To be honest it’s pretty unfair to compare something built before humans sent anything into space, vs something after we’ve made it to Mars. There is over 60 years of innovation between the Hindenburg and the airbus.
Comment on Anon wants to ride a zeppelin
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
They kinda suck, and this isn’t likely to change.
The Hindenburg was 245m long, carried around 50 crew plus 60 or so passengers. It needs all that length to have enough volume to lift that many people. The laws of physics are a limitation here; even figuring out a vaccum rigid air ship would only slightly improve this (it’s a neat engineering problem, but not very practical for a variety of reasons).
An Airbus a380 is 72m long and carries over 500 passengers and crew.
The Hindenburg made the transatlantic journey in around 100 hours. You could consider it more like a cruise than a flight–you travel there in luxury and don’t care that it takes longer. You would expect it to be priced accordingly. In fact, given the smaller passenger size compared to the crew size, I’d expect it to be priced like a river cruise rather than an ocean cruise. Those tend to be more exclusive and priced even higher.
Being ground crew for blimps was a dangerous job. You’re holding onto a rope, and then the wind shifts and you get pulled with it. This could certainly be done more safely today with the right equipment. Don’t expect the industry to actually do that without stiff regulations stepping in.
Overall, they suck and would only be a luxury travel option. Continental cargo is better done by trains. Trans continental cargo is better done by boats. There isn’t much of a use case anywhere.
weeeeum@lemmy.world 6 months ago
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
The whole idea was losing out to the DC-3 already.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Airships only make sense in a world in which the economy takes into account ecodestruction. Kind of like wind-powered ships. If we didn’t know what GHGs do environmentally, which offset any short-term efficiency gains provided by burning hydrocarons, nobody would ever dream of abandoning these miracle fuels. So you can only examine the efficiency of airships with hydrocarbons off the table entirely.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
They do plenty of ecodestruction. If we had them now, they’d be fueled by hydrocarbons. That could hypothetically be batteries in the future, but batteries good enough for that could do equally well in airplanes.
The material used in making them rigid also has a carbon cost.
B0rax@feddit.de 6 months ago
Don’t forget that they are huge, you could fit a lot of solar power on them, given that it would be light enough
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
It wouldn’t be light enough. Panels weight about 19kg each for a 1x1.7m panel. This can probably be slimmed down for the application, but probably not by enough. Perovskite promises a lighter weight panel, but they still have longevity issues that are being worked out in the lab.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I think they’d be solar powered with some kind of thin film photovoltaic. You don’t need much battery in that case. While some carbon cost is inevitable, the point is they wouldn’t ever compete with something that burns kerosene.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
There are plenty of other options that don’t burn kerosene.
Chef@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
So what you’re saying is we should expect Elon Musk to start a zeppelin company at some point in the near future.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
Yes, that’s correct.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I’m already buying shares in BlimpX! He’s a visionary, first Hyperloop, now BlimpX! What’ll be the next thing from 80+ year old popular science mags for the real life Tony Stark will invent?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 6 months ago
And thus the transformation into Max Zorin is complete.