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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 air
by 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 agoDirect 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 agoWe 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 agoWe 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 agoOf 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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoThe Sergey Brin airship project is Lighter Than Air (LTA), in case any one was wondering. https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7dd09 https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7d...
- oofta-boofta 4y agoHow much do you want to bet the employees working on this were apart of the anointed 12k that just got laid off
- 0xB31B1B 4y agoLTA is not google/alphabet affiliated
- iancmceachern 4y agoI wonder why, why was this not, and Loon was?
- hgsgm 4y agoBrin is toxic to the Alphabet brand. Too much using the staff as a sexual smorgasbord.
- water-your-self 4y agoGiven that i cannot find anything to suggest it is a subsidiary, I would stake a healthy sum that they did not particiapte in the Google layoffs
- smegger001 4y agoone does not lay of the team of a pet project of the confounder/board member with controlling interest in your company lightly.
- 4y ago
- innagadadavida 4y agoIf US, China and Taiwan situation escalates and US imposes a naval blockade, this can be used to effectively circumvent it. Perhaps China should invest in this.
- padobson 4y agoMassive airships flying 90/km an hours are LESS susceptible to blockades than cargo ships? I think I'll need a little more explanation than that. Seems like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher would be more than enough to bring one down.
- stopping 4y agoOr a single tracer bullet, if it's filled with hydrogen.
- chatmasta 4y agoSurely you could design some redundancy into the hull? It's not like the ship needs to be one giant gas bubble. It can be a mesh of a few hundred bubbles that could each pop without bringing the whole thing down.
- natpalmer1776 4y agoSo… 100 tracer bullets instead?
- simonh 4y agoSo several hundred times the weight of the pressure envelope? Tracer bullets was only an example. Airships would be spectacularly vulnerable to all sorts of modes of attack.
- sophacles 4y agoSurely you could design your tracer bullet launcher around repeatable processes, so that you could send a few more shortly after? Don't even need to pop all the bubbles. Just enough for lift < weight. Gravity automates the rest.
- hguant 4y agoI know some of the Canadian provincial governments were looking at using airships to provide a means of supplying some of the more remote northern towns - because of weather/terrain conditions, you can't build a rail head that far north, and the roads aren't reliable, so light cargo planes are the only reliable means of getting goods around. Airships, even of the good year variety, would be far cheaper for the weight/volume transported, but initial costs were prohibitive, if I recall correctly
- mastax 4y agoHow do airships fare in bad weather?
- 0xffff2 4y agoNot very well. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron
- worik 4y agoAn extreme example. One extraordinary event is not very good evidence. The safety record of the Zepplin company in Germany is very impressive They had many failures, no fatalities. Until the Hindenburg
- jcranmer 4y agoThe USS Akron, USS Shenandoah, and USS Macon all failed due to bad weather. That's 3 of the US's 4 operational airships. (Another airship was constructed for the US, but was destroyed by poor handling before it was delivered to the US.) Of the British experience with airships, R101 outright failed due to bad weather, and three more were scrapped after suffering accidents during bad weather, out of a total of 16 completed. I don't feel like totting up the record of the Zeppelins, but the Wikipedia page does indicate that several of them failed due to weather incidents. One of the big lessons from the most notable airship failures is that airships don't really work in poor weather, and safety in such conditions means "don't even attempt to fly," which is a pretty different rule than the one for airplanes or other modes of transportation.
- hef19898 4y agoNo, the airship renaissance was over a decade ago. Cargolifter tried, and failed. From what I heard so, the water and holiday park they built in the ex Cargolifter hangars has to be quite good so.
- throwaway2037 4y agoAre you talking about Tropical Islands Resort outside Berlin, Germany? Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
- m0llusk 4y agoThey mostly had trouble with landings and takeoffs. Cargo ships could have specialized cranes load and unload cargo while airborne.
- krisoft 4y agoThat would be very tricky with conventional airships (and even trickier with hybrid ones). You would need to keep the system rougly at the density of air as you are tensioning the crane hoists. Probably by shedding ballast at the same rate you are appying tension on the lifting ropes. While the ship is blown about. And any cable failure would result in the airship violently jolting into the sky. With hybrid airship this is even trickier, since they relly on airspeed to generate some portion of their full lift.
- moring 4y agoCould they use a circular lift that loads ballast at the same rate as they unload cargo, the way usually proposed for a space elevator? That would at least solve the ballast problem and lift problem (while still needing a solution to keep the airship in place horizontally AND needing tough materials for the lift).
- hef19898 4y agoOr one could stick with the existing transport solutions: sea, air, rivers, truck and rail. Those work just fine to get basically everything anywhere on the planet.
- madaxe_again 4y agoThe project I am pitching currently, which has a good chunk of financing secured, envisages passenger operations in seven years. The piece is almost spooky in its similarity to the piece I circulated to investors a month ago. We aren’t, however, going after the cargo market. Will it get off the ground? Who knows. But if you see kilometre-scale airships emerging from the backwaters of Europe where subsidies abound and land is cheap and regulations are… interpretable, you read about it here first.
- possiblelion 4y agoHey, do you have some way to contact yourself? I'm from a "backwater" of Europe myself and would love to hear more about your project.
- winReInstall 4y agoThey are waiting for Diamond foil encased vacuum, thats kept apart by statically charged graphene strands. The ultimate in air-buyoncy.
- SiVal 4y agoBut diamond foil is brittle, and if it cracked, all of your vacuum would leak out.