Comment by alpos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alpos | Hacker News Reader

Still not seeing anything that addresses the counter-points made here the last time the tech was supposedly good enough to win:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum...

Airships occupy an unfortunate gap in the cross-section of mass moved over distance per time and energy space. Unless they build one that goes faster than a plane for the same fuel or consumes less fuel to get the same amount of cargo across the same distance, it will always be better time/money spent to clear a dirt runway or build a road.

New materials don't get us there. At best, the new envelope saves on how much helium needs to be bought in addition to fuel...but that's competing against other tech that doesn't need to buy helium at all.

And going all electric doesn't do it either. That only forces the trade off between cargo capacity and energy generation/storage. We already know batteries are not more energy dense than jet fuel so that will continue to be a losing trade until batteries equal chemical fuels. This is made even worse by the fact that fuel burns off in flight, making fueled engines more efficient during the flight while batteries are just as heavy empty as they are full.

I think less fuel is exactly what the goal is and not to mention types of fuel if you could move 100 tons across the Pacific ocean on electric turbines powered by solar you'd certainly could amortization the speed of delivery by just scaling the pipeline with more airship.

The unknown is the lifting gas helium is expensive and hydrogen can leak and go boom. But the speed does not necessarily matter if the cost is much lower and sustainable

Thing is you're never going to beat the lift/drag ratio of a cargo ship doing that. Cargo ships already play the slow but chonky game. The only limits to their size is space at the ports and the number containers that can be loaded/off-loaded per day.

Technically you could build an airship that only uses power to get into a jet stream then floats across the Atlantic on the wind saving tons of fuel, but then you've reinvented a sailboat in the sky and the buoyant force of water always beats that of air. So you might as well put your cargo in an actual sailboat and get there faster (see ocean currents v wind above them) without needing to "fuel" the thing with hydrogen or helium.

This is just one example of the cross-section we can't escape. It is as tyrannical as the rocket equation is to space travel. For anything to be a viable transport, it needs to go faster, use less fuel, or carry more cargo than other modes of transport.

A 100 tons across the Pacific suggests a ship.

Or the 747-8f if you are in a hurry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8#747-8_Freighter

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