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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

That was my first thought.

Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.

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They have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into these projects.

There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.

About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.

I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.

Airships would seem to excel, then, for short trips where you need lots of lift. Within the same city, for example.

Airplanes, helicopters ... they seem to fight gravity, somehow not meant to fly, but succeeding nonetheless by overwhelming gravity almost violently with sheer horsepower.

Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it.

I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.

I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" — think "yachts."

Wealthy people don't want a "yacht" that can only fly in good weather. It's hard to see how this could ever compete with private jets. Maybe in a few tourist areas it could work for sightseeing tours as an alternative to helicopters?

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