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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 3 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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00N8 ◴[14 Oct 24 23:38 UTC] No.41843391[source]▶
One challenge I've heard of is: If you carry 100 tons of cargo from point A to point B in an airship, for the airship to return to point A, it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or ballast), or it needs to vent (or compress) lifting gas, in order to maintain the correct buoyancy. I wonder what the best approach is here, & how it affects the economics? Is water ballast safe & cheap enough, or is there a better way?
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__MatrixMan__ ◴[15 Oct 24 03:43 UTC] No.41844718[source]▶
Rather than taking a huge shipment, delivering it, and having to deal with an empty airship, maybe it's better to think of it as a slowly drifting warehouse. Drones can handle delivery and restock across short distances, and the airship doesn't land at all. This would let you maintain a more or less consistent mass.
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1. danpalmer ◴[15 Oct 24 06:29 UTC] No.41845556[source]▶
That’s cool, but also a quite different business and operating model where storage and delivery multiplexing are much more of a thing than with air freight.

The other problem is the drones. For this to work you’d be shipping either regular TEU containers or the air freight equivalent (not sure what they’re called but there’s a standard shape I believe), however no drone available today can move either of those. That means new drones, new shipping form factors, or both, and those are both hard problems that you probably don’t want to face when already trying to launch a new freight modality.

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2. xg15 ◴[15 Oct 24 13:18 UTC] No.41848272[source]▶
Awesome idea, but as you say, seems more like a sort of "last mile delivery vehicle" than cargo transport.

You could imagine some sort of futuristic flying Amazon warehouse/drone carrier: It would be pre-stocked at a distribution center, with packets already arranged in a way that they can be picked up by drones individually. Then it floats over a neighborhood while the drones deliver the individual packets to the homes below.

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3. __MatrixMan__ ◴[15 Oct 24 14:23 UTC] No.41848947[source]▶
I was thinking of these as an alternative to having a distribution center. They're just always traveling on a few routes determined mostly by prevailing winds, making big circles around the planet. If you live on one of those routes, you can last mile delivery directly from the warehouse as it passes overhead. If not, the drones are loading/unloading a train or some such.