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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The article's headline seems misleading: the article is actually about cargo, not traditional travel -- since airships are so slow.

But I don't see what needs this would meet -- either you need something to be shipped between continents quick (~overnight) so you use a plane, or you don't so you use a container ship.

This seems like it has neither the speed advantage of a plane, nor anything close to the size and scale advantage of a container ship.

So aside from the niche use of large deliveries to remote areas inaccessible by ship or rail... I'm not getting it.

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For remote are delivery, there is the often ignored issues of replacement mass.

Basically, if you deliver 100 tons to some remote location, the airship is now 100 tons lighter once you ofload it. Unless you want it to immediatelly shoot up to the stratosphere, you need to rebalance it.

You either have tobrelease some of the gas to reduce the lifting force (pretty expensive if you use helium) or load 100 tons of some replacement mass (even if you load 100 tons of local dirt, it can still not be an easy task on a remote location).

How do you drive a container ship over land?

I Think the point is that you could use this across the USA or other large geographic bodies for similar efficiency that you see with a container ship on water.

I'm not sure, but I think some standard shipping containers fit on semi truck beds and on special train cars.

a freight train

Wonderful thing called a railroad network.

Rail can only carry objects that can fit inside the cross-section and streets aren't much better.

The defunct Cargolifter protect was quite open about not attempting to be competitive for loads that easily fit conventional transport. They saw their market exclusively in loads that are too bulky for ground transport and I don't think that anything has changed.

Other than that this hypothetical market could be really huge now that wind turbines have grown into the "untransportable" realm for offshore use where no practical transport restrictions exist. (At least in countries that haven't universally given in to NIMBY and are still expand their land-based wind capacity)

> Rail can only carry objects that can fit inside the cross-section and streets aren't much better.

Trains typically carry the same intermodal containers that cargo ships do.

That answers GP's "how do you drive a container ship over land" but we seem agree that container transport is a solved problem that airships can't meaningfully contribute to.

But there are objects that don't fit the rail profile that still need transportation.

And a lot more objects that don't fit that profile, or the more generous limitations of an oversize road load, that could exists if matching overland transportation existed. A lot of technology is severely size-constrained only because roads between factory and deployment site are size constrained. A cargo airship that can take those loads could completely change whole industries.

Yes just trying point out the comment was a little short sighted

Title updated to say cargo. Thanks!

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