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Comment by MorrisofOrange | Hacker News Reader

I read that these were going to be used for cargo in hard to reach places. However, if there is a need for alot of cargo then an airport usually already exists, and drones would probabally be more economical for smaller packages. Other than that? I think niche cruises like in that one episode of Archer.

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> However, if there is a need for alot of cargo then an airport usually already exists, and drones would probabally be more economical for smaller packages.

Airship plans are for heavy hauling, not delivering amazon packages. TFA's airship lifts 10 tonnes. Lockheed Martin's LMH1 is planned for 20. The goal is large / bulk cargo in low-infrastructure or hard-to-access locations.

I'd want to turn it into a drone swarm staging ship and see if it could do last mile delivery.

Didn't Amazon recently patent something of the sort?

Traditionally, airships have required large ground crews to managing mooring/unmooring operations. Have they solved that problem? Delivery to low infrastructure areas by definition means it would be hard to assemble a trained ground crew. I suppose you could drop cargo without mooring and go home again.

That'd be why the new generations of airships are not lighter than air but mix buoyancy with a lifting body: hybrid airships retain some of the low operating costs and long range of an LTA airship, but because they're not actually lighter than air they can be landed on the actual ground and secured more conventionally.

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