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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

The most meaningful application for airships is to carry blades, nacelles, and towers for wind turbines off-shore. Direct transport from the factory to the farm would greatly simplify installation.

Luxury in an airship is quite relative: weight gets you, and something as simple as water or people to handle service, for instance, is heavy. Not a billionaire's dream — not when Page already has a shower in his 747.

Source: my brother started a business for airships and asked me to add numbers to different options. Accidentally, I was also working for Paradox when City Skylines came out, and I suggested adding airships to the game when they asked for new transport methods. No idea if that’s how they ended up there, but happy they are.

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>The most meaningful application for airships is to carry blades, nacelles, and towers for wind turbines off-shore

It seems like a boat would be better to bring cargo to offshore applications. Especially factoring in weather.

Not an expert, but I suspect that getting them from the factory to the dock (and finding a dock that would not be a nightmare to maneuver through) is a pretty significant part of the challenge

I guess this is why factories used to be on waterways and waterfronts.

I think that had more to do with weight. As far as I can tell, there weren't any good options to transport heavy goods over land before trains. A barge on a canal will transport a lot more weight than carts and wagons pulled by animals will.

Land transport is the limiting part: you have to limit size to bridge heights and road width standards that are driven by how wide horse arses were in Roman times.

Loading them on boats is expensive because they are non-standard size, and large and flexible enough cranes aren’t available everywhere.

Finally, there aren’t boats of the right size, and those that are increasingly expensive. Airships are also faster (not by much, admittedly) and less sensitive to bad weather (not by much either) in particular waves.

I wonder how much cargo these can haul. Comparable more to what current jets haul or what the giant China to US cargo ships haul. I would imagine the first

Most of the current ones can carry about a ton and a half, but larger ones would be able to carry a lot more: the Hindenburg could carry 232 t, for instance. The largest blades nowadays are 12 t; the nacelle with the transformer is the expensive bit; those can be as much as 55 t. The tower is more (twice that), but it’s usually transported as rings of 10-20 t each.

As long as you can make the envelope airtight (and rigid), airship performances improve with scale thanks to the cube-square law. The limiting factor is the factory: they aren’t hangars big enough to make bigger airships, so you’d need an industry with predictable demand for larger ships.

>Most of the current ones can carry about a ton and a half, but larger ones would be able to carry a lot more: the Hindenburg could carry 232 t, for instance.

The Hindenburg could carry 232 metric tons aside from its own weight and the weight of its gas, or this was its total maximum tonnage?

Useful lift, so people, luggage, and fuel.

> It seems like a boat would be better to bring cargo to offshore applications. Especially factoring in weather.

The problem is getting the blades to the boats. Offshore wind turbine blades can be as long as 100m [1] and they're only getting longer and longer as that's the best way to maximize energy output.

However, many roads have not been designed for such lengths, so the heavy transports needed for this need special clearance and are limited to a very limited subsection of roadways that are also used for other heavy transports which also means that there's a ton of bureaucracy involved, to the tune that the central authority for German highways is now a critical bottleneck as it's swamped in that bureaucracy [1], not to mention that the place for parking these transports during the day is also highly limited.

An airship would need to load the blade up once and could then travel unimpeded to the manufacturing site where all that's needed to unload it is a mobile grounding anchor rig.

[1] https://www.enercity.de/magazin/unsere-welt/so-funktioniert-...

[2] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/fakten...

Honestly I could see airships as being better to deliver components to wind farms under construction on land. It can often be quite a logistical hassle to move the massively over-length items like blades or tower sections over the road.

Isn't the point of putting wind turbines there is that it's often very windy? Are you sure a blimp is the _most meaningful_ application?

There's a reason commercial providers haven't been building them. There's a reason distracted silicon valley billionaires are.

Think if it can move a whole wind turbine intact. A thousand tons maybe? Then just sail back and forth. If each turbine is 15 megawatts nameplate capacity and you install 3 per day, work 200 days per year that might be 10 gigawatts per year.

> 747

A 747 can’t stay in the air indefinitely. An airship can refuel and resupply without the owner even being aware.

He can park it 5 miles off the coast and stay there forever. A 747 can’t do this.

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