199
The world's largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley
(techcrunch.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
199 points (96.7% liked)
Technology
73338 readers
2294 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Airship, tons of cargo? They famously suck at carrying anything of weight. The hindenburg could carry like 10 tons, and a regular zeppelin around 2 tons.
Helium isn’t exactly an abundant resource either, is it? I’m all for a future with a sky dotted with airships, but how could you possibly scale this up?
deleted
I thought it was an abundant resource just not here, awkward places like the moon and sun.
Man I can't wait till we're able to harvest helium from the Sun! That means that we made to the big leagues.
Dyson sphere or ring world which do like better?
Dyson Swarm. Makes more sense to me.
Hydrogen has about half the density of helium. The fire risk is notoriously unpopular, however.
Wide-spread adoption of airships would almost certainly have to use hydrogen.
Yeah, it's expensive as shit.
The article says it can carry about 4 tons of cargo on top of the requirements to run the thing, but that's for Pathfinder 1. I'm trying to think of an actual real world use case for these. Outside of tours that carry around 50 adult passengers with no belongings, I don't see the practicality of it.
It’s completely impractical, which is why they’ll inevitably transition to luxury travel for millionaires. It’s faster than a yacht, but slower than a private jet, so it’s only useful roll is in carrying rich bastards to vacations that they aren’t in a rush to get to.
The equivalent of a cruise ship, that's really the only market. Except with a much lower passenger count and a lot less space, so a much higher ticket price.
Maybe a luxury air yacht for the ultra-wealthy who're bored with their ocean yachts?