Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

A German company had a go at this with CargoLifter [1] in the mid 90s. They wanted - as the name says - transport oversized loads that are hard to transport on road or would otherwise require an expensive transport like long detours on waterways. Their hangar is now an indoor water park [2].

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

View on HN

I am well aware of their fate.

Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium. Either is not helping with turning a profit.

Let alone that fact, that any of this will only work of there is no wind at both the start and end of your journey.

But I guess the swimming resort is kinda nice.

As compared to transporting passengers, transporting cargo seems like a good choice when it comes to the weather, you probably have a lot more freedom in scheduling flights, being able to wait for good conditions. With the ballast, did they not plan to compensate the weight of the cargo with water? Certainly adds complexity and probably also risk if you have to load a hundred tons of water into an airship relatively quickly, but does not sound completely unreasonable to me.

Part of the pitch was to be able to deliver extra heavy cargo to places without other infrastructure, but if there is no other infrastrukcture, how do they get the water(-tanks) and (big) pumps there?

Portable pumps used by fire fighters can deliver up to 2 m³/min at 10 bar weighing somewhere in the range of 150-200 kg. With five of those you could load 100 tons in 10 minutes which seems quick enough to me but I have no idea how quick one has to be, I am just comparing to the time scale I would assume dropping off the cargo would take. And I would just place the pumps on the airship and lower them to the ground, maybe together with the cargo. And for tanks, 100 m³ are five of the larger above ground pools worth of water weighing about 100 kg a piece. Or look at those water inflated flood barriers. You could probably carry 100 m³ worth of water storage into the middle of nowhere without too much trouble in a bunch of back bags if you really had to. What you still need is a water source. If you only have a normal tap, it will take a hand full of days to fill 100 m³, but completely feasible. Or a diesel generator, a small pump, and enough hoses to reach a nearby lake or stream. Nothing you could not deliver with a helicopter. But what actually is the imagined use case here, under what circumstances would you want to drop off some heavy and probably expensive equipment in the inaccessible middle of nowhere? As soon as you can get there with (off-road) vehicles, it seems pretty simple to get the necessary materials there.

> Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium.

Can you not compress the helium, when you no longer want it so buoyant?

Then the extremely heavy stuff you'd be transporting would at least partly be a lot of pressure tanks and compressors and fuel to power the compressing. I don't know how the numbers work out but I'm guessing you can't just make an air-submarine.

> I'm guessing you can't just make an air-submarine.

I hadn't realized I wanted this until I found out I couldn't have it :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com