Benclaman
Benclaman on Hacker News
The Git-style workflow is super clever. How do teams typically collaborate around it? For example, can multiple people work on different branches of the same agent (visual and code), or is the sync more linear?
Remote pilot like a military drone operator! If a vehicle misbehaves, worst case scenario would be a total control failure (will definitely have redundancies designed in), which would result in the airship slowly falling to the ground. Hopefully, people would see it coming and be able to get out of the way!
The final one we're building will be 60 feet and have a 650lb payload, so would have to be an ultralight house! And you'd also need a place to park a 60'x20' airship. Or I suppose you could just keep it in the air? There's actually a startup that's supposedly building air yachts like you're talking about. I forgot the name but I think they're 150-200 feet.
We have a pretty cool plan for managing icing that I can't talk about here because of IP disclosure. In general we don't think icing will be an unsolvable problem.
We anticipate these will have operating bases with lifting gas storage tanks, hangars, tiedowns, etc. The hybrid design we're using doesn't need ballast because the total vehicle mass is heavier than air. In emergencies, we would land them in a field or on water for recovery when conditions improve, or fly to an area with better weather.
These are awesome questions! Here's a couple answers:
1) We're building our full size airship to fly at 60 mph, which increases the usability in inclement weather.
2) Joe answered this in another comment, but our airships use pretty small quantities of helium compared to the bigger ones, so it's not a major operational cost.
3) For sure this is an issue, but the bigger the blimp is, the more bullet holes you'd have to fill it with to prevent it from reaching its final destination. The german zeppelins of world war I were really hard to shoot down. See 5:47 of the below video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlQgprSGpNI
The economics on small airships only work if they're unmanned, and now is pretty much the best time ever to develop unmanned aircraft.
We're not planning to build something that's 600 feet long and costs hundreds of millions, we're building something that's 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands. Unmanned blimps of this size don't require the same amount of capital, so we can fly faster and get to market faster.
This is exactly where we think the big market opportunity is!
A bored or malicious person will definitely be able to shoot our airships. The nice part about an airship is that if you shoot it with a gun, the hole will be small so it will take a long time for the gas to leak out. The failure mode is the airship will gradually lose lift and have trouble flying, probably on the order of hours before it wouldn't have enough to fly.
Most of the time we'll be operating over areas without people, so if the airships do get shot at, they should be in an area where they can safely land and be recovered. The envelope will be tough enough to handle birds landing on it.
Regarding banditry, we hope that we are providing enough value to these communities that there will be peer pressure to prevent it.
It's relatively easy to transport them when not in use, either keeping them inflated and flying to the end location, or packing them up and assembling/inflating on location.
The goal is to make them completely autonomous, though a pilot observer will likely be required for the near future.
Business model is something we're still figuring out. We have interest on both sides, but at first we'll definitely be operating themselves as the 'FedEx of the low skies.' Once the airship is certified (1-3 years after we build it), we can sell them.
A fleet for autonomous search and rescue would be awesome.
We haven't filed for a BVLOS waiver yet, that's something we're planning to do in the next couple months. Full scale version will be unmanned.
The inclement weather where our airships have the biggest advantage is in fog or limited visibility due to autonomy hardware/software in geographies with traditionally VFR approaches. Based on our experiences flying our current prototype, the full size airship should be able to take-off and land in wind speeds of 25-30 kts.
It depends. For example, small planes need runways to take off and land, and if the crosswinds are over 15 kts they aren't able to operate. In this same situation, our airships would be able to take off and land because they have VTOL capability like a helicopter and can point in any direction.
Helicopter can take off and land in really high winds, up to 40 kts, but they are 4-8x more expensive to operate than planes, and have limited range.
Our test site is by a wind farm so we have a lot of experience with flying blimps in wind, and we expect our max takeoff windspeed for the full size airship to be 25-30 kts.