s x; echo "$x"
- dr_dshiv 4y agoHappy to amuse!
- anamexis 4y agoYou seem to have misplaced your comment.
- netsharc 4y agoHe's linking to a post from dr_dshiv and hijacking dr_dshiv's comment to reply to him because the original post has been archived...
- Retric 4y agoThe actual request is a little more subtle: I think just a letter or two... Anything more and I'd want to edit. Anything less and I'd worry about whether it was working. But, I will try it with my screen off
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- sophacles 4y agoI've been seeing some variant of this article for as long as I remember. The return of the airship feels like aviation's fusion at this point.
- pydry 4y agoThat was my first thought. Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
- arise 4y agoThey have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into these projects. There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it. About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
- zizee 4y agoI'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.
- pwdisswordfish0 4y agoAirships would seem to excel, then, for short trips where you need lots of lift. Within the same city, for example.
- affgrff2 4y agoDreams of cargo lifting airships gave us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
- noneeeed 4y agoI really wish airships were actually viable, but it’s just never going to happen. They seemed like a really nice way to travel, slow and sedate like an ocean liner, but you could take them over land.
- standardUser 4y agoYou can book a ride right now if you want. It may never be a dominant mode of transportation, but it is happening: https://incredible-adventures.com/zeppelin-airship.html https://incredible-adventures.com/zeppelin-airship.html
- FunnyBadger 4y agoIt would be nice. The problem is the same as self-driving cars: they work but ONLY in certain very constrained and limited application scenarios that limit their adoption. Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard. Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather. Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
- JasonFruit 4y ago> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas. I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.
- smileysteve 4y ago> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard. to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for white lane markers will never do well in snow country. For certain situations, different technologies are useful. Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in snow or rain. You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety windshield, with wipers. "Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
- karteum 4y agoIf it's filled with helium, I guess it won't scale to replace the thousands of aircrafts in operation due to the finite amount of helium on earth. If it's filled with hydrogen, then people should remember the Hindenburg tragedy (and R101 too, glorified in Iron Maiden's "Empire of the clouds")...
- stubish 4y agoHindenburg is brought up in every single article about airships, so reminding people to remember is rather redundant. It happened 80 years ago. 30 people died. There might even have been one or two people looking into the causes over the last century in the hope of improving things. It was a PR disaster more than anything. When 1500+ people died on the Titanic, it lacked movie reels of explosions and thus we still sail the seas. And now we have TV news, where nothing of note happens unless there is a camera to catch the carnage.
- karteum 4y agoActually my point was not to emphasize on this tragedy, but rather to highlight that the "solution" (to use helium instead of hydrogen) would probably only work at low scale considering how limited helium exist on earth... If we want to scale airships (which I would be delighted to see), then I guess we have to go back to hydrogen, and then I would like to see how they would proceed to ensure safety.
- frompdx 4y agoAs with LTA, he’s pushing the humanitarian applications of airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention delivering food to famine-struck regions. Interesting, this is the same motivation the financial backer of the AEREON 7 had. While the AEREON 7 never materialized, a scaled down test aircraft known as the AEREON 26 flew, and demonstrated the possibility of building a hybrid airship/airplane. The book "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" describes the efforts of the AEREON corporation's attempt and failure to bring airships back into the mainstream of aviation. History seems to be repeating itself here. I would love to see airships return, and there are many possibilities today that didn't exist in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, like supersonic flight for the masses, it doesn't seem likely to ever return to the aviation mainstream.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoSo straightforward. Trade off speed for volume. Weight carrying capacity is terrible, but—-high ceilings, huge windows, low altitude (better view), minimal sound… that is a real luxury experience! The world’s most profitable route should be LA to Vegas. It’s that glass bottom ballroom, you know? But really, flying europe would be amazing. Next time I’m at the Bodensee in Germany, i really want to fly a zeppelin!
- nradov 4y agoTurbulence doesn't make for a "luxury" experience. Airships can't fly above the weather while carrying a useful load.
- meowkit 4y agoGiven the software advances in drone stabilization, would it not be possible to add some sort of dynamic stabilization to this hypothetical airship?
- nradov 4y agoThe rotor systems typically used by small drones don't scale up well for use on larger manned airships. The weight and drag penalty would be huge, and the higher inertia doesn't allow for rapid dynamic adjustments to compensate well for turbulence.
- kragen 4y agoHistorically, Zeppelin was a luxury form of travel in the 01930s, until the Hindenburg crash.
- Nomentatus 4y agoAnd smoother than a Ford Triplane, I don't doubt: but still dangerous and harsh in heavy weather. Heavily subsidized by the NAZI state as well, as a prestige achievement.
- amelius 4y agoSounds nice, until Amazon starts using them for freight transport.
- credit_guy 4y agoHere's how to think about airships using numbers. You need about 1000 liters of helium or hydrogen to lift 1kg of cargo (the difference is only about 10%, despite the fact that H2 is twice as light as He they are both so much lighter than air, that you can almost think they are weightless, so all that matters is the mass of air displaced). Let's say you want to lift 1 ton. You need a cube of balloon that's 10m x 10m x 10m. Let's put 4 of those next to each other, so you can lift 4 tons with a box-shaped balloon that's 40m x 10m x 10m. Let's make it a cylinder instead, and make the Soviet assumption that pi=3, we end up with a cylindrical balloon that's 40m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons. Since the ends of an actual dirigible are not quite flat, let's say you need a 50m long and 10m tall dirigible to lift about 3 tons. The ratio of lengt/height of Hindenburg was 7:1 and of Graff Zeppelin was 6:1. Current Goodyear blimps have a ratio of about 4:1. So our intuition building block is a dirigible that's 50m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons. Multiply that by 10 in all dimensions and you get a 500m long by 100m tall giant that can lift a whopping 3000 tons of cargo. Multiply by only 5 in all dimensions and you get a 250m long by 50m tall dirigible that can lift 375 tons of cargo. That is a large dirigible, but not impossibly large. That was roughly the size of Hindenburg: 41 m tall and 245 m long. Hindenburg was build 100 years ago. We can probably build one like that nowadays for much less. How about one that's double in size in all dimensions? I find that conceivable. And such a dirigible would have 3000 tons of lift. Can you imagine that? For comparison, the cargo capacity of the famous Liberty ships was about 4300 tons. You could get airlift capacity that's only available nowadays as sealift.
- jstanley 4y agoThis is really interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that. It looks like airships are one of those things that work much better as you scale them up.
- walrus01 4y agoIsn't helium extremely expensive and even getting more so every year?
- nradov 4y agoYes that's true. On the other hand, much of the helium we currently extract along with natural gas is currently being wasted and vented into the atmosphere. It could be captured but that would require some investment in additional equipment.
- walrus01 4y agoI'm firmly in the camp of "I'll believe it when I see it" for modern cargo airships actually going into use. People have been trying to do it since cargolifter AG in Germany raised vc money and went bankrupt 22 years ago. Thus far, none successfully.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'm old enough to have seen this suggestion refloated for going on five decades. It keeps on not happening, and the older I get, the more I understand why. There are simply massive constraints on large-scale airship development, construction, and operation. Niche applications: maybe. Widespread adoption in the face of extant or potential viable alterantives? No. More in this 9-month old comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076> And from others in a thread from just over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943> What I'm thinking instead: Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail, particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to take 10--30 days by rail. This could be significantly improved on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes short haul rail freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still vastly more efficient in terms of mass moved distance per unit energy, it's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've mentioned in some previous comments. Electrified air transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100 mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed rail is almost certainly a viable contender. The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option. Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link, perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is provocative and not entirely implausible. I'd suspect such projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's possible to link at least five or six continents within reason, and possibly even Antarctica. Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be made (16 hours). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel> I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any nibbles so far. <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20floating%20tunnel&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
- ac50hz 4y agoAnd when you don’t have freight to transport, transport yourself, soon… https://oceanskycruises.com/ https://oceanskycruises.com/