News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by jvanderbot on Monday August 09, 2021 @03:13PM (#28121039)
Well certainly that's an edge case. I don't know anything, honestly, but seems to me TFA is talking about wholesale distributor type cargo, not pizza deliveries. I guess waiting a day for a storm to pass doesn't kill anything, and airships can actually loiter in that time.

I'm trying to think of a (non aquatic) case where rail is worse than airships though. If we were to invest in thousands of vehicles for distributing machinery, I'm guessing the average joe like me would vote rail. Unless we're talking going to a place where the infrastructure isn't good enough to support traditional delivery.

For setting up a base in Greenland or the antarctic, I bet airships are really attractive. Or delivering bulk cargo to hawaii, perhaps.

Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by vineyardmike on Monday August 09, 2021 @03:27PM (#28121230)
> I'm trying to think of a case where rail is worse than airships though

You can ship non-standard cargo via air easier than rail if its wide. Eg. Moving a wide machinery, or parts to large construction project.

Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by jcims on Monday August 09, 2021 @05:47PM (#28122715)
One downside of rail is that new routes seem to always be decade long, multi-billion dollar projects.
Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by fanf2 on Monday August 09, 2021 @03:44PM (#28121455)
Airships are better than trains at crossing the sea
Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by jvanderbot on Monday August 09, 2021 @04:15PM (#28121809)
Sure, I was thinking any nation that wants to move cargo over the sea would use ships.

So what conditions other than unestablished areas make airships better than sea ships?

Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by ClumsyPilot on Monday August 09, 2021 @08:07PM (#28123836)
Speed
Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas by giantrobot on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @12:58AM (#28125274)
A cargo airship is slower than a freight jet and only a few times faster than a cargo ship.

Even the relatively "small" PANAMAX container ships can carry 5000TEU. If you had an airship that could carry 50TEU (I'm being extremely generous there) you'd need 100 trips (200 total ocean crossings crossings) to equal a single smaller sized container ship.

If your airships are only four times faster than container ships you'll need 50 of them to carry the same amount of freight as that single ship.

If 20 days is too long a wait air freight (heavier than air) already exists. It also deals with weather by simply flying over it. So you'd need some sort of cargo that was too time sensitive for sea freight but not so sensitive or valuable enough for traditional air freight. But it couldn't be too sensitive or valuable because airships are very sensitive to weather, wind especially, so can only really operate in very clear weather with low winds at departure and arrival.