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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 21 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.617s | source | bottom
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metalman ◴[14 Oct 24 22:51 UTC] No.41843028[source]▶
Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation engineering forums the only way around the guaranteed ground handling debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers where wind drift can be managed.....sort of could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk
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frickinLasers ◴[15 Oct 24 00:07 UTC] No.41843582[source]▶
I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a solution.
replies(2): >>41844305 #>>41845186 #
1. peterashford ◴[15 Oct 24 02:21 UTC] No.41844305[source]▶
Yeah, dude was head of Hyperloop. Nailed that one
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2. frickinLasers ◴[15 Oct 24 03:37 UTC] No.41844668[source]▶
I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

replies(5): >>41845542 #>>41846535 #>>41846968 #>>41846982 #>>41848068 #
3. cjbgkagh ◴[15 Oct 24 06:27 UTC] No.41845542[source]▶
Apples and oranges. Of my many engineer friends none of them thought the hyper loop was viable, it’s an absurdly bad idea. Like installing compressed air jets in cars for faster acceleration. Another one of Elons missives.

Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.

4. ◴[15 Oct 24 09:02 UTC] No.41846535[source]▶
5. ◴[15 Oct 24 10:12 UTC] No.41846968[source]▶
6. Wytwwww ◴[15 Oct 24 10:14 UTC] No.41846982[source]▶
Even if they solve most of the technical issues could this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under what circumstances?

It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..

> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm

Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)

replies(1): >>41847509 #
7. usrusr ◴[15 Oct 24 11:44 UTC] No.41847509{3}[source]▶
Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.
replies(1): >>41847614 #
8. Wytwwww ◴[15 Oct 24 11:59 UTC] No.41847614{4}[source]▶
> market segment

So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?

replies(2): >>41848639 #>>41867169 #
9. pclmulqdq ◴[15 Oct 24 12:55 UTC] No.41848068[source]▶
Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible."

Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.

Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

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10. usrusr ◴[15 Oct 24 13:56 UTC] No.41848639{5}[source]▶
Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained by land transport.
replies(1): >>41850155 #
11. Qwertious ◴[15 Oct 24 14:15 UTC] No.41848850{3}[source]▶
>Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible?

Because airships are really cool.

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12. dralley ◴[15 Oct 24 14:22 UTC] No.41848928[source]▶
Hyperloop succeeded at exactly what it was meant to succeed at, which was planting just enough FOMO to get a handful of rail projects in California delayed and ultimately canceled.
13. ◴[15 Oct 24 16:19 UTC] No.41850155{6}[source]▶
14. frickinLasers ◴[15 Oct 24 18:57 UTC] No.41851904{4}[source]▶
Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.

If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.

replies(1): >>41853055 #
15. frickinLasers ◴[15 Oct 24 19:26 UTC] No.41852196{3}[source]▶
Well, TIL something I thought was demonstrated mid-century didn't happen until the 90s.
16. pclmulqdq ◴[15 Oct 24 20:57 UTC] No.41853030{4}[source]▶
Great, form an airship club. Stop throwing $100 million after $100 million of your investors' cash at your hobby.
replies(1): >>41854180 #
17. pclmulqdq ◴[15 Oct 24 20:59 UTC] No.41853055{5}[source]▶
Ships are simple and cheap. Airships are known to combine the drawbacks of ships (slow, weather-dependent) with the drawbacks of airplanes (needs to be light so it can fly).

That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of freight carrying out of business. The main reason people use air freight today is to get something from one continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do that.

18. Qwertious ◴[15 Oct 24 23:31 UTC] No.41854180{5}[source]▶
I'll keep that in mind if I ever have money to invest in airships with.
replies(1): >>41854517 #
19. pclmulqdq ◴[16 Oct 24 00:33 UTC] No.41854517{6}[source]▶
(This was obviously not aimed at you, but at the VCs who have been trying this for the last 30 years)
20. perilunar ◴[16 Oct 24 05:08 UTC] No.41855802{3}[source]▶
> Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.

21. brohee ◴[17 Oct 24 07:12 UTC] No.41867169{5}[source]▶
Big transformers are now limited to boat transportation, and it's a constraint on grid design. I assume this is also the case for other industries that become river bound but wouldn't necessarily be so if not for equipment transportation. So this could be a game changer (more so I think than this faster than boat slower than plane thing).