From what I recall, strong wind is kryptonite to any lighter than air vessel. I’m not sure how they plan to solve that problem, but I’d be really impressed if they do.
DOD estimates the F-35 will cost $1.7T in total development cost The Concorde was a couple billion, Howard Hughes pretty much spent his fortune developing aircraft that turned into a flop.
What's the issue with this? Cargo will always need to be shipped around so as long as the marginal impact is low that seems fine?
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-fir...
Boats can lift so much more stuff for the weight of the craft and support that it is not even fair.
A container ship can lift about 10 times the weight of the ship as cargo.
I don't have stats for airships but my guess would be it is reversed, so no more than 10% of the weight of the airship in cargo.
Also, each airship can only lift very small amount of cargo so a single container ship can probably transport as much stuff as all the airships we will be ever able to build combined.
If you don't care about how much cargo is used, then you have sailing ships which we know quite a lot about. You can sail long distances without using a drop of fuel.
If you stick to container ships, you still have net zero options. We can use expensive hydrocarbon fuels made from renewable sources and drive those ships at slower speeds which would lower fuel consumption. This I think would still be so much cheaper than airships given the costs to produce and maintain those.
Going to have to rebuild a sailing vessel fleet.
Maybe, but smaller blimps don't have very much throughput compared to trucks, much less rail. A Hindenburg sized megablimp that can actually carry a lot (but still way less than rail + trucks) is logistically difficult.
Seems like the niche is more point-to-point, where a large cargo needs to get somewhere unusual or unscheduled, and kinda quick. Something too big or too cheap for a helicopter, and maybe where a manned truck would not work or have a similar cost.
Maybe prefab structures too? All but the smallest dwellings are too bulky for roads.
if you are building new then an automated isolated railway network is not hard to achieve; and with any airship infrastructure you are pretty much building new anyways.
Main problem here is that it is a floating device. As soon as it unloads 4 tons of cargo it gets pushed up with 4 tons force upwards. And you'd better do not release helium to compensate that - it is quite expensive.
Without solving that problem airships are mostly for travel...
This doesn’t seem like the hard part.
Edit: sibling comment points out that helium can also be compressed. I don’t think “too much lift” is an intractable issue.