Me investing in Goodyear:
People think mainly of the Hindenberg when you mention airships, but there were a lot of other ones that met tragic ends. The US Navy's Akron and Macon both crashed due to storms, the former with the loss of all but three sailors.
I think the troposphere is just too turbulent for big fragile bubbles like this to work. Maybe if we had blimps like Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age - where they are made of diamond and use vacuum for lift - they could be strong and small enough to work. But the idea of using something like this to deploy wind turbines is just asking for trouble.
Yep, the structure integrity is maybe a hardest issue here.
I recently finished reading His Majesty’s Airship, which focuses specifically on the R101 development and disaster, but also more broadly on the entire history of rigid airships through the 1930s. The recurring theme is that people want airships to work so they keep trying. A new design comes along that promises to fix the problems from before and it’s fine for a while, until there’s a problem like, say, a strong breeze, and dozens of people die in a horrible crash. I want airships to make a comeback. The basic idea of something that floats and you merely need to push around with some propellers sounds great. I’m not terribly optimistic about it though. The weather is a real problem. Planes and ships and trains and trucks can all function even in an outright storm; airships inevitably require fair weather. Worse still, if they’re outside a hangar when the weather starts getting bad, they're stuck. They can’t get into a hangar before it gets worse because the very act of getting in a hangar for protection requires extremely precise control with no chance of sudden gusts that could shove it into the ground or the sides of the hangar. Extra propellers to maneuver can do only so much; they’re not magic. Major advances in weather forecasting in recent years maybe mean there are more situations where an airship could be safely used, with greater confidence of agreeable weather for the duration of the trip, but you’re certainly not going to build a freight business model on “sorry, let’s try again next week."
Unpredictable drift in a sky thats dense with jet propled air travel sounds like a deathwish. You'd have to keep these things far away from airports and have their own launching space.
Yep, the problem is probably worse for big ones and the video implies that we need extra large airships to carry heavy weights.
Yes.
Idk, should they?
Betteridge’s Law says the answer to an article title with a question is always “no”.
I heard about this law several times, but I always forget whether it is 'yes' or 'no' 😂
Click the link and watch? It's very good. Looks like Veritasium spent a huge amount of time researching for this video and you're not just trusting his research - he interviews experts on historical (failed) air ships as well as modern engineers working on multi-billion dollar projects trying to fix the mistakes that were made in the past as well as discussing new problems that weren't encountered last time but would have if they hadn't given up almost immediately.
Still - it finishes on a positive note, those engineers do think the problems can be solved. We could have cheap cargo transport to anywhere in the world instead of exclusively to coastal cities with a sheltered bay and a harbour that takes hundreds of years to build. An air ship could deliver a shipping container, cheaply, to anywhere a helicopter can land. That's a problem worth trying to solve.
It will likely start with niche use cases, such as delivering massive wind turbine blades to the top of a mountain ridge... without having to first build a mountain road up to the construction site - and a road suitable for trucks that can carry an 800 foot long turbine blade:
Once air ships are solved for those use cases, it will inevitably be used for other things too.
Found Cid from the next Final Fantasy.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Haven't watched it yet, but yes, absolutely.
We need them for my town’s SteamPunk Festival! Nice bit of retro-futuristic technology that is so cool, but utterly impractical
This video is recommended by Tournesol community:
[37🌻] Veritasium: Should Airships Make A Comeback?#Tournesol is an open-source web tool made by a non profit organization, evaluating the overall quality of videos to fight against misinformation and dangerous content.
