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The math isnt that simple. As they get bigger the structure needed for very heavy lifts also multiplies. The old airships only carried light/small objects li

The math isnt that simple. As they get bigger the structure needed for very heavy lifts also multiplies. The old airships only carried light/small objects like people and mail. Lifting large individual objects is a totally differnt game. Ok, the new beast has a 3000kg capacity, but the crane/truss necessary to suspend a 3000kg object will itself weigh perhaps 1000kg. You then need a ballast system, separate from the crane, that also can hold 3000kg (big water bags or equivalent) to hold the airship down when it isn't loaded. That also requires more structure and equipment. The cargo-carrying behemoth that can quietly lift giant refinery parts into place is not a simple equation.

kragen 4y ago
It's not that bad. Without reaching for any modern supermaterials, ordinary Victorian-age 2GPa music wire needs to be 4.4 millimeters thick to support 3000kg; 1000 kg of 4.4-millimeter music wire would be 8.3 kilometers of wire. 100 meters of it only weighs 12 kg. (Of course this doesn't include the safety factor you'd want.) Tension members like wire scale linearly with load; a cable of 2 GPa music wire that can support 3000 tonnes would be only 140 mm in diameter. 100 meters of it would weigh 12 tonnes. This almost doesn't change if you split it into separate cables going to separate parts of the airship envelope. It's not the Victorian age anymore, and we actually do have modern supermaterials like flash bainite, S-glass, Tyranno fiber, basalt fiber, carbon fiber, kevlar, and gelspun UHWMPE. Basalt fiber, declassified in 01995, is 2½ times as strong as music wire and one third the weight, so roughly you need 1.6 tonnes of it (1600 kg) to support 3'000'000 kg at a 100-meter span. It's not all that expensive either; it's mostly used to reinforce concrete. Of course you need more than just a single cable, and you need a safety factor. But the available margin is much greater than you're implying. Airships don't need big trusses to carry compressive loads because the compressive load is carried by the gas, and they have to carry the load below the envelope anyway to be stable, so the load is necessarily connected to the envelope with tensile members. I don't mean to say that it's a simple project, in particular because the failure mode is so exciting, but it definitely seems feasible. I don't think England, Sweden, or the US is going to do it, though. They can't even fly to the moon any more, they're embroiled in partisan fighting among their ethnicities that threatens to boil over into genocide, and California's been trying to build the US's first high-speed railway for 26 years without any success. They aren't the kind of place anymore where Enrico Fermi built the humans' first nuclear reactor under the football bleachers; when Richard Handl tried to build one in Sweden in 02011 the police detained him and confiscated his supplies, due to the irrational paranoia of the public. They aren't even the kind of place my friend Aaron built RECAP anymore.

kragen 4y ago

It's not that bad. Without reaching for any modern supermaterials, ordinary Victorian-age 2GPa music wire needs to be 4.4 millimeters thick to support 3000kg; 1000 kg of 4.4-millimeter music wire would be 8.3 kilometers of wire. 100 meters of it only weighs 12 kg. (Of course this doesn't include the safety factor you'd want.) Tension members like wire scale linearly with load; a cable of 2 GPa music wire that can support 3000 tonnes would be only 140 mm in diameter. 100 meters of it would weigh 12 tonnes. This almost doesn't change if you split it into separate cables going to separate parts of the airship envelope. It's not the Victorian age anymore, and we actually do have modern supermaterials like flash bainite, S-glass, Tyranno fiber, basalt fiber, carbon fiber, kevlar, and gelspun UHWMPE. Basalt fiber, declassified in 01995, is 2½ times as strong as music wire and one third the weight, so roughly you need 1.6 tonnes of it (1600 kg) to support 3'000'000 kg at a 100-meter span. It's not all that expensive either; it's mostly used to reinforce concrete. Of course you need more than just a single cable, and you need a safety factor. But the available margin is much greater than you're implying. Airships don't need big trusses to carry compressive loads because the compressive load is carried by the gas, and they have to carry the load below the envelope anyway to be stable, so the load is necessarily connected to the envelope with tensile members. I don't mean to say that it's a simple project, in particular because the failure mode is so exciting, but it definitely seems feasible. I don't think England, Sweden, or the US is going to do it, though. They can't even fly to the moon any more, they're embroiled in partisan fighting among their ethnicities that threatens to boil over into genocide, and California's been trying to build the US's first high-speed railway for 26 years without any success. They aren't the kind of place anymore where Enrico Fermi built the humans' first nuclear reactor under the football bleachers; when Richard Handl tried to build one in Sweden in 02011 the police detained him and confiscated his supplies, due to the irrational paranoia of the public. They aren't even the kind of place my friend Aaron built RECAP anymore.