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Meanwhile, cargo ships are out there carrying hundreds of thousands of tons. I don't want to be a naysayer, but ships will always have the luxury of the fact th
by fooqux 4y ago
Meanwhile, cargo ships are out there carrying hundreds of thousands of tons. I don't want to be a naysayer, but ships will always have the luxury of the fact that water is denser than air. You can float a hell of a lot more on it. Plus, we have hundreds of years of infrastructure built to support it.
I'm having a hard time thinking of what the place of these air ships will be. I realize that large cargo ships can't go everywhere, but again, we already have things like rail that far outclass what these airships are claiming.
- nradov 4y agoThe only real potential commercial use case for cargo airships is delivery to remote locations which lack any other transportation infrastructure. Think of building a new wind farm and electrical lines out in the middle of nowhere.
- Ekaros 4y agoWouldn't you want some sort of access for electrical lines anyways? Maybe for components air lifts would make sense. Building those with just airlift capacity seems rather messy and complicated. Getting people parts tools, possibly machinery at each pylon... Still, I could see parts of wind turbines moved. As they are large and unwieldly, but not that heavy.
- labcomputer 4y agoI can envision intermodal commercial use cases. Airships could lift a group of containers from a ship, while at sea, and deliver them to inland marshaling yards. That would skip port bottlenecks as well as truck/train transport from, for example, Los Angeles to Chicago. The improved economics of unloading containers as a group, instead of one by one alone might make it worthwhile.
- nradov 4y agoDoubt it. A huge airship would be needed to lift multiple shipping containers. It would be cheaper to expand the ports and lay more rail lines.
- h0l0cube 4y agoOP article makes a compelling argument that there's an untapped market for faster-than-shipping and cheaper-than-air freight: > The new airships can carry heavier loads farther and cheaper than helicopters can, with lower emissions than fixed-wing aircraft—potentially zero emissions, if the ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells. > To Buerge the aerospace engineer, helicopters seem like a reasonable analogy to the new airships. “I don’t ride on a helicopter with any regularity, and you probably don’t either,” he says. But even though the civilian helicopter market isn’t near the size of the commercial aircraft industry, “I wouldn’t call helicopters an unsuccessful technology, or a technology that doesn’t exist in a serious way.”
- kragen 4y agoAirships make the entire Earth a shipping port on the air ocean. Rail shipping doesn't come close to ships in cost, even in the few places to which it has been so expensively extended. Airships might.