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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

For the humanitarian use case, how quickly could an airship landing zone be established? I assume it's more than a helipad (empty dirt field) but far less than a runway (FOD-free, long, flat, straight, paved).

I wonder if the airship could deliver it's own LZ kit in a delicate touch-and-go slash hover.

The article briefly mentions repurposing yachts and that made me think of hospital ships. I wonder if you could reconfigure the internal space as a go-anywhere hospital (or at least, a set of operating rooms) or if it just makes more sense to deploy a standard field hospital with tents.

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The ship doesn’t need to touch the ground, but you need to attach it firmly (because as soon as you unload a ton, that ship wants to jump up by about a ton). You can mitigate some of that with helium pumps and pointing the engines up and down, but a firm cabling would be necessary. In a pinch, I assume you can drop the necessary equipment to attach cables from the ship itself (it will still jolt when you do that).

Right. We're far removed from the 1930's "have lots of men hold on to lots of ropes" level of technology.

I assume airships aren't allowed to touch the ground because it needs to rotate with the wind. For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released. If the craft jumps skyward, who cares because it can't land yet anyway.

To your point about weight, I was thinking that instead of permanent anchors fixed to the ground, you could use water bladders or those large military sandbags[1] for ad-hoc purposes. You need to forage for the ballast on-site because of the relationship of lift you described.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

> We're far removed from the 1930's "have lots of men hold on to lots of ropes" level of technology.

This morning, the airship floated silently from its WW2-era hangar at NASA’s Moffett Field at walking pace, steered by ropes held by dozens of the company’s engineers, technicians and ground crew.

That made me chuckle.

> I assume airships aren't allowed to touch the ground because it needs to rotate with the wind.

It can touch it, it’s just that because it’s designed to be buoyant, it won’t have a good grip without enforcing it.

> For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released.

The solutions I’ve seen discussed are closer to what you see on ships or airplanes: narrow passerelles for people and a roll-on-roll-off option for heavier equipment.

The issue is to have a system that can handle a literal ton of either extra weight (that’s easy if the nacelle can push on the ground) or less weight (the part that would need anchoring). Most aeronautical mitigations are nowhere fast enough to avoid buckling.

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