I can’t wait for the jet packing up and down for parties and whatnot.
This seems like it’s out of Altered Carbon.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
There's a reason commercial providers haven't been building them. There's a reason distracted silicon valley billionaires are.
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.
I'm neither a billionaire nor am I expecting to ever become one (unless we'll get hit by hyperinflation and start denominating banknotes in scientific notation), and I've always been happy to sneer at the huge yachts and villas of the super-rich, on the grounds of those things being wasteful excess. But sneering at them for pumping money into useful scientific and technological advances that are otherwise currently not interesting to regular market economy? That's just self-defeating, and smells of petty jealousy.
Living on a giant airship would be like having the highest penthouse apartment in the world, and the most amazing views. And you can move it when you get bored.
But in keeping up with the Musks', I can see billionares competing with each other to have more extravagant homes in even more exotic locations, like in an airship, or an underwater base.
Some even have smaller yachts inside their super yachts.
Because there is no law at sea.
Haven't you heard what happens on these yachts? Crazy sex, kink, drugs. Even tales of slavery and murder.
> Living on a giant airship
Even a mild gust would cause trouble. You have to be incredibly mindful of the weather.
https://www.businessinsider.com/superyacht-sex-crew-sexual-h...
https://www.stylist.co.uk/long-reads/yachting-hollywood-traf...
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a38053431/yacht-girl...
I've read multiple articles (but can't seem to find links to them) that threats of throwing unwilling parties overboard are used to silence and coerce.
Seems pretty lawless to me.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hindenbur...
The ports were fine; what we had trouble sourcing was labourers, water, food, and building supplies.
He’d do a lot more good by repurposing a super-yacht as a passenger ferry, tbh.
> Brin runs a separate non-profit, called Global Support and Development, that has already carried out such missions by sea, in the Caribbean, Latin American and the South Pacific. It originally used Brin’s own superyacht to ferry medical personnel to the scene of hurricanes and other disasters, and recently launched a purpose built vessel capable of transporting dozens of medical staff and full-size shipping containers.
Maybe the intent is to reach areas inland that are inaccessible by plane, automobile, or helicopter?
I’m not saying airships are better than water ships all the time, but there are certainly real use cases for being able to drop tons of cargo in a lightly improved landing field.
We take for granted that cargo planes and ships can skirt a tropical storm and sneak in while the trees are still dripping. A dirigible is a fair weather friend. It cannot arrive until relief efforts are well underway. That doesn’t make them useless, but it also doesn’t make them useful.
Food and water are good, though we have a lot stockpiled already, but it’s easy to underestimate how tough things can get in the summer when there’s no A/C or refrigeration in the supermarkets. Heck, it took us a week to get a gas station back online in ‘04, cars and trucks were abandoned on the roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)
In general the US had a lot of pretty bad airship accidents, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
A hint: The 1914 M-class Zeppelin (158 metre) had about 9 metric tons of useful load.
A small "Handysize" (around 150 metre) cargo ship can carry around 40,000 metric tons.
A 747 cargo plane (76 metre) has about 100 tons of useful load, and will be there faster.
Also, there are a lot of even smaller cargo ships making deliveries to islands. Many of those have cranes for offloading containers to ports without infrastructure.
Sort of? It was a startup that went bankrupt before building its first product. The light bulb was also "tried" 50 years before Edison. There's something to be said for trying again.
But I wonder if Cargolifter would still be such a dud in today's market? Just look at the crazy lengths companies go through to put the largest possible wind turbines in remote locations. Seriously, if you've never done so (or if it's been a few years), enter "turbine blade transportation" in the image search of your choice and be awed. I can't imagine Cargolifter not having a waiting list measured in decades given the pains ground based blade transportation goes through, and those things aren't even that heavy. Currently, inland wind turbine size is clearly limited by transportation, not by materials or engineering. (and larger turbines are actually less annoying than smaller ones, because rpm go down with size due to blade tips approaching transonic speeds at any non-trivial size)
Right, but sometimes the only way for it to change is for someone to burn through enough money to drag the market kicking and screaming into embracing a new/better type of products. Recent example: Tesla and electric cars.
Whether or not something would be a useful/successful product, and whether the market can, on its own, get to that point from where it is now, are two distinct considerations.
but calling it a "floating city" is silly. the blimp might be 124m long, but the cabin is basically a sprinter van. https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/2023-09/21ZD_...