5 ms·
Dirigibles benefit from the square-cube law, so as long as you have a hangar large enough to build them, larger is overall better. There are probably some quest
by bertil 3y ago
Dirigibles benefit from the square-cube law, so as long as you have a hangar large enough to build them, larger is overall better. There are probably some questions about those 3,000 titanium hubs, so it might not be trivial to make it bigger, but it feels more manageable to scale than an airplane.
- krupan 3y ago"as long as you have a hangar large enough to build them" seems to be doing a lot of work in your reasoning here
- throwaway4aday 3y agoNot really, Pathfinder 1 isn't even close to using the capacity of its current hangar https://d2n4wb9orp1vta.cloudfront.net/cms/brand/CW/2023-CW/1023-cw-FOD-LTA-4.jpg https://d2n4wb9orp1vta.cloudfront.net/cms/brand/CW/2023-CW/1... Hangar One at Moffett (where Pathfinder is) is 348,964 sqft while the largest airship hangar ever built was the Aerium hangar at 851,500 although they didn't wind up building the big airship that was supposed to go along with it and converted it into an indoor rainforest resort and waterpark.
- bertil 3y agoI don’t think larger hangars than what we have now are that hard to build – not compared to, say, buildings like the Burj Kalifa. We can do tall. The biggest issue would be to have a wide span without columns. But those are long shapes: if you can make a gate 50 m tall (18 floors) and 50 m wide (the Golden Gate bridge has a 1,280 m span between each tower), you can build 10 gates in a row and have enough room for a dirigible with a 45 m diameter and as long as you need, but 300 m seems doable. This prototype is 20 m wide and 124.5 m long, so if you scale it to 45 m x 45 m x 300 m, you might get something that can carry about twelve times more than this one.
- krupan 3y agoNow I'm totally picturing a hollow Burj Kalifa with airships stacked vertically inside :-)
- flashback2199 3y agoYou underestimate the amount of land there is in this country lol