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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

No, the airship renaissance was over a decade ago. Cargolifter tried, and failed. From what I heard so, the water and holiday park they built in the ex Cargolifter hangars has to be quite good so.

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Are you talking about Tropical Islands Resort outside Berlin, Germany?

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

One thing they struggled with was ballast. If you plan on carrying 100+ metric tons, what do you do once you're done? Suck up the nearest lake maybe and dump it back at base when you load your next cargo? Now this restricts your use cases. Not that many lakes people wanna part with in Africa...

Can't you compress the helium and let in some normal air?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonet

100 metric tons of water isn't very much water. A medium sized swimming pool will have way more than 100 metric tons of water.

They mostly had trouble with landings and takeoffs. Cargo ships could have specialized cranes load and unload cargo while airborne.

That would be very tricky with conventional airships (and even trickier with hybrid ones). You would need to keep the system rougly at the density of air as you are tensioning the crane hoists. Probably by shedding ballast at the same rate you are appying tension on the lifting ropes. While the ship is blown about. And any cable failure would result in the airship violently jolting into the sky.

With hybrid airship this is even trickier, since they relly on airspeed to generate some portion of their full lift.

Could they use a circular lift that loads ballast at the same rate as they unload cargo, the way usually proposed for a space elevator? That would at least solve the ballast problem and lift problem (while still needing a solution to keep the airship in place horizontally AND needing tough materials for the lift).

Or one could stick with the existing transport solutions: sea, air, rivers, truck and rail. Those work just fine to get basically everything anywhere on the planet.

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