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Cargo Airships Are Happening

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220 points elidourado | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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LordHeini ◴[] No.41846425[source]
Sounds good does not work.

Reminds me of CargoLifter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

The german article states that the price the Zeppelin GmbH (yes those guys) calculated, that the costs of transportation via airship, would be about 10 times as high as conventional methods.

CargoLifter used helium which is stupidly expensive, this is supposed to use hydrogen and more modern materials but i think that does not make a factor of 10.

Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.

As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.

Old Airships had either rain collectors (yep really) or piston engines which burned gas with a similar density to air (which digs a lot into your carrying capacity and volume).

Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.

This article and the linked website have no idea how to solve the propulsion problem. There is some stuff about turbines going with the the old Zeppelin approach, of burning gas. Or something about solar cells, which obviously would not work because solar cells are rigid and heavy but this is supposed to be semi rigid. And you would need heavy batteries too.

Also airships sink when they get wet. And it gets warm the gas expands and it rises. You need ballast to account for that; this is large so it will do that a lot.

Don't forget how stupidly large these things are and thus how much wind is a problem. The linked website claims a predicted length of 388 and width of 78 Meters minimum!

So maneuverability is going to be a large problem, you can overcome this by adding lots of propellers everywhere but that add weight and uses fuel.

Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...

Since wind might be coming from every direction you need a landing circle (!) of roughly a km in diameter. This is why old Zeppelins landed at large (!) airstrips or sometimes on masts attached to skyscrapers.

Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.

That ballast has to go somewhere, so the ship either needs water tanks (again loss of carrying capacity). Or the landing strip has some attachable ballast (how do you transport that back and forth?).

If you have the infrastructure to accommodate this thing you can be reached by truck or rail, which is cheaper, not depended on weather and so on... And weirdly enough you can be reached by cargo aircraft which is a solved problem!

Door to door delivery was exactly what CargoLifter was supposed to do. But it was basically a more expensive and clunky helicopter. Thus it failed.

replies(1): >>41849482 #
1. pantalaimon ◴[] No.41849482[source]
> As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.

Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?

replies(2): >>41851798 #>>41856570 #
2. marcosdumay ◴[] No.41851798[source]
Yes, if you do the mechanical adjusts on the vessel. What may be much harder than expected.

But compressing the gas takes time. If you intend to leave the ship parked there until you finish this, you will need a lot more of space.

3. LordHeini ◴[] No.41856570[source]
No really because the gas helium or oxygen, is super low density (in fact the lowest 2 density gasses there are). This means that you would need a compressor which can on one end suck super large volumes of gas but sill achieve high compression. Those are heavy and need lots of energy which you don't have on an airship.

I looked up some compressor manufacturers. And got roughly the following:

Large helium compressors, which compress like 2000 liters of helium per minute to 200bar, weight around 2 tons and consume power in the order of 60kw.

Not sure if 2000 liters per minute is the right amount but you get the idea.

So even if you can fit that thing on your airship, the 60kw power plant and all its accompanying fuel does not fit.

And remember you are doing this because of fuel usage the first place! So you would be using fuel to compress gas which you have to compress because you are using fuel...

Usually gasses like this are compressed (and liquified) via something like the Linde process:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle

That is industrial scale and does not go onto anything that moves...

And you would need to store your compressed gasses somewhere too.

All of this is super complex, heavy, requires stupid amounts of energy and thus is way to costly to do on something that flies.