Imperial Airship Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Imperial Airship Scheme

en.wikipedia.org

40 pointsbenbreen19 comments

Fascinating. It still seems counterintuitive almost a century later that heavier-than-air flight would be so much more effective, even for long-haul bulk transportation. Compare the payload of a C130 to even the biggest airships. The only thing airships seem to have going for them is loiter time.

Also, this makes me want to implement a new dialect of scheme just so I can name it "Imperial Airship Scheme."

There might still be potential for future ultra heavy lift airships for niche transports of things heavier than 20 tons, bulkier than 40x9x9', and destinations lacking in an airport.

I'd say the major problem is that the niche may be too small to amortize construction cost across a big enough fleet. A reduction in global poverty may be able to increase demand to make the niche market big enough to be viable. For now we wait.

Dropping prefab factories and buildings into remote locations would be a good use of this.

how delightfully steampunk!

FactoryFactory class?

Wouldn't it be a TransportFactory class? Is it itself built in a TransportFactoryFactory?

Does scheme have flet - if you do have an Imperial Scheme it should also have a Grand-Flet... :-)

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

Amusingly the title led me to assume that this would be about a new or long forgotten Scheme dialect.

There are two huge downsides to LTA flight: leaks, and drag.

Leaking lift gas is expensive & difficult to prevent. Also explodey! (if H2).

Airships have to have enormous volumes to float. Therefore they have a lot of drag compared to their payload capacity (Vs. heavier-than-air-craft). So they aren't very good at dealing with wind in an efficient manner.

> Leaking lift gas is expensive & difficult to prevent. Also explodey! (if H2).

Expensive OR very cheap and explodey. (Gasoline is also explodey)

Helium is comparatively expensive, but you don't expend it as part of normal flight and it doesn't migrate very quickly through modern materials. A bigger problem than loss is fouling - you have to pump out the helium and purify it every so often (I think Zeppelin does it every six months).

Hydrogen is close to free.

~$2 per 10kgs of lift if my internet calculations are correct.

But I guess if helium isn't lost at a great rate, it might be a cheap part of the whole setup.

Seems pretty intuitive to me. If you want to pass something to a friend across the room, would you rather tie it to a balloon or a baseball?

Lighter than air is pretty decent at going up, but not much good at the lateral motion bit.

Your intuition works differently than mine! The baseball's trajectory is ballistic, while an airplane actually stays aloft. The not falling out of the sky bit is the thing that still boggles my mind. I mean, demonstrably, it works, but that to me does not seem intuitive at all.

Well, I was thinking purely about propelling an object that is heavier than air versus lighter than air.

An airplane only stays aloft as long as it is being propelled, after that, it's basically falling with style. Likewise, a lighter than air craft is just floating in the wind without being propelled, so the key is which is easier to propel, thus, it compares well to just throwing an object.

There were even flying aircraft carriers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_aircraft_carrier#USS_...

What about the German Zeppelin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin First lift off was 1900/06... They tried to reinvent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter But announced insolvency in 2002...

There is still interesting development going on although the only I remember off the top of my head is http://aeroscraft.com/

The Wikipedia article doesn't say but I assume these were filled with hydrogen, making crashes very dangerous.

There is modern attempt at airships in the Airlander 10, but it has had a (soft) crash.

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