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To me a main use case is transporting windmill turbine blades. Blade size is currently limited by rail and truck capacity, but with an airship transport you don’t have to fit the blade through tunnels and around corners.
They go over this in the video, but there are a few major issues with airships, notably wind and the need to maintain neutral bouyancy. Wind is particularly hard to deal with and for bouyancy they would need to pickup an equal amount of weight at the dropoff point (which likely would mean trucking in massive lumps of concrete), eject vast quantities of helium from the airship, or have large tanks in the airship to compress the helium into. None of those are great solutions and building out a better road for last-mile delivery is almost certainly cheaper/easier.
Trucking in ballast would work for the case where roads exist, but aren’t appropriate for a 100+ meter turbine blade. If no roads exist, you’d be stuck filling sandbags on site, pumping in water, or maybe shipping back felled trees or boulders. A hassle but not impossible. Worth it?
Where huge turbine blades will come into their own (if they do) initially is in ocean based turbines. They can be manufactured at a port and go directly to a ship without navigating roads, so they won’t be limited by overpass height and so forth. If the large turbines are that much of an advantage, it should become apparent as sea installations evolve.
If there is any way to match up new blades coming in with shipments of old blades or worn out components going back, that would be ideal.
But also large bags of sea water would do the trick.
The craft in the news today mixes aero lift with helium lift, and claim that it “can stay in place on the ground as it is loaded, unloaded or refueled”
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/airlander_10_hybrid_airship/
Admittedly their main customer wasn’t unloading anything at remote locations (it was carrying surveillance equipment) so we don’t know if it can fully unload all 10 tonnes in that mode - but that was the claim.
Me investing in Goodyear:
My main issue with anything that flies and doesn’t have wings is that, if anything bad happens, it’s straight to the ground and everyone (probably) dies. Planes can at least glide if there’s an engine failure.
That said, we still have helicopters and hot air balloons, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t have dirigibles as well.
Helicopter can also go into autorotation mode, i.e., to “gently” land even with engine failure. I think airships has no moving parts, what’s safe, and with the gas leak, I think it is rather slow process, so it would be easy to gently land.
Yep, airships aren’t overpressurized like a balloon - any leak will be extremely slow, as the heavier ambient air gradually displaces the helium inside the airship through whatever hole might be created. As I understand it, one of the big maintenance issues they have is even finding the holes from normal wear and tear. The usual failure scenarios involve storms with huge pressure changes.
Helium could be detected with some specialized detectors, but I suppose approximately – so, as you said, finding exact leak place is challenging.
Found Cid from the next Final Fantasy.
We need them for my town’s SteamPunk Festival! Nice bit of retro-futuristic technology that is so cool, but utterly impractical
