29 ms·

Cargo airships could be big

389 points by Luc 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
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badcppdev 4y ago
They have a very small section on wind and don't seem to have the word storm at all. Ships could be massive as well and far more fuel efficient if they didn't have to be engineered to weather storms.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  That was my thought as well. Airships are hella slow, so they wouldn’t be able to go around a fast moving storm very easily. I don’t imagine they’d do well in much of a storm, lightning being an issue I’d imagine. It also appears they couldn’t gain enough altitude to ride above a storm. I could be wrong, but it seems like encountering even a small storm would make for a bad day in a giant airship.
jacknews 4y ago
There's no doubt they'll be big, but will they be practical, economically viable and successful?
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  they could automate overseas transport of (e.g. fruit and other time-critical) cargo, with no pilots and very much reduced fligth costs, while being much faster then ships. Then off the coast its remote take-over and steering towards the freight air-port of destination. The critical part here is good enough automation to keep the thing on track and prevent accidents, while not trying to integrate it into the airways like a traditional plane. They might even over time grow into a "2nd class - slow - but cheaper transport" for people in no hurry, but with limited funds. PS: It failed before though.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter investors beware..
  - nradov 4y ago
    It is highly unlikely that uncrewed cargo aircraft will be allowed to operate in most US airspace any time soon. They can't reliably see and avoid other aircraft operating under VFR, and so are restricted to only limited designated airspace. Airships are unable to cruise at high altitude due to loss of lift, and are vulnerable to damage from severe weather. For ocean routes it's not always possible to route around storms. People keep wanting cargo airships to be a thing for some reason. It's not likely to happen. The costs are too high and the range of potential applications too limited to produce a real industry. At most we might see some limited military use where cost is less of a factor.
    - mupuff1234 4y ago
      Are remote crews an option?
      - nradov 4y ago
        Not an option under current FAA rules. The available optical sensors are still generally inferior to human eyes in terms of dynamic range, depth perception, and slew rate. The US military does fly remote-piloted aircraft (Predators being the most prominent example) but they're only allowed to operate in limited pieces of designated airspace due to the risk of midair collisions. Communications reliability and latency is a problem. We still have no way to guarantee solid bidirectional comms. The mishap rate for RPVs is much higher than for comparable manned aircraft.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      If/when forecasts will be good enough to only dispatch and route airships when they can be safely flown to either destination or safe harbor, is the wildcard I could imagine to make them viable options. But as you say, is the niche large enough to make work? I think the pull for wanting them isn't so strange - they offer the promise of much lower fuel costs, which is a big stigma and problem of current aircraft.
      - 4y ago
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > There's no doubt they'll be big, but will they be practical, economically viable and successful? Frankly no. Its like every few years people remember about airships and suddenly start shouting how its the answer to the world's problems. I mean, just search here on HN... 11 years ago there was "Blimpocracy - Is the airship the transportation system of the future?"[1] .... now here we are 11 years later, and, well, yeah ... The trouble is that the present system already works well. If it's not urgent, you can put tons of it on a massive ship. That ship can make multiple stops along the way. If it's urgent, you can put it on a plane. Modern airfreight is reasonably efficient and not that expensive. I really don't see what airships all bring to the party. Except perhaps being a slow-moving target for miscreants and bringing high-profile failures in newspaper headlines. As for the people who say combine AI + airships ... yeah, like that's going to seriously happen any time soon. AI can't even do FSD in a Tesla properly yet. Putting AI in an airship, in today's complex busy airspace, add in real-life weather conditions and real-life technical issues ... yeah, erm, thanks but no thanks. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000819
  - djtango 4y ago
    What about places with limited rail/roads like Alaska and Kazakhstan?
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      In general, where there's limited infrastructure, there's limited demand for infrastructure. I can't speak for Kazakhstan, but most of rural Alaska is adequately serviced using tiny Cessna-sized aircraft for shipping, and the parts that aren't (say, Prudhoe Bay) already have existing ground and/or marine infrastructure to supply them.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      As I recall, about 1/3 of the population of Alaska is in the vicinity of Anchorage which has a port and is connected to Fairbanks by road. Juneau, the third largest city, is also on the water--as are other cities in Southeast Alaska. Many other cities--such as they are (the 4th largest city in Alaska has a population of 20,000)--are also on the ocean.
thworp 4y ago
This is a nice theoretical summary, but it's missing an analysis on why previous attempts at cargo airships failed (see https://www.airship-association.org/cms/node/214 https://www.airship-association.org/cms/node/214 ).
- elidourado 4y ago
  Did you read the whole thing? There's an entire section at the end that talks about what current players are doing wrong, while raising the question of whether even the suggested approach is fundable.
  - thworp 4y ago
    That section is very short and very general when compared to the rest of the very detailed analysis. I know a tiny bit about the failure of cargolifter and their problem wasn't just funding and market fit. They also had a big list of technical issues, not least with making the damn thing at least somewhat all-weather (still nothing compared to jet planes).
deleted 4y ago
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guruz 4y ago
Germany's cargo airship project is now an indoor waterpark located in Brandenburg (close to Berlin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort (With rising energy costs, hopefully it can stay like this for a while)
- vintermann 4y ago
  One of Germany's cargo airship projects. I'm pretty sure there have been more, but none got as far as Cargolifter (for cargo. For more modest ambitions, the Zeppelin NTs out of Bodensee are still going strong, 25 years on).
- aeyes 4y ago
  Their argument is that it is less polluting because people don't have to fly to have a tropical vacation. It seems to work, they are constantly expanding. I went last December, the place was packed. Surprisingly I'd say about 40% of the guests were foreigners. It's nice but I don't know if I'd want to stay a whole week.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Seems like Germans like to turn anything into a water attraction (e.g. Kiesgruben)...
splitrocket 4y ago
This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operational_Concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  A respirator and a teflon suit to keep the sulfuric acid clouds away from your skin?
  - lkjdsklf 4y ago
    sure teflon might not be the most comfortable, but think of the speed we could get on a slip n' slide
- meindnoch 4y ago
  And what are we going to do there? Mine sulphuric acid from the clouds?
  - haarts 4y ago
    Enjoy the view obviously. Cruise!
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      In case that wasn't sarcarsm - you won't see much, as you would be inside the acid clouds.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    what are we going to do from mars
newaccount2021 4y ago
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carapace 4y ago
I've been slowly and sporadically working towards making large airships. Basically you make a large (like a square kilometer or more) rigid kite (see Alex G. Bell's cellular kites) and add enough drone guts to make it into a giant drone. Then you lodge an Airstream trailer or something in it. I'm not an engineer, but the small models I've built make me think that there's no effective upper limit on the size of these structures. I think you could build a kite that girdled the world, an arch with no pillars. I've got all the parts now for a first prototype, but I don't have any room to build it, so I'm studying origami etc. to design a folding version. It's a PITA but the designs are pretty: like a blooming flower, (like https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/project/space-origami-make-your-own-starshade/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/project/space-origami-mak... )
- Someone 4y ago
  > Basically you make a large (like a square kilometer or more) rigid kite (see Alex G. Bell's cellular kites) Those were incredible (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-bell-goes-and-flies-a-kite-for-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-...), but it would surprise me if you could scale them up to a kilometer in size. Also, from that article: “Aggregated rectangles increased kite weight faster than they expanded wing surface area. Tetrahedrons kept the ratio nearly constant.” That nearly makes me think that, even if you wouldn’t need stronger beams for huge kites, a huge number of kites connected to each other would provide less lifting weight than the sum of the lifting weights of the individual kites. > I think you could build a kite that girdled the world, an arch with no pillars […] but I don't have any room to build it. Doesn’t surprise me ;-)
  - carapace 4y ago
    > but it would surprise me if you could scale them up to a kilometer in size. It's like the intuitive argument that heavier objects fall at the same rate as lighter objects: throw two shoes off the roof, if you tie their shoelaces together will they fall faster? You start with N kites and connect them, each kite retains its airworthiness and connecting them doesn't change that. > nearly [constant] The ratio falls off much slower than lifts add as you get bigger. > you wouldn’t need stronger beams for huge kites I don't think so, because you're just connecting small kites together, but you need to be flexible, or maybe modulate the airfoils' area (maybe open/close like butterfly wings.) > a huge number of kites connected to each other would provide less lifting weight than the sum of the lifting weights of the individual kites. If you just make a ball or cube, sure, but that's optional, eh? Most of my designs come out looking like modified 3D Sierpiński gaskets.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Airships have one, tremendous problem: Hydrogen. Helium is too expensive and is running out, and hydrogen, well see the Hindenburg. There's a lot of research into "safe hydrogen" but despite decades of research (and money) there has not been any success. Until you can overcome the fizzy lifting gas issue airships will remain a dream.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Your not trying very hard to shift what's acceptable to talk about. :-)
- cityofdelusion 4y ago
  The article proposes autonomous unmanned cargo airships. Does the world care about "safe hydrogen" in this application? Most zeppelin disasters involved weather or mooring issues, not fire, and usually injured crew/passengers, not ground crew.
tim333 4y ago
I remember in the UK Airship Industries tried to make the things work economically for ages but never did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries For one thing they struggle a bit when it's windy.
- onion2k 4y ago
  For one thing they struggle a bit when it's windy. If you could move your airship to an altitude where the wind is going in the direction you want to go that would give you a huge advantage.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Airship cargo capacity is inversely proportional to ambient air pressure. As they climb they lose lift, and while it is technically possible to build an airship that can fly above the weather the cargo capacity would be so low as to make it pointless.
- netsharc 4y ago
  It'd be fascinating if the package tracker of the future says "package delayed, waiting for a north-easterly wind from Los Angeles. Meanwhile those mangoes from Africa are arriving sooner!"
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Partially or completely wind-powered cargo ships appear to be on the way, so this might happen anyway.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      Personally I'm pretty disappointed that hobby drones use so much power, when the seagulls just glide out there, not even flapping their wings for minutes on end. We should be able to manage the same with microcontrollers now, surely?
rob74 4y ago
> Second, some modes are missing because a lot of countries are not connected by land. Looking at US import and export data, and excluding Canada and Mexico where US roads, rail, and pipelines connect, water transportation has claimed the majority of both the tonnage and the value. Er... what? Just because you can't ship stuff between some countries by land, they're ignoring all cargo shipped by rail and truck internationally? Sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater...
- twelve40 4y ago
  he says throughout the post that the main focus is intercontinental cargo market
twelve40 4y ago
I didn't understand the jump from: > International water transportation is also cheaper than domestic, perhaps around 1¢ per ton-km to: > Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km Having half of the entire market switch to something that is 10x more expensive?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  There is a large dichotomy between the value of goods sent by plane vs ship, almost certainly due to the trade-off on speed. The intent with the airship idea seems to be to make something roughly similar in price and speed to trucking on land, but over the ocean. There is arguably a big chunk of cargo that would like to be in that middle area.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Why airships, a known failed technology, rather, than, say, a large hydrofoil/catamaran, tech that has been proving quite successful on long distance ferries for decades. The Hindenberg-class Zeppelins had the theoretical lift capacity of approximately... 8 40ft containers.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Y Combinator portfolio company Boundary Layer Technologies tried to build a hydrofoil cargo ship to target the market niche that wants to go faster than a regular cargo ship but doesn't need aircraft speeds. The basic technology probably would have worked but I'm skeptical whether the market really exists. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/boundary-layer/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/boundary-layer/
    - mike-the-mikado 4y ago
      Electric cars were failed technology for about a hundred years. But with better battery technology, combined with a need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they are the future. If something can only work effectively at huge scale, there are likely to be a number of enabling technologies needed to get there.
comfypotato 4y ago
I wonder why they didn’t mention simply sailing with the wind almost entirely. My understanding is that at certain altitudes there are winds that circle the earth (the jet stream, yes?). If the ships are completely autonomous, this could take a sector of the market where shipping speed doesn’t matter. It’s a different value proposition than discussed, but if I’m reading the surrounding literature correctly, it’s winds that have been the main problem with this approach in the past.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  They did. It's a long article, they don't get to that point for a while. Search the page for "The other approach would be to take a deliberate strategy of riding the winds."
- haarts 4y ago
  From the article I understand that airship can only fly so high (I think because of the density of the air decreasing when you go higher). A jet stream (10km+) is far too high for an airship to reach (1.5km).
  - thrill 4y ago
    An airship can be designed to fly to over 100,000 ft, so you could design anywhere in between. Above 60,000 feet the average wind speed drops to 20 knots or so.
atlasunshrugged 4y ago
It's a narrow use case but I've always wondered if these would be good for facilitating export of certain cash crops (or maybe even processed critical minerals) out of hard to reach areas of Africa where there isn't much infrastructure, rains can wash out roads, and airports aren't conveniently accessible (thinking cocoa in Liberia, cobalt in the DRC).
- lastofthemojito 4y ago
  I think with my stomach too :) My first thought was "maybe cargo airships could make a Pakistani mango supply chain more feasible". See: https://www.eater.com/22618349/pakistani-mangoes-chaunsa-anwar-ratol-buy-usa-whatsapp-shipping-supply-chain https://www.eater.com/22618349/pakistani-mangoes-chaunsa-anw...
btilly 4y ago
It is fun to read the analysis. But they are right that we don't have the ability to make enough helium to make that make sense. I can believe that hydrogen can be made to work. But when they got to making the frame out of magnesium - a leak in the rain would be scary! This is one of those ideas that seems better in theory than practice. Not as bad as the fact that adding mercury to rocket fuel makes it go better. But still not a great thing to do. For those who are puzzled at the mercury comment, energy is proportional to mv^2/2 while momentum is mv. Mercury takes away a bit from the energy, but increases the density, and therefore gives you more momentum per unit of fuel. It is a great theory, ruined by the fact that we'd be spraying nasty poisons everywhere.
- greesil 4y ago
  I don't understand this. LH2/LOX typically burns on the rich side to increase exhaust velocity. This means more momentum for less mass, which is what you want from a rocket. This is the opposite.
  - black6 4y ago
    John Clark goes into detail in his book Ignition! about why smaller, lighter exhaust molecules are much better than larger and heavier ones.
    - btilly 4y ago
      John Clark also was the one who proposed adding mercury. It was a joke, that the military types didn't realize was a joke. Read https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... pages 193-196 in the PDF for the full story.
      - sitkack 4y ago
        One has to be really really careful when cracking these kinds of jokes, one really has to weigh the downside of it being taken seriously. I'll still do it, on an ephemeral medium, and then spoil it seconds later. That is only way it can be delivered.
brunoqc 4y ago
Crashes would be spectacular too...
jp57 4y ago
The airship renaissance is the fusion of transportation world. It's always ten years away. Seriously, I've been hearing about the great promise of modern airships for twenty years. Where are they? Are there any airships operating commercially now outside of niche applications?
- SonicScrub 4y ago
  Direct weather control is the prerequisite technology for at scale operation of commercially viable airships. So once we crack that I'm sure we will see them!
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    We have very good weather prediction these days. After the Titanic sank and people argued about mandating lifeboats on ships, one of the arguments against was that global shipping had already settled into the least stormy most safe sea routes and accidents where lifeboats might help had reduced year on year because it was already in everyone's interests - cargo sellers, shipping industry, passengers, insurance industry - to make that happen.
    - nradov 4y ago
      We have very good weather prediction for tomorrow. For longer airship trips like spending a few days crossing the Pacific Ocean the exact tracks of storms are harder to predict, and dangerous squalls can brew up with little notice during certain seasons.
- vintermann 4y ago
  Of course it's niche applications, but it is the Zeppelin NTs which is the biggest success story. They're used for tourism in Germany and advertising in the US (the Goodyear Blimps, which as the article points out are no longer blimps at all, but much larger Zeppelins). Zeppelin Luftschiffstechnik have survived by being _very_ careful about the scale of their ambitions (i.e, it's very modest). They did deliver the three ships in the Goodyear fleet, though, as far as I know completely on schedule, which is rare in any project of that scale, let alone an airship project. I still haven't written off Sergey Brin's project entirely, although it keeps getting delayed. Airlander I'm less optimistic about, but they did fly (and crash) their prototype and they're still around, so who knows.
jliptzin 4y ago
Is there any discussion about personal airships? I wouldn’t mind the slow speed if it meant I could go to sleep in a quiet, bump free, spacious craft and wake up a couple hundreds miles away at my destination (weather permitting, of course).
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  This article glosses over it a bit, but yeah, almost everyone discounts passenger airships as a viable option, but as someone who enjoys a good cruise ship every so often, I could absolutely see a lovely market for airships in recreational passenger travel. Airships may never beat airplanes for speed/cost, but yeah, I think people greatly underestimate the demand for an air travel option where you could walk around, lounge, play board games, comfortably grab some sleep, maybe even shower if you had lift budget for enough water.
mark212 4y ago
The leisure market is huge for airships, in my opinion. Think of the same people that go on cruises to Antartica, but flying gently and at much lower altitude than a plane, over wild and scenic parts of the world. With luxury accommodations.
jodrellblank 4y ago
I'd like to draw your attention to "killing 35 of the 97 people on board in the inferno." The Hindenburg had 7 million cubic feet of Hydrogen gas. It was the biggest aircraft disaster of its time. It had such rudimentary technology that the cockpit looked more like a sailing ship than an aircraft[1]. Despite that, well over half the passengers jumped out the windows[2], ran away and survived with few or no injuries. When was the last time a jumbo jet crash landed with complete loss of the aircraft and all the combustible stuff burning it into a molten metal heap, and half the passengers simply jumped out and escaped? In terms of risk, fatality, and compared to aircraft of the day, it was surprisingly good. And the huge raging fire and prominent news footage of it being caught on camera did it a bit of a disservice. By comparison, look at Wikipedia's list of worst aircraft crashes[3], and see how many are marked 'no survivors'. What if some of those "flew into a mountain", "engines failed", "mid-air-collision" had been captured on video in the earlier days of aviation, would we still have widespread planes? [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/inside-hindenburg-zeppelin-luxury-interior-vintage-photographs-21-5c6ac3a82ebd3__700.jpg https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i... [2] https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/inside-hindenburg-zeppelin-luxury-interior-vintage-photographs-14-5c6ac39983ff7__700.jpg https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_acc... (NB. people now want aircraft which can legally be pushed horizontally by hydrogen, but cannot legally be pushed upwards by hydrogen.)
- credit_guy 4y ago
  There's actually no need for hydrogen. Helium would do just fine. From the blog post, filling the hypothetical airship with helium would cost $8 MM, while filling it with hydrogen would cost only $100k. Sounds like a no brainer. But, the overall cost of the airship would be at $100 MM. Hydrogen would result in a less than 10% cost reduction. Now, the FAA approved unleaded jet fuel in 2022. Yes, that's how conservative FAA is. We'll sooner achieve world peace than the FAA would approve hydrogen for airships.
  - tiagod 4y ago
billbrown 4y ago
Great essay. How he failed to mention Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander is beyond me, though. https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/ https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/
- billbrown 4y ago
  I asked him on Twitter and this was his reply: "It’s a very different vehicle than I am considering. Hybrid blimp instead of non-hybrid rigid. I think even with a blimp 10 tons will be too small to be price competitive in the market I’m talking about." https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1620266026461196288 https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1620266026461196288
nwatson 4y ago
Not mentioned in the article at all: security. Unmanned airships over water at low altitude, and pirates with drones.
- theelfismike 4y ago
  agreed, a huge, slow-moving target for a bad actor to try to shoot down
- padobson 4y ago
  This. It was all I could think about while reading the piece. The US Navy is capable of making the seas safe, but under current political conditions I don't even see THAT happening forever. To make this work, the air force would almost certainly have to get in on the act, and that makes even less geopolitical sense.
andrewflnr 4y ago
The suggestion to use a magnesium frame, in combination with hydrogen for lift, is kind of hysterical. Why not use a flammable metal with your flammable lifting gas? I won't even be shocked if it works, but it would still be a hell of a thing.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  You need oxygen to get to the flammable material to burn it. For magnesium that means grinding it to a fine powder that burns really quick. Otherwise, it will just oxidize at the surface and be quite boring and inert. It's a common metal used for all sorts of engineering. E.g. German WWII era planes used some magnesium parts. Iron also burns if you grind it to a fine powder. You can try that out if you have some steel wool. It's just an exothermic oxydation process. The more surface area the hotter it burns. Magnesium just burns a bit hotter. Most of the colors in fireworks are just different metal powders burning. And for hydrogen, you need to mix it with oxygen to get a flammable mixture. So, a large mass of hydrogen is explosive in the same sense that a few tonnes of kerosene is explosive. I.e. not that much at all. Also, hydrogen is light. If you have a leak you go down, and the hydrogen goes up very rapidly. It doesn't stick around. They did this routinely in the 1930s. It wasn't much of an issue then. The theories of what happened to the hindenburg vary a bit but it seems as it didn't explode so much as burn. Probably most of the hydrogen escaped before it could burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster Interesting read. Quite a few people actually survived. I'm sure these things could be engineered to a much higher safety standard now.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
Zeppelin is still around : https://zeppelinflug.de/de/ https://zeppelinflug.de/de/ (or more accurately it restarted)
credit_guy 4y ago
Great analysis. A few random thoughts 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and the inner foil would be only 1cm or so, so 99.9999% of the helium would be inside the inner foil. The gas between the two foils would in time become mixed with air, but the amount of double leakage would be negligible. The weight of the double foil would also be negligible compared to the overall weight of the structure. 2. Going up and down. Hindenburg had a cruising altitude of 200m. Up to 2000 meters or so, the air density goes down by about 1% every 100 meters. So, lowering a balloon from 200m to 0m does not mean you need to fully deflate it, only that you need to reduce its buoyancy by 2%, or add 2% ballast. For a 1100 ton airship, you need to add 22 tons of ballast. Pumping 22 tons of water 200 meters high is not easy feat. But there's a cute shortcut: you could send only 2.5 tons of hydrogen with a hose (hydrogen is more than happy to flow up), and you burn it there. The resulting water vapor needs to be condensed, but you can probably arrange that with a small refrigeration unit that you power with the electricity from a generator powered by the said hydrogen. The current cost of hydrogen is about $5 per kilogram, so this whole affair would cost you less than $15k. It's a rounding error when you ship 500 tons of cargo. 3. Fuel. Yes, it would be cool to have neutrally buoyant fuel, like a mix of methane and propane. But do you think the FAA would like that? How is that different from just having some hydrogen gas onboard, like, you know, Hindenburg? I think the most conservative design choice would be to just use plain old jet fuel.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  would batteries work for fuel in an airship? I know the battery bank is a structural element in Tesla cars, seems like that could be done with airships as well (it'd increase the price precipitously of course)
- rimunroe 4y ago
  > 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and the inner foil would be only 1cm or so, so 99.9999% of the helium would be inside the inner foil. The gas between the two foils would in time become mixed with air, but the amount of double leakage would be negligible. The weight of the double foil would also be negligible compared to the overall weight of the structure. I assume someone else can address this better, but given how expensive and limited helium is, I don't think we can just write off losses by comparing airships to party balloons. Foil party balloons look noticeably less inflated after a week or two. I have no idea how much gas is being lost, but that seems much more than a trivial amount to the point where I don't think a second envelope is going to help you much. It will have the same outgassing problems as the inner envelope, but will add additional weight and air resistance, both of which will reduce the maximum payload. Relatedly: is it cheap to extract the helium trapped in the outer envelope? Given the quantity of helium needed for an airship fleet, is topping them up regularly even an option? I'd assume it would need dramatically more helium than is currently being produced, and there's only so much helium available to us without using something like hydrogen fusion. In college I briefly worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory on an experiment with the Relativistic Heavy Ion collider. That collider has a set of giant collection tanks next to it so that (at least as it was explained to me) in the event of a superconductor quench event, they can try to shunt all the remaining liquid helium coolant into storage in order to limit how much of the valuable resource they lose. I imagine the amount of helium they're using would be peanuts compared to the amount required for a cargo fleet.
cameronh90 4y ago
As the article says at the end, a key technology here is automation. Lots of cargo isn't time sensitive, but paying a load of crew to take shifts sailing it slowly over the Pacific will kill the economic viability. Additionally, making it unmanned gets rid of a lot of the safety concerns, especially if you're going to use hydrogen and run them primarily over water. Still, hard to see the advantages compared to container ships.
- waynenilsen 4y ago
  It seems about 2x faster plus overland capabilities should be great for some use cases that currently depend on canals.
sitkack 4y ago
The article completely omits trains. That is glaring. I had this steampunk like plan when I was in college to have huge hydrogen cargo airships pulled by trains to haul large bulk items (fully assembled houses, building parts, large trees, fully assembled combines, etc). A literal skytrain. Some new lines would have to be created a way to handle going through tunnels etc. I think now I would have a drone be able to connect and unconnect the tether and the airship would be able to be autonomous for period of time and reconnect. Or a small track could be run just to connect the small tug needed to pull the airship.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Trains can’t cross oceans or cover long distances or dynamically change routes
  - genderwhy 4y ago
    Trains can't cover long distances? Surely that's a typo -- trains can cover incredible distances... And they can change routes within their network. So yes, there's some cost to get train stations and tracks built, but afterwards they can visit anywhere within the network and carry a whole lot more than airships. Fair point on the oceans thing though.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Trains in tunnels can cross water, and trans-oceanic tunnels are ... within the realm of possibility. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel> A fully-automated, cargo-only submerged floating tunnel might be an acceptable pilot / risk model. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967216> (From a previous airships discussion, as it happens.)
- the_cat_kittles 4y ago
  this is kind of like the old idea of a tow-path. those work by floating the cargo on the river and pulling it with horses next to the river. I really like the idea of pulling cargo floating in air with trains, since trains already exist, and its also visually entertaining. im curious what the numbers would look like, since trains are very efficient for each marginal mile i think? also im not sure what you would do about a wind storm haha.
dwighttk 4y ago
I started skimming towards the end but does the author get into how the speeds are airspeeds, not ground speeds?
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Finally people are waking up to the airship meta. I want blimpworld so bad.
ambientlight 4y ago
Great book on this topic: https://www.cambridge.org/tv/academic/subjects/engineering/aerospace-engineering/airship-technology-2nd-edition?format=HB&isbn=9781107019706 https://www.cambridge.org/tv/academic/subjects/engineering/a...
killjoywashere 4y ago
His fundamental assumptions are flawed to the point of hilarity. The same physical laws apply to ships, but they are at an interface with a fluid with a much higher specific gravity (orders of magnitude higher), so you can pack enormous amounts of cargo on a ship. Once you have to solve the last mile, you need a truck anyway. For the in-between, trains work great. Why, why would this make any economic sense?
- SmooL 4y ago
  As the article states, the idea is that this would be faster than ships, as well as operational in areas without large bodies of water.
legitster 4y ago
> What we observe under these conditions is that, domestically, most of both the tonnage and value of cargo is transported via truck. Trucks are neither the fastest nor the cheapest mode of transport, but they provide a great value proposition—you get your stuff in a few days for much cheaper than air freight. I feel like this is a bit naive. The true competitor to trucking is rail. But trucking is preferred because it's point-to-point and you don't have to deal with intermodal connections. Airships would have these exact same problems (unless you invented some way to build routes and drop off containers at specific addresses - but then you are back to it being slow again!). So the only real market would be replacing container ships with something slightly more expensive but faster. But even using his own math - a fleet of 25,000 airships each with only a 500 ton capacity, and each being twice as big as the biggest airplane ever built - seems like a nightmare. All to only capture half of the global shipping market!
- 4wsn 4y ago
  I concede I might be totally wrong here, but the issue with rail seems to be profitability. I live in (moved to) Europe, and the railways are far more developed than in the US. But as far as I know, they all have to be heavily subsidized by the governments to even function. None of them operate with a true profit. Here in Germany, 2.2% of the latest federal budget is to support the railways. This is despite the railways being privatized (into a government owned corporation). And while trucking is also subsidized to an extent, and it's a difficult business, but people do successfully operate trucking companies. Airships might have the same problems as rail does with intermodal connections, but it's worth a try to see how the profitability equation works out (in real life, not MBA-land). _Maybe_ it's feasible for large multinationals to run direct routes between their warehouses, with trucks being used for last-mile delivery. The only cost is operation; in comparison with rail where the infrastructure is a constant sink, and in comparison with trucks where the infrastructure cost is outsourced to society.
  - nradov 4y ago
    You have it backwards. Cargo railways are more developed in the US than in most of Europe. After the latest round of industry consolidation, most rail companies are highly profitable. Trucks pay most of infrastructure costs through fuel taxes and registration fees.
oblak 4y ago
CAPTAIN: All aboard for safety and adventure on the rigid airship Excelsior, where the pampered luxury of a cruise ship meets the smoothness of modern air travel. Yes, when you fly Excelsior, you're flying in style and safety. TIMMY: Safety? But isn't hydrogen flammable? CAPTAIN: And how, Timmy. That's why Excelsior is filled with safe, natural helium. Why, it's actually flame-retardant. TIMMY: Neat! CAPTAIN: And safe. So, whether you're enjoying excelsior's majestic vistas, duty-free shopping, high-stakes baccarat, dancing with your lovely wife, or even a cigar after a french gourmet dinner, you'll be enjoying them in style and safety. All aboard Excelsior!
hnarn 4y ago
If something doesn't exist, especially when it's something that has existed in the past but no longer does, there's usually a good reason for it. It's not a natural law, but it's a good rule of thumb to use to initially question and defend a "groundbreaking" idea. A quick search online tells me that ocean freight is about $1.3/lbs and air freight is about $5.3/lbs. Since we already know that "airships" would likely never be more convenient than existing air cargo, their only way of succeeding is if they found a place between 1.3-5.3 where the cost savings felt motivated to sacrifice regular air freight, while being many orders of magnitude better than ocean freight for that use case. Even if we're nice and call this a "new" technology rather than what it actually is -- a tried and failed technology -- this "new" technology needs to be many times better than existing options either for cost or convenience (preferably both) to offset the major penalty you will have initially due to the lack of existing infrastructure; and we're not just talking about airports and runways, we're talking about the entire network of optimizations in logistics, maintenance and everything else that have occurred during a century of practice. I'm just a guy with an opinion, but I very much doubt cargo airships even have a small chance of being "big", unless someone builds something absolutely groundbreaking that leapfrogs existing air cargo solutions entirely -- for example in areas like fuel efficiency, autonomy, or something else. Nothing is impossible, but if I was a very technical and entrepreneurial person, this isn't where I would put my time.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I am also sceptical that airships will ever be big. They do have advantages over ocean freight (not everyone lives near a major sea port, or any sea port.) I'm not sure if your price includes road transport, or rail, depending on where you are. Sea is obviously a Lao quite slow. Air freight is expensive, and also somewhat limited airports. In some parts of the world there are lots of those, but most freight travels to a major centre, then trucks etc. I see airships as more of a "trucking" compeditor. Theoretically it can load and unload with minimal ground infrastructure. And it can go places trucks can't go. Yet with all of that the killer problem (literally) seems to be weather. It's hard to see how that problem is reliably solved.
recursive 4y ago
They'd pretty much have to be.
fiat_fandango 4y ago
Iranian missile boats are going to have a field day with these...
af3d 4y ago
Imagine our supply chains being dependent upon fleets of zeppelins. Sheesh...
holyknight 4y ago
damn, this concept is mind boggling
dbrueck 4y ago
Probably a very stupid question, but can someone help me understand the following: once you have airships that have a rigid shell, why isn't using a vacuum better than a lifting gas? Isn't the buoyant force simply the result of displacing some volume of air with something less dense? (i.e. any excess lifting force comes from the fact that the mass of the hydrogen or whatever is less than the mass of the displaced air) A vacuum (or near vacuum) would provide more lifting force per liter, would not have the scarcity problem of helium nor the safety problem of hydrogen, and assuming the thing that generates the vacuum is transportable, it'd eliminate the need for separate ballast. Edit: the wikipedia article cited by slibhb has all sorts of good info - thank you for sharing that!
- lucideer 4y ago
  Wild wild speculation: I'd imagine "rigidity" is a trade-off between weight and ability to withstand the given pressure differential for any two gases (outside & inside). A vacuum would undoubtedly give extra buoyancy but the additional weight required to achieve rigidity might not make the trade off worthwhile.
  - bagels 4y ago
    It's an understatement. It would not be buoyant, and would not fly.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I'd imagine its because its one thing to make a basic rigid shell (able to hold its own weight without collapsing) and another thing to make a giant pressure vessel able to withstand immense pressures. Imagine a storage tank made out of glued together popsicle sticks with a plastic bag around it versus a CO2 cylinder. One is going to weigh quite a bit more than the other, all because one is trying to fight some massive pressure differentials while the other can accept near ambient pressures on both sides.
- oliveshell 4y ago
  I looked into this a while back, and there's simply no feasible way to construct an airship from known materials that could sustain a vacuum of the necessary volume without being crushed by atmospheric pressure. You can keep reinforcing the vacuum chamber, but by the time it's strong enough, it'll be too heavy for the buoyant forces to lift it.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
The other point this obscures is that it pays scant attention to wind profile. Specifically, if you're looking at 50 mph transverse winds you aren't going to get to where you want with a super big envelope/frame. Drag is the cube of airspeed, so the bigger airships are, the less control you have over where they go (without adding lots and lots of power to the power plant). Try off-loading containers when you're "ship" turns 90 degrees in < 30 minutes because a breeze came up.
xg15 4y ago
Ok, so I love his enthusiasm, but when someone proposes a hydrogen/propane/ethane mixture as lifting gas and support struts made of magnesium, I'd like a few more details on how to deal with the problem of everything bursting into flames than "we'll deal with the risk and do some clever engineering" :)
dathinab 4y ago
Starupable? TL;DR: Technical viable but I think it doesn't bring enough benefits in enough situations to be a success in most areas of the world. Yes, but uh risky. Close to where I live are old end/post WW2 above ground large aircraft hangars you can buy/rent etc. So there had been airship startups, multiple times. I'm not sure if a single of them is still around. The main problem isn't a stable hull, or non explosive gas anymore. AFIK: The main problem is that there are nearly always much much more convenient solutions. Like they only make sense (due to economics,convenience) for transporting things which don't fit easily on the road, e.g. huge thing. Which also tend to be heavy so the airship need to be huge. But airships are sensitive to wind and the bigger the more wind can get a grip on them. And only being able to use them at top (wind) wetter conditions where plains, trains and cars can go even with pretty bad wetter is a major problem. Another use-case could be areas where cars can't go, but airships can e.g. huge swamps, areas with a lot of folding, but likely not mountain sides where there is no street be you need to transport things, too. But how common is that and how many of that cases could also be fulfilled with other "special" but more convenient to use transports like larger drones.
flockonus 4y ago
TIL: how to format my niche dissertation thesis in a way people will actually read through it!
inamberclad 4y ago
Not sure how to use a neutrally buoyant fuel for a vehicle like this. at 1 kg/m^3, like air, your fuel is 10% of the volume of your vehicle, which displaces lifting gas and increases structure (which requires more lifting gas).
sph 4y ago
In the past 90 years, has an airship article ever been written without a picture nor a reference to the Hindenburg disaster? I would say no, because if they had stopped reminding us of it every single time, we'd have airships back in the sky by now.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Is there anything there that would not have been true 50 years ago? What's changed about airships that makes them practical now, when (presumably) they weren't before?
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Climate change and the need to get rid of fossil fuels as the base for transportation. With cheap oil, planes and helicopters are superior in most cases. But when you cover a airship with lightweight solar foil and power it electrical, you could get transportation for allmost free (in sunny areas). But even without that, they fly way more economic, since you get the uplift for free. (starting of a plane and reaching height, consumes the most fuel)
swyx 4y ago
> the Hindenburg erupted into flames in front of newsreel cameras, killing 35 of the 97 people on board in the inferno. wait.. how did the rest survive being on a giant fiery gas balloon hundreds of feet in the air?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  The people are all in the cabins mounted under the “hydrogen balloon.” Most survived by waiting until they were low enough and then jumping and running. The whole thing fell to the earth very slowly when compared to free fall.
Nition 4y ago
Re that link in the article to the Lockheed page[1], I'm not sure that everyone is going to read their slogan "Hybrid Airships: The Road Not Needed" in the way they intend. [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/aero/documents/hybridAirship/HybridAirshipLitho.pdf https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/a...
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Amazon sells a rc blimp. I've owned it, and it's not that good. Anyone know of a better one? Here's the amazon one if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Control-Swimming-Inflatable-Balloon/dp/B08NT2BXZF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3H47KEOYHBTP5&keywords=radio%2Bblimp&qid=1675132803&sprefix=radio%2Bblim%2Caps%2C437&sr=8-1&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Control-Swimming-Inflatable-Ba...
JackFr 4y ago
I remember reading “Popular Science” magazine article in the early 80’s telling us how cargo airships were just around the corner, detailing the advantages and briefly naming the companies soon to commercialize. And then reading effectively the same article every couple of years there after. After 40 years I’ll believe it when I see it.
tgtweak 4y ago
>Third, more speculatively, lightweight thin-film solar panels could be mounted on the top of the hull to extend the range of the vehicle if it were electric. We haven’t done the trade at exactly what price and performance of panels would be needed to make this work, but if solar continues to improve it could be an option. They spent a surprisingly little amount of time on this... you can probably offset your fuel by a substantial margin by considering how much solar energy you can generate with that much surface area on the airship. A 400M x 50M airship could accommodate ~20,000 sqm of film solar panels on the top-most section. Something like Maxeon's Air panels are 6kg/sqm and at 20% efficiency, so with 7hrs of median peak sunlight per day, you could generate 28mWh per day with about 120,000KG of added solar panel weight. That is sufficient to power the ship at cruise speed for 8 hours per day, reducing fuel requirements by 33%. Forgoing fuel altogether, if the ship only moved when it had power to do so, but at 90km/h, it could still cover the same distance as an ocean liner in a day while using no fuel. Still a far reach from the tonnage of a standard cargo ship (by a factor of 200 or so, 800,000 tons vs 165,000,000 tons) but given the reduced running costs it could be a cheaper method of transportation than ocean liners. Plus picking up and delivering to somewhere other than a major ocean port has some substantial advantages for cost savings and dock-to-dock turnaround times. I'd be a bit concerned about performance in bad weather - it's not uncommon to have a storm at sea with >90km/h winds, and you can't exactly run from that.
topkai22 4y ago
So many problems missing in the analysis: - No analysis of last mile logistics. I am not a logistics expert, but I know enough to know that last mile logistics dominate costs. How does this setup improve the issues with the transfer of containers once they arrive in port? I can see some possible improvements by opening up more direct routes such that you can avoid rail transport and reduce truck line times, but then again most of the global population lives near the coast... - The whole autonomous angle doesn't deal with the fact that modern cargo vessel area already highly automated. For the most part, the crews are there to maintain and deal with emergencies, not sail it. Would you really want your $100M investment to be wandering alone over the ocean with no one there to fix things if they go wrong? - They massively underplay the safety issues. Yes, the vessel spends most of its time over open ocean, but its got to come into port somewhere, and last mile logistics are simpler the closer it is to population centers. Regulators will rightly demand lots of controls and compliance on half a kilometer long floating bomb.
terrorOf 4y ago
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dyeje 4y ago
I think there’s a YC company working on this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515
npmaile 4y ago
I mean of course. How much cargo could you get into a small airship?
6510 4y ago
You could have a big tank with a piston inside to suck the gas out of the craft before unloading. Say the Japanese get to scale their nuke hydrogen one could be transporting the stuff as cargo. You mention having to ventilate to get rid of leaking hydrogen. Perhaps it can go into the generators. While adding a layer of solar to strengthen the construction seems a good plan there is also fantastic wind up there. One might use turbines or even sails to propel the craft. If you make it truly large you won't need a gas. Can just use a hard vacuum... It's going to have to be big tho. At least a few km.
staplung 4y ago
Reminds me of the line from Snowcrash: "dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel". It was published in 1992 so I'm assuming there must have been talk even back then about the coming dirigible renaissance.
wiz21c 4y ago
Why not simply put a lot more stuff on trains and accept that it takes a little more time to Amazon to deliver your new gadget? I'm always baffled by the lack of analysis of a "let's just slow down" scenario.
- 0xy 4y ago
  Why would we deliberately cripple the economy? Who would want worse service?
  - popol12 4y ago
    Ever heard about ecology ?
  - wiz21c 4y ago
    I don't want worse services. I want services that don't break the environment. I want services that respect a proper balance. If it means that it's a bit worse to my "customer experience", then so be it.
    - 0xy 4y ago
      You can already make the choice to accept slower shipping and choose to avoid air travel. Dragging everyone else down to a more primitive society to satiate ideological climate goals doesn't seem politically palatable nor expedient.
- macintux 4y ago
  The primary emphasis of the analysis is transoceanic.
  - ciphol 4y ago
    The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Jeez, why is there fuel at all? If you have that much real estate in the lift body, cover it with solar panels. Especially since I figure they would flatten it at some point to get some sort of wing effect as well, but I'm no aero engineer. But 388m x 78m is 30264 square meters A 400 watt panel is 2 square meters, assume it's 1/2 yield, so you get six megawatts of power. That sounds... pretty good? Even 3 megawatts? Again, you could probably flatten it further for more panels.
cmacleod4 4y ago
Strange, I thought all airships were big, since the gas takes up a lot of space??? (But according to the article, bigger really is better.)

389 points by Luc 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

They have a very small section on wind and don't seem to have the word storm at all. Ships could be massive as well and far more fuel efficient if they didn't have to be engineered to weather storms.

berniedurfee 4y ago
That was my thought as well. Airships are hella slow, so they wouldn’t be able to go around a fast moving storm very easily. I don’t imagine they’d do well in much of a storm, lightning being an issue I’d imagine. It also appears they couldn’t gain enough altitude to ride above a storm. I could be wrong, but it seems like encountering even a small storm would make for a bad day in a giant airship.

jacknews 4y ago

There's no doubt they'll be big, but will they be practical, economically viable and successful?

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
they could automate overseas transport of (e.g. fruit and other time-critical) cargo, with no pilots and very much reduced fligth costs, while being much faster then ships. Then off the coast its remote take-over and steering towards the freight air-port of destination. The critical part here is good enough automation to keep the thing on track and prevent accidents, while not trying to integrate it into the airways like a traditional plane. They might even over time grow into a "2nd class - slow - but cheaper transport" for people in no hurry, but with limited funds. PS: It failed before though.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter investors beware..
- nradov 4y ago
  It is highly unlikely that uncrewed cargo aircraft will be allowed to operate in most US airspace any time soon. They can't reliably see and avoid other aircraft operating under VFR, and so are restricted to only limited designated airspace. Airships are unable to cruise at high altitude due to loss of lift, and are vulnerable to damage from severe weather. For ocean routes it's not always possible to route around storms. People keep wanting cargo airships to be a thing for some reason. It's not likely to happen. The costs are too high and the range of potential applications too limited to produce a real industry. At most we might see some limited military use where cost is less of a factor.
  - mupuff1234 4y ago
    Are remote crews an option?
    - nradov 4y ago
      Not an option under current FAA rules. The available optical sensors are still generally inferior to human eyes in terms of dynamic range, depth perception, and slew rate. The US military does fly remote-piloted aircraft (Predators being the most prominent example) but they're only allowed to operate in limited pieces of designated airspace due to the risk of midair collisions. Communications reliability and latency is a problem. We still have no way to guarantee solid bidirectional comms. The mishap rate for RPVs is much higher than for comparable manned aircraft.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    If/when forecasts will be good enough to only dispatch and route airships when they can be safely flown to either destination or safe harbor, is the wildcard I could imagine to make them viable options. But as you say, is the niche large enough to make work? I think the pull for wanting them isn't so strange - they offer the promise of much lower fuel costs, which is a big stigma and problem of current aircraft.
    - 4y ago
traceroute66 4y ago
> There's no doubt they'll be big, but will they be practical, economically viable and successful? Frankly no. Its like every few years people remember about airships and suddenly start shouting how its the answer to the world's problems. I mean, just search here on HN... 11 years ago there was "Blimpocracy - Is the airship the transportation system of the future?"[1] .... now here we are 11 years later, and, well, yeah ... The trouble is that the present system already works well. If it's not urgent, you can put tons of it on a massive ship. That ship can make multiple stops along the way. If it's urgent, you can put it on a plane. Modern airfreight is reasonably efficient and not that expensive. I really don't see what airships all bring to the party. Except perhaps being a slow-moving target for miscreants and bringing high-profile failures in newspaper headlines. As for the people who say combine AI + airships ... yeah, like that's going to seriously happen any time soon. AI can't even do FSD in a Tesla properly yet. Putting AI in an airship, in today's complex busy airspace, add in real-life weather conditions and real-life technical issues ... yeah, erm, thanks but no thanks. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000819
- djtango 4y ago
  What about places with limited rail/roads like Alaska and Kazakhstan?
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    In general, where there's limited infrastructure, there's limited demand for infrastructure. I can't speak for Kazakhstan, but most of rural Alaska is adequately serviced using tiny Cessna-sized aircraft for shipping, and the parts that aren't (say, Prudhoe Bay) already have existing ground and/or marine infrastructure to supply them.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    As I recall, about 1/3 of the population of Alaska is in the vicinity of Anchorage which has a port and is connected to Fairbanks by road. Juneau, the third largest city, is also on the water--as are other cities in Southeast Alaska. Many other cities--such as they are (the 4th largest city in Alaska has a population of 20,000)--are also on the ocean.

thworp 4y ago

This is a nice theoretical summary, but it's missing an analysis on why previous attempts at cargo airships failed (see https://www.airship-association.org/cms/node/214 https://www.airship-association.org/cms/node/214 ).

elidourado 4y ago
Did you read the whole thing? There's an entire section at the end that talks about what current players are doing wrong, while raising the question of whether even the suggested approach is fundable.
- thworp 4y ago
  That section is very short and very general when compared to the rest of the very detailed analysis. I know a tiny bit about the failure of cargolifter and their problem wasn't just funding and market fit. They also had a big list of technical issues, not least with making the damn thing at least somewhat all-weather (still nothing compared to jet planes).

deleted 4y ago

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guruz 4y ago

Germany's cargo airship project is now an indoor waterpark located in Brandenburg (close to Berlin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort (With rising energy costs, hopefully it can stay like this for a while)

vintermann 4y ago
One of Germany's cargo airship projects. I'm pretty sure there have been more, but none got as far as Cargolifter (for cargo. For more modest ambitions, the Zeppelin NTs out of Bodensee are still going strong, 25 years on).
aeyes 4y ago
Their argument is that it is less polluting because people don't have to fly to have a tropical vacation. It seems to work, they are constantly expanding. I went last December, the place was packed. Surprisingly I'd say about 40% of the guests were foreigners. It's nice but I don't know if I'd want to stay a whole week.
aidenn0 4y ago
Seems like Germans like to turn anything into a water attraction (e.g. Kiesgruben)...

splitrocket 4y ago

This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operational_Concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...

actionfromafar 4y ago
A respirator and a teflon suit to keep the sulfuric acid clouds away from your skin?
- lkjdsklf 4y ago
  sure teflon might not be the most comfortable, but think of the speed we could get on a slip n' slide
meindnoch 4y ago
And what are we going to do there? Mine sulphuric acid from the clouds?
- haarts 4y ago
  Enjoy the view obviously. Cruise!
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    In case that wasn't sarcarsm - you won't see much, as you would be inside the acid clouds.
- andbberger 4y ago
  what are we going to do from mars

newaccount2021 4y ago

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carapace 4y ago

I've been slowly and sporadically working towards making large airships. Basically you make a large (like a square kilometer or more) rigid kite (see Alex G. Bell's cellular kites) and add enough drone guts to make it into a giant drone. Then you lodge an Airstream trailer or something in it. I'm not an engineer, but the small models I've built make me think that there's no effective upper limit on the size of these structures. I think you could build a kite that girdled the world, an arch with no pillars. I've got all the parts now for a first prototype, but I don't have any room to build it, so I'm studying origami etc. to design a folding version. It's a PITA but the designs are pretty: like a blooming flower, (like https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/project/space-origami-make-your-own-starshade/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/project/space-origami-mak... )

Someone 4y ago
> Basically you make a large (like a square kilometer or more) rigid kite (see Alex G. Bell's cellular kites) Those were incredible (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-bell-goes-and-flies-a-kite-for-science/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-...), but it would surprise me if you could scale them up to a kilometer in size. Also, from that article: “Aggregated rectangles increased kite weight faster than they expanded wing surface area. Tetrahedrons kept the ratio nearly constant.” That nearly makes me think that, even if you wouldn’t need stronger beams for huge kites, a huge number of kites connected to each other would provide less lifting weight than the sum of the lifting weights of the individual kites. > I think you could build a kite that girdled the world, an arch with no pillars […] but I don't have any room to build it. Doesn’t surprise me ;-)
- carapace 4y ago
  > but it would surprise me if you could scale them up to a kilometer in size. It's like the intuitive argument that heavier objects fall at the same rate as lighter objects: throw two shoes off the roof, if you tie their shoelaces together will they fall faster? You start with N kites and connect them, each kite retains its airworthiness and connecting them doesn't change that. > nearly [constant] The ratio falls off much slower than lifts add as you get bigger. > you wouldn’t need stronger beams for huge kites I don't think so, because you're just connecting small kites together, but you need to be flexible, or maybe modulate the airfoils' area (maybe open/close like butterfly wings.) > a huge number of kites connected to each other would provide less lifting weight than the sum of the lifting weights of the individual kites. If you just make a ball or cube, sure, but that's optional, eh? Most of my designs come out looking like modified 3D Sierpiński gaskets.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Airships have one, tremendous problem: Hydrogen. Helium is too expensive and is running out, and hydrogen, well see the Hindenburg. There's a lot of research into "safe hydrogen" but despite decades of research (and money) there has not been any success. Until you can overcome the fizzy lifting gas issue airships will remain a dream.

actionfromafar 4y ago
Your not trying very hard to shift what's acceptable to talk about. :-)
cityofdelusion 4y ago
The article proposes autonomous unmanned cargo airships. Does the world care about "safe hydrogen" in this application? Most zeppelin disasters involved weather or mooring issues, not fire, and usually injured crew/passengers, not ground crew.

tim333 4y ago

I remember in the UK Airship Industries tried to make the things work economically for ages but never did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries For one thing they struggle a bit when it's windy.

onion2k 4y ago
For one thing they struggle a bit when it's windy. If you could move your airship to an altitude where the wind is going in the direction you want to go that would give you a huge advantage.
- nradov 4y ago
  Airship cargo capacity is inversely proportional to ambient air pressure. As they climb they lose lift, and while it is technically possible to build an airship that can fly above the weather the cargo capacity would be so low as to make it pointless.
netsharc 4y ago
It'd be fascinating if the package tracker of the future says "package delayed, waiting for a north-easterly wind from Los Angeles. Meanwhile those mangoes from Africa are arriving sooner!"
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Partially or completely wind-powered cargo ships appear to be on the way, so this might happen anyway.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Personally I'm pretty disappointed that hobby drones use so much power, when the seagulls just glide out there, not even flapping their wings for minutes on end. We should be able to manage the same with microcontrollers now, surely?

rob74 4y ago

> Second, some modes are missing because a lot of countries are not connected by land. Looking at US import and export data, and excluding Canada and Mexico where US roads, rail, and pipelines connect, water transportation has claimed the majority of both the tonnage and the value. Er... what? Just because you can't ship stuff between some countries by land, they're ignoring all cargo shipped by rail and truck internationally? Sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater...

twelve40 4y ago
he says throughout the post that the main focus is intercontinental cargo market

twelve40 4y ago

I didn't understand the jump from: > International water transportation is also cheaper than domestic, perhaps around 1¢ per ton-km to: > Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km Having half of the entire market switch to something that is 10x more expensive?

rootusrootus 4y ago
There is a large dichotomy between the value of goods sent by plane vs ship, almost certainly due to the trade-off on speed. The intent with the airship idea seems to be to make something roughly similar in price and speed to trucking on land, but over the ocean. There is arguably a big chunk of cargo that would like to be in that middle area.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 4y ago
  Why airships, a known failed technology, rather, than, say, a large hydrofoil/catamaran, tech that has been proving quite successful on long distance ferries for decades. The Hindenberg-class Zeppelins had the theoretical lift capacity of approximately... 8 40ft containers.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Y Combinator portfolio company Boundary Layer Technologies tried to build a hydrofoil cargo ship to target the market niche that wants to go faster than a regular cargo ship but doesn't need aircraft speeds. The basic technology probably would have worked but I'm skeptical whether the market really exists. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/boundary-layer/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/boundary-layer/
  - mike-the-mikado 4y ago
    Electric cars were failed technology for about a hundred years. But with better battery technology, combined with a need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they are the future. If something can only work effectively at huge scale, there are likely to be a number of enabling technologies needed to get there.

comfypotato 4y ago

I wonder why they didn’t mention simply sailing with the wind almost entirely. My understanding is that at certain altitudes there are winds that circle the earth (the jet stream, yes?). If the ships are completely autonomous, this could take a sector of the market where shipping speed doesn’t matter. It’s a different value proposition than discussed, but if I’m reading the surrounding literature correctly, it’s winds that have been the main problem with this approach in the past.

rootusrootus 4y ago
They did. It's a long article, they don't get to that point for a while. Search the page for "The other approach would be to take a deliberate strategy of riding the winds."
haarts 4y ago
From the article I understand that airship can only fly so high (I think because of the density of the air decreasing when you go higher). A jet stream (10km+) is far too high for an airship to reach (1.5km).
- thrill 4y ago
  An airship can be designed to fly to over 100,000 ft, so you could design anywhere in between. Above 60,000 feet the average wind speed drops to 20 knots or so.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago

It's a narrow use case but I've always wondered if these would be good for facilitating export of certain cash crops (or maybe even processed critical minerals) out of hard to reach areas of Africa where there isn't much infrastructure, rains can wash out roads, and airports aren't conveniently accessible (thinking cocoa in Liberia, cobalt in the DRC).

lastofthemojito 4y ago
I think with my stomach too :) My first thought was "maybe cargo airships could make a Pakistani mango supply chain more feasible". See: https://www.eater.com/22618349/pakistani-mangoes-chaunsa-anwar-ratol-buy-usa-whatsapp-shipping-supply-chain https://www.eater.com/22618349/pakistani-mangoes-chaunsa-anw...

btilly 4y ago

It is fun to read the analysis. But they are right that we don't have the ability to make enough helium to make that make sense. I can believe that hydrogen can be made to work. But when they got to making the frame out of magnesium - a leak in the rain would be scary! This is one of those ideas that seems better in theory than practice. Not as bad as the fact that adding mercury to rocket fuel makes it go better. But still not a great thing to do. For those who are puzzled at the mercury comment, energy is proportional to mv^2/2 while momentum is mv. Mercury takes away a bit from the energy, but increases the density, and therefore gives you more momentum per unit of fuel. It is a great theory, ruined by the fact that we'd be spraying nasty poisons everywhere.

greesil 4y ago
I don't understand this. LH2/LOX typically burns on the rich side to increase exhaust velocity. This means more momentum for less mass, which is what you want from a rocket. This is the opposite.
- black6 4y ago
  John Clark goes into detail in his book Ignition! about why smaller, lighter exhaust molecules are much better than larger and heavier ones.
  - btilly 4y ago
    John Clark also was the one who proposed adding mercury. It was a joke, that the military types didn't realize was a joke. Read https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... pages 193-196 in the PDF for the full story.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      One has to be really really careful when cracking these kinds of jokes, one really has to weigh the downside of it being taken seriously. I'll still do it, on an ephemeral medium, and then spoil it seconds later. That is only way it can be delivered.

brunoqc 4y ago

Crashes would be spectacular too...

jp57 4y ago

The airship renaissance is the fusion of transportation world. It's always ten years away. Seriously, I've been hearing about the great promise of modern airships for twenty years. Where are they? Are there any airships operating commercially now outside of niche applications?

SonicScrub 4y ago
Direct weather control is the prerequisite technology for at scale operation of commercially viable airships. So once we crack that I'm sure we will see them!
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  We have very good weather prediction these days. After the Titanic sank and people argued about mandating lifeboats on ships, one of the arguments against was that global shipping had already settled into the least stormy most safe sea routes and accidents where lifeboats might help had reduced year on year because it was already in everyone's interests - cargo sellers, shipping industry, passengers, insurance industry - to make that happen.
  - nradov 4y ago
    We have very good weather prediction for tomorrow. For longer airship trips like spending a few days crossing the Pacific Ocean the exact tracks of storms are harder to predict, and dangerous squalls can brew up with little notice during certain seasons.
vintermann 4y ago
Of course it's niche applications, but it is the Zeppelin NTs which is the biggest success story. They're used for tourism in Germany and advertising in the US (the Goodyear Blimps, which as the article points out are no longer blimps at all, but much larger Zeppelins). Zeppelin Luftschiffstechnik have survived by being _very_ careful about the scale of their ambitions (i.e, it's very modest). They did deliver the three ships in the Goodyear fleet, though, as far as I know completely on schedule, which is rare in any project of that scale, let alone an airship project. I still haven't written off Sergey Brin's project entirely, although it keeps getting delayed. Airlander I'm less optimistic about, but they did fly (and crash) their prototype and they're still around, so who knows.

jliptzin 4y ago

Is there any discussion about personal airships? I wouldn’t mind the slow speed if it meant I could go to sleep in a quiet, bump free, spacious craft and wake up a couple hundreds miles away at my destination (weather permitting, of course).

WorldMaker 4y ago
This article glosses over it a bit, but yeah, almost everyone discounts passenger airships as a viable option, but as someone who enjoys a good cruise ship every so often, I could absolutely see a lovely market for airships in recreational passenger travel. Airships may never beat airplanes for speed/cost, but yeah, I think people greatly underestimate the demand for an air travel option where you could walk around, lounge, play board games, comfortably grab some sleep, maybe even shower if you had lift budget for enough water.

mark212 4y ago

The leisure market is huge for airships, in my opinion. Think of the same people that go on cruises to Antartica, but flying gently and at much lower altitude than a plane, over wild and scenic parts of the world. With luxury accommodations.

jodrellblank 4y ago

I'd like to draw your attention to "killing 35 of the 97 people on board in the inferno." The Hindenburg had 7 million cubic feet of Hydrogen gas. It was the biggest aircraft disaster of its time. It had such rudimentary technology that the cockpit looked more like a sailing ship than an aircraft[1]. Despite that, well over half the passengers jumped out the windows[2], ran away and survived with few or no injuries. When was the last time a jumbo jet crash landed with complete loss of the aircraft and all the combustible stuff burning it into a molten metal heap, and half the passengers simply jumped out and escaped? In terms of risk, fatality, and compared to aircraft of the day, it was surprisingly good. And the huge raging fire and prominent news footage of it being caught on camera did it a bit of a disservice. By comparison, look at Wikipedia's list of worst aircraft crashes[3], and see how many are marked 'no survivors'. What if some of those "flew into a mountain", "engines failed", "mid-air-collision" had been captured on video in the earlier days of aviation, would we still have widespread planes? [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/inside-hindenburg-zeppelin-luxury-interior-vintage-photographs-21-5c6ac3a82ebd3__700.jpg https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i... [2] https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/inside-hindenburg-zeppelin-luxury-interior-vintage-photographs-14-5c6ac39983ff7__700.jpg https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_acc... (NB. people now want aircraft which can legally be pushed horizontally by hydrogen, but cannot legally be pushed upwards by hydrogen.)

credit_guy 4y ago
There's actually no need for hydrogen. Helium would do just fine. From the blog post, filling the hypothetical airship with helium would cost $8 MM, while filling it with hydrogen would cost only $100k. Sounds like a no brainer. But, the overall cost of the airship would be at $100 MM. Hydrogen would result in a less than 10% cost reduction. Now, the FAA approved unleaded jet fuel in 2022. Yes, that's how conservative FAA is. We'll sooner achieve world peace than the FAA would approve hydrogen for airships.
- tiagod 4y ago

billbrown 4y ago

Great essay. How he failed to mention Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander is beyond me, though. https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/ https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/

billbrown 4y ago
I asked him on Twitter and this was his reply: "It’s a very different vehicle than I am considering. Hybrid blimp instead of non-hybrid rigid. I think even with a blimp 10 tons will be too small to be price competitive in the market I’m talking about." https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1620266026461196288 https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1620266026461196288

nwatson 4y ago

Not mentioned in the article at all: security. Unmanned airships over water at low altitude, and pirates with drones.

theelfismike 4y ago
agreed, a huge, slow-moving target for a bad actor to try to shoot down
padobson 4y ago
This. It was all I could think about while reading the piece. The US Navy is capable of making the seas safe, but under current political conditions I don't even see THAT happening forever. To make this work, the air force would almost certainly have to get in on the act, and that makes even less geopolitical sense.

andrewflnr 4y ago

The suggestion to use a magnesium frame, in combination with hydrogen for lift, is kind of hysterical. Why not use a flammable metal with your flammable lifting gas? I won't even be shocked if it works, but it would still be a hell of a thing.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
You need oxygen to get to the flammable material to burn it. For magnesium that means grinding it to a fine powder that burns really quick. Otherwise, it will just oxidize at the surface and be quite boring and inert. It's a common metal used for all sorts of engineering. E.g. German WWII era planes used some magnesium parts. Iron also burns if you grind it to a fine powder. You can try that out if you have some steel wool. It's just an exothermic oxydation process. The more surface area the hotter it burns. Magnesium just burns a bit hotter. Most of the colors in fireworks are just different metal powders burning. And for hydrogen, you need to mix it with oxygen to get a flammable mixture. So, a large mass of hydrogen is explosive in the same sense that a few tonnes of kerosene is explosive. I.e. not that much at all. Also, hydrogen is light. If you have a leak you go down, and the hydrogen goes up very rapidly. It doesn't stick around. They did this routinely in the 1930s. It wasn't much of an issue then. The theories of what happened to the hindenburg vary a bit but it seems as it didn't explode so much as burn. Probably most of the hydrogen escaped before it could burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster Interesting read. Quite a few people actually survived. I'm sure these things could be engineered to a much higher safety standard now.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

Zeppelin is still around : https://zeppelinflug.de/de/ https://zeppelinflug.de/de/ (or more accurately it restarted)

credit_guy 4y ago

Great analysis. A few random thoughts 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and the inner foil would be only 1cm or so, so 99.9999% of the helium would be inside the inner foil. The gas between the two foils would in time become mixed with air, but the amount of double leakage would be negligible. The weight of the double foil would also be negligible compared to the overall weight of the structure. 2. Going up and down. Hindenburg had a cruising altitude of 200m. Up to 2000 meters or so, the air density goes down by about 1% every 100 meters. So, lowering a balloon from 200m to 0m does not mean you need to fully deflate it, only that you need to reduce its buoyancy by 2%, or add 2% ballast. For a 1100 ton airship, you need to add 22 tons of ballast. Pumping 22 tons of water 200 meters high is not easy feat. But there's a cute shortcut: you could send only 2.5 tons of hydrogen with a hose (hydrogen is more than happy to flow up), and you burn it there. The resulting water vapor needs to be condensed, but you can probably arrange that with a small refrigeration unit that you power with the electricity from a generator powered by the said hydrogen. The current cost of hydrogen is about $5 per kilogram, so this whole affair would cost you less than $15k. It's a rounding error when you ship 500 tons of cargo. 3. Fuel. Yes, it would be cool to have neutrally buoyant fuel, like a mix of methane and propane. But do you think the FAA would like that? How is that different from just having some hydrogen gas onboard, like, you know, Hindenburg? I think the most conservative design choice would be to just use plain old jet fuel.

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
would batteries work for fuel in an airship? I know the battery bank is a structural element in Tesla cars, seems like that could be done with airships as well (it'd increase the price precipitously of course)
rimunroe 4y ago
> 1. The dreaded helium leakage. It might not be a problem at all. Think of a party balloon of the foil type. It stays afloat for weeks. And it has positive pressure. A neutral pressure one would leak much less. But maybe not to zero. Ok, now use a double layer. Just like there are double hull submarines, this would be a double foil balloon. The distance between the outer foil and the inner foil would be only 1cm or so, so 99.9999% of the helium would be inside the inner foil. The gas between the two foils would in time become mixed with air, but the amount of double leakage would be negligible. The weight of the double foil would also be negligible compared to the overall weight of the structure. I assume someone else can address this better, but given how expensive and limited helium is, I don't think we can just write off losses by comparing airships to party balloons. Foil party balloons look noticeably less inflated after a week or two. I have no idea how much gas is being lost, but that seems much more than a trivial amount to the point where I don't think a second envelope is going to help you much. It will have the same outgassing problems as the inner envelope, but will add additional weight and air resistance, both of which will reduce the maximum payload. Relatedly: is it cheap to extract the helium trapped in the outer envelope? Given the quantity of helium needed for an airship fleet, is topping them up regularly even an option? I'd assume it would need dramatically more helium than is currently being produced, and there's only so much helium available to us without using something like hydrogen fusion. In college I briefly worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory on an experiment with the Relativistic Heavy Ion collider. That collider has a set of giant collection tanks next to it so that (at least as it was explained to me) in the event of a superconductor quench event, they can try to shunt all the remaining liquid helium coolant into storage in order to limit how much of the valuable resource they lose. I imagine the amount of helium they're using would be peanuts compared to the amount required for a cargo fleet.

cameronh90 4y ago

As the article says at the end, a key technology here is automation. Lots of cargo isn't time sensitive, but paying a load of crew to take shifts sailing it slowly over the Pacific will kill the economic viability. Additionally, making it unmanned gets rid of a lot of the safety concerns, especially if you're going to use hydrogen and run them primarily over water. Still, hard to see the advantages compared to container ships.

waynenilsen 4y ago
It seems about 2x faster plus overland capabilities should be great for some use cases that currently depend on canals.

sitkack 4y ago

The article completely omits trains. That is glaring. I had this steampunk like plan when I was in college to have huge hydrogen cargo airships pulled by trains to haul large bulk items (fully assembled houses, building parts, large trees, fully assembled combines, etc). A literal skytrain. Some new lines would have to be created a way to handle going through tunnels etc. I think now I would have a drone be able to connect and unconnect the tether and the airship would be able to be autonomous for period of time and reconnect. Or a small track could be run just to connect the small tug needed to pull the airship.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Trains can’t cross oceans or cover long distances or dynamically change routes
- genderwhy 4y ago
  Trains can't cover long distances? Surely that's a typo -- trains can cover incredible distances... And they can change routes within their network. So yes, there's some cost to get train stations and tracks built, but afterwards they can visit anywhere within the network and carry a whole lot more than airships. Fair point on the oceans thing though.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Trains in tunnels can cross water, and trans-oceanic tunnels are ... within the realm of possibility. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel> A fully-automated, cargo-only submerged floating tunnel might be an acceptable pilot / risk model. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967216> (From a previous airships discussion, as it happens.)
the_cat_kittles 4y ago
this is kind of like the old idea of a tow-path. those work by floating the cargo on the river and pulling it with horses next to the river. I really like the idea of pulling cargo floating in air with trains, since trains already exist, and its also visually entertaining. im curious what the numbers would look like, since trains are very efficient for each marginal mile i think? also im not sure what you would do about a wind storm haha.

dwighttk 4y ago

I started skimming towards the end but does the author get into how the speeds are airspeeds, not ground speeds?

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Finally people are waking up to the airship meta. I want blimpworld so bad.

ambientlight 4y ago

Great book on this topic: https://www.cambridge.org/tv/academic/subjects/engineering/aerospace-engineering/airship-technology-2nd-edition?format=HB&isbn=9781107019706 https://www.cambridge.org/tv/academic/subjects/engineering/a...

killjoywashere 4y ago

His fundamental assumptions are flawed to the point of hilarity. The same physical laws apply to ships, but they are at an interface with a fluid with a much higher specific gravity (orders of magnitude higher), so you can pack enormous amounts of cargo on a ship. Once you have to solve the last mile, you need a truck anyway. For the in-between, trains work great. Why, why would this make any economic sense?

SmooL 4y ago
As the article states, the idea is that this would be faster than ships, as well as operational in areas without large bodies of water.

legitster 4y ago

> What we observe under these conditions is that, domestically, most of both the tonnage and value of cargo is transported via truck. Trucks are neither the fastest nor the cheapest mode of transport, but they provide a great value proposition—you get your stuff in a few days for much cheaper than air freight. I feel like this is a bit naive. The true competitor to trucking is rail. But trucking is preferred because it's point-to-point and you don't have to deal with intermodal connections. Airships would have these exact same problems (unless you invented some way to build routes and drop off containers at specific addresses - but then you are back to it being slow again!). So the only real market would be replacing container ships with something slightly more expensive but faster. But even using his own math - a fleet of 25,000 airships each with only a 500 ton capacity, and each being twice as big as the biggest airplane ever built - seems like a nightmare. All to only capture half of the global shipping market!

4wsn 4y ago
I concede I might be totally wrong here, but the issue with rail seems to be profitability. I live in (moved to) Europe, and the railways are far more developed than in the US. But as far as I know, they all have to be heavily subsidized by the governments to even function. None of them operate with a true profit. Here in Germany, 2.2% of the latest federal budget is to support the railways. This is despite the railways being privatized (into a government owned corporation). And while trucking is also subsidized to an extent, and it's a difficult business, but people do successfully operate trucking companies. Airships might have the same problems as rail does with intermodal connections, but it's worth a try to see how the profitability equation works out (in real life, not MBA-land). _Maybe_ it's feasible for large multinationals to run direct routes between their warehouses, with trucks being used for last-mile delivery. The only cost is operation; in comparison with rail where the infrastructure is a constant sink, and in comparison with trucks where the infrastructure cost is outsourced to society.
- nradov 4y ago
  You have it backwards. Cargo railways are more developed in the US than in most of Europe. After the latest round of industry consolidation, most rail companies are highly profitable. Trucks pay most of infrastructure costs through fuel taxes and registration fees.

oblak 4y ago

CAPTAIN: All aboard for safety and adventure on the rigid airship Excelsior, where the pampered luxury of a cruise ship meets the smoothness of modern air travel. Yes, when you fly Excelsior, you're flying in style and safety. TIMMY: Safety? But isn't hydrogen flammable? CAPTAIN: And how, Timmy. That's why Excelsior is filled with safe, natural helium. Why, it's actually flame-retardant. TIMMY: Neat! CAPTAIN: And safe. So, whether you're enjoying excelsior's majestic vistas, duty-free shopping, high-stakes baccarat, dancing with your lovely wife, or even a cigar after a french gourmet dinner, you'll be enjoying them in style and safety. All aboard Excelsior!

hnarn 4y ago

If something doesn't exist, especially when it's something that has existed in the past but no longer does, there's usually a good reason for it. It's not a natural law, but it's a good rule of thumb to use to initially question and defend a "groundbreaking" idea. A quick search online tells me that ocean freight is about $1.3/lbs and air freight is about $5.3/lbs. Since we already know that "airships" would likely never be more convenient than existing air cargo, their only way of succeeding is if they found a place between 1.3-5.3 where the cost savings felt motivated to sacrifice regular air freight, while being many orders of magnitude better than ocean freight for that use case. Even if we're nice and call this a "new" technology rather than what it actually is -- a tried and failed technology -- this "new" technology needs to be many times better than existing options either for cost or convenience (preferably both) to offset the major penalty you will have initially due to the lack of existing infrastructure; and we're not just talking about airports and runways, we're talking about the entire network of optimizations in logistics, maintenance and everything else that have occurred during a century of practice. I'm just a guy with an opinion, but I very much doubt cargo airships even have a small chance of being "big", unless someone builds something absolutely groundbreaking that leapfrogs existing air cargo solutions entirely -- for example in areas like fuel efficiency, autonomy, or something else. Nothing is impossible, but if I was a very technical and entrepreneurial person, this isn't where I would put my time.

bruce511 4y ago
I am also sceptical that airships will ever be big. They do have advantages over ocean freight (not everyone lives near a major sea port, or any sea port.) I'm not sure if your price includes road transport, or rail, depending on where you are. Sea is obviously a Lao quite slow. Air freight is expensive, and also somewhat limited airports. In some parts of the world there are lots of those, but most freight travels to a major centre, then trucks etc. I see airships as more of a "trucking" compeditor. Theoretically it can load and unload with minimal ground infrastructure. And it can go places trucks can't go. Yet with all of that the killer problem (literally) seems to be weather. It's hard to see how that problem is reliably solved.

recursive 4y ago

They'd pretty much have to be.

fiat_fandango 4y ago

Iranian missile boats are going to have a field day with these...

af3d 4y ago

Imagine our supply chains being dependent upon fleets of zeppelins. Sheesh...

holyknight 4y ago

damn, this concept is mind boggling

dbrueck 4y ago

Probably a very stupid question, but can someone help me understand the following: once you have airships that have a rigid shell, why isn't using a vacuum better than a lifting gas? Isn't the buoyant force simply the result of displacing some volume of air with something less dense? (i.e. any excess lifting force comes from the fact that the mass of the hydrogen or whatever is less than the mass of the displaced air) A vacuum (or near vacuum) would provide more lifting force per liter, would not have the scarcity problem of helium nor the safety problem of hydrogen, and assuming the thing that generates the vacuum is transportable, it'd eliminate the need for separate ballast. Edit: the wikipedia article cited by slibhb has all sorts of good info - thank you for sharing that!

lucideer 4y ago
Wild wild speculation: I'd imagine "rigidity" is a trade-off between weight and ability to withstand the given pressure differential for any two gases (outside & inside). A vacuum would undoubtedly give extra buoyancy but the additional weight required to achieve rigidity might not make the trade off worthwhile.
- bagels 4y ago
  It's an understatement. It would not be buoyant, and would not fly.
vel0city 4y ago
I'd imagine its because its one thing to make a basic rigid shell (able to hold its own weight without collapsing) and another thing to make a giant pressure vessel able to withstand immense pressures. Imagine a storage tank made out of glued together popsicle sticks with a plastic bag around it versus a CO2 cylinder. One is going to weigh quite a bit more than the other, all because one is trying to fight some massive pressure differentials while the other can accept near ambient pressures on both sides.
oliveshell 4y ago
I looked into this a while back, and there's simply no feasible way to construct an airship from known materials that could sustain a vacuum of the necessary volume without being crushed by atmospheric pressure. You can keep reinforcing the vacuum chamber, but by the time it's strong enough, it'll be too heavy for the buoyant forces to lift it.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

The other point this obscures is that it pays scant attention to wind profile. Specifically, if you're looking at 50 mph transverse winds you aren't going to get to where you want with a super big envelope/frame. Drag is the cube of airspeed, so the bigger airships are, the less control you have over where they go (without adding lots and lots of power to the power plant). Try off-loading containers when you're "ship" turns 90 degrees in < 30 minutes because a breeze came up.

xg15 4y ago

Ok, so I love his enthusiasm, but when someone proposes a hydrogen/propane/ethane mixture as lifting gas and support struts made of magnesium, I'd like a few more details on how to deal with the problem of everything bursting into flames than "we'll deal with the risk and do some clever engineering" :)

dathinab 4y ago

Starupable? TL;DR: Technical viable but I think it doesn't bring enough benefits in enough situations to be a success in most areas of the world. Yes, but uh risky. Close to where I live are old end/post WW2 above ground large aircraft hangars you can buy/rent etc. So there had been airship startups, multiple times. I'm not sure if a single of them is still around. The main problem isn't a stable hull, or non explosive gas anymore. AFIK: The main problem is that there are nearly always much much more convenient solutions. Like they only make sense (due to economics,convenience) for transporting things which don't fit easily on the road, e.g. huge thing. Which also tend to be heavy so the airship need to be huge. But airships are sensitive to wind and the bigger the more wind can get a grip on them. And only being able to use them at top (wind) wetter conditions where plains, trains and cars can go even with pretty bad wetter is a major problem. Another use-case could be areas where cars can't go, but airships can e.g. huge swamps, areas with a lot of folding, but likely not mountain sides where there is no street be you need to transport things, too. But how common is that and how many of that cases could also be fulfilled with other "special" but more convenient to use transports like larger drones.

flockonus 4y ago

TIL: how to format my niche dissertation thesis in a way people will actually read through it!

inamberclad 4y ago

Not sure how to use a neutrally buoyant fuel for a vehicle like this. at 1 kg/m^3, like air, your fuel is 10% of the volume of your vehicle, which displaces lifting gas and increases structure (which requires more lifting gas).

sph 4y ago

In the past 90 years, has an airship article ever been written without a picture nor a reference to the Hindenburg disaster? I would say no, because if they had stopped reminding us of it every single time, we'd have airships back in the sky by now.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Is there anything there that would not have been true 50 years ago? What's changed about airships that makes them practical now, when (presumably) they weren't before?

hutzlibu 4y ago
Climate change and the need to get rid of fossil fuels as the base for transportation. With cheap oil, planes and helicopters are superior in most cases. But when you cover a airship with lightweight solar foil and power it electrical, you could get transportation for allmost free (in sunny areas). But even without that, they fly way more economic, since you get the uplift for free. (starting of a plane and reaching height, consumes the most fuel)

swyx 4y ago

> the Hindenburg erupted into flames in front of newsreel cameras, killing 35 of the 97 people on board in the inferno. wait.. how did the rest survive being on a giant fiery gas balloon hundreds of feet in the air?

Waterluvian 4y ago
The people are all in the cabins mounted under the “hydrogen balloon.” Most survived by waiting until they were low enough and then jumping and running. The whole thing fell to the earth very slowly when compared to free fall.

Nition 4y ago

Re that link in the article to the Lockheed page[1], I'm not sure that everyone is going to read their slogan "Hybrid Airships: The Road Not Needed" in the way they intend. [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/aero/documents/hybridAirship/HybridAirshipLitho.pdf https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/a...

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Amazon sells a rc blimp. I've owned it, and it's not that good. Anyone know of a better one? Here's the amazon one if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Control-Swimming-Inflatable-Balloon/dp/B08NT2BXZF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3H47KEOYHBTP5&keywords=radio%2Bblimp&qid=1675132803&sprefix=radio%2Bblim%2Caps%2C437&sr=8-1&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Control-Swimming-Inflatable-Ba...

JackFr 4y ago

I remember reading “Popular Science” magazine article in the early 80’s telling us how cargo airships were just around the corner, detailing the advantages and briefly naming the companies soon to commercialize. And then reading effectively the same article every couple of years there after. After 40 years I’ll believe it when I see it.

tgtweak 4y ago

>Third, more speculatively, lightweight thin-film solar panels could be mounted on the top of the hull to extend the range of the vehicle if it were electric. We haven’t done the trade at exactly what price and performance of panels would be needed to make this work, but if solar continues to improve it could be an option. They spent a surprisingly little amount of time on this... you can probably offset your fuel by a substantial margin by considering how much solar energy you can generate with that much surface area on the airship. A 400M x 50M airship could accommodate ~20,000 sqm of film solar panels on the top-most section. Something like Maxeon's Air panels are 6kg/sqm and at 20% efficiency, so with 7hrs of median peak sunlight per day, you could generate 28mWh per day with about 120,000KG of added solar panel weight. That is sufficient to power the ship at cruise speed for 8 hours per day, reducing fuel requirements by 33%. Forgoing fuel altogether, if the ship only moved when it had power to do so, but at 90km/h, it could still cover the same distance as an ocean liner in a day while using no fuel. Still a far reach from the tonnage of a standard cargo ship (by a factor of 200 or so, 800,000 tons vs 165,000,000 tons) but given the reduced running costs it could be a cheaper method of transportation than ocean liners. Plus picking up and delivering to somewhere other than a major ocean port has some substantial advantages for cost savings and dock-to-dock turnaround times. I'd be a bit concerned about performance in bad weather - it's not uncommon to have a storm at sea with >90km/h winds, and you can't exactly run from that.

topkai22 4y ago

So many problems missing in the analysis: - No analysis of last mile logistics. I am not a logistics expert, but I know enough to know that last mile logistics dominate costs. How does this setup improve the issues with the transfer of containers once they arrive in port? I can see some possible improvements by opening up more direct routes such that you can avoid rail transport and reduce truck line times, but then again most of the global population lives near the coast... - The whole autonomous angle doesn't deal with the fact that modern cargo vessel area already highly automated. For the most part, the crews are there to maintain and deal with emergencies, not sail it. Would you really want your $100M investment to be wandering alone over the ocean with no one there to fix things if they go wrong? - They massively underplay the safety issues. Yes, the vessel spends most of its time over open ocean, but its got to come into port somewhere, and last mile logistics are simpler the closer it is to population centers. Regulators will rightly demand lots of controls and compliance on half a kilometer long floating bomb.

terrorOf 4y ago

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dyeje 4y ago

I think there’s a YC company working on this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515

npmaile 4y ago

I mean of course. How much cargo could you get into a small airship?

6510 4y ago

You could have a big tank with a piston inside to suck the gas out of the craft before unloading. Say the Japanese get to scale their nuke hydrogen one could be transporting the stuff as cargo. You mention having to ventilate to get rid of leaking hydrogen. Perhaps it can go into the generators. While adding a layer of solar to strengthen the construction seems a good plan there is also fantastic wind up there. One might use turbines or even sails to propel the craft. If you make it truly large you won't need a gas. Can just use a hard vacuum... It's going to have to be big tho. At least a few km.

staplung 4y ago

Reminds me of the line from Snowcrash: "dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel". It was published in 1992 so I'm assuming there must have been talk even back then about the coming dirigible renaissance.

wiz21c 4y ago

Why not simply put a lot more stuff on trains and accept that it takes a little more time to Amazon to deliver your new gadget? I'm always baffled by the lack of analysis of a "let's just slow down" scenario.

0xy 4y ago
Why would we deliberately cripple the economy? Who would want worse service?
- popol12 4y ago
  Ever heard about ecology ?
- wiz21c 4y ago
  I don't want worse services. I want services that don't break the environment. I want services that respect a proper balance. If it means that it's a bit worse to my "customer experience", then so be it.
  - 0xy 4y ago
    You can already make the choice to accept slower shipping and choose to avoid air travel. Dragging everyone else down to a more primitive society to satiate ideological climate goals doesn't seem politically palatable nor expedient.
macintux 4y ago
The primary emphasis of the analysis is transoceanic.
- ciphol 4y ago
  The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Jeez, why is there fuel at all? If you have that much real estate in the lift body, cover it with solar panels. Especially since I figure they would flatten it at some point to get some sort of wing effect as well, but I'm no aero engineer. But 388m x 78m is 30264 square meters A 400 watt panel is 2 square meters, assume it's 1/2 yield, so you get six megawatts of power. That sounds... pretty good? Even 3 megawatts? Again, you could probably flatten it further for more panels.

cmacleod4 4y ago

Strange, I thought all airships were big, since the gas takes up a lot of space??? (But according to the article, bigger really is better.)