this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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There are companies trying to bring airships back. The Airlander 10 is expected to be flying flights over Spain in 2026.
While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:
The other problem with high altitudes is that the wind speeds up there tend to be very strong and fast. Aircraft can overcome them because they can travel at hundreds of kilometers an hour, (but it still has a significant effect on travel time) but airships trundle along at a speed roughly equivalent to that or the motorist on their driving test.
Could work more along the lines of a cruise ship though. Not as an efficient way to get somewhere but just to go float around doing vacation stuff.
Well, you can have a lot of space for casinos, shops and pools with waterslides on a cruise ship to entertain passengers because weight is not important. But on an airship...?
Not impractical really, according to Wikipedia even the old Hindenburg: "held 200,000 cubic metres (7,062,000 cu ft) of gas in 16 bags or cells with a useful lift of approximately 232 t (511,000 lb). This provided a margin above the 215 t (474,000 lb) average gross weight of the ship with fuel, equipment, 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) of mail and cargo, about 90 passengers and crew and their luggage."
So if it has a capacity of 40,000+ lb beyond all the needed crew, passengers, fuel, and whatever cargo with a 100 year old design using diesel engines I imagine you throw a small nuclear reactor for power in a modern design you could probably float around for a while with some pretty comfy accomodations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship
There was a Wendigo video about how it could be used as a way of transporting goods as cargo since it isn't too time sensitive and it could be quite cheap compared to trucks and ships because of fuel iirc. Also for tourism since they can land vertically