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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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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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1. usrusr ◴[15 Oct 24 11:35 UTC] No.41847439[source]▶
It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.

The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.