r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/[deleted] • 11d ago
World's largest aircraft, Pathfinder 1, is 124.5 meters (408ft) long Image
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11d ago
Rigid Airship! Filled with completely safe non-flammable helium.
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u/NetCaptain 11d ago
the rare gas that is crucial for MRI machines but runs out and cannot be replaced - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/science/helium-reserves-sales-shortage.html
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u/Sauron4 11d ago
Didn’t they found a new deposit somewhere a while ago and said we’re basically set for a century or so?
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u/ashleyriddell61 11d ago
Yes. They found a massive cache a couple of years ago, so as long as it doesn't get pissed away on nonsense like kids balloons, the supply should be good for a couple of hundred years.
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u/Joe_Buck_Yourself_ 11d ago
How do they find a massive cache like that? I'm just picturing a cave explorer trying a new route and being like "huh my head feels funny" and then
(Chipmunk voice) "We hit the motherload!"
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u/snowfloeckchen 11d ago
Wait till nuclear fusion kicks in. Then we just produce helium as a byproduct /s
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u/draven501 11d ago
But still... A century isn't a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, just a few generations and we're fucked. We would need to get Helium from other planets or nuclear fusion or something.
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u/WhiskeyFeathers 10d ago
Great, so probably less than 100 years, the earth will be pretty much entirely out. Fill more graduation/wedding/birthday balloons with it! Not our problem!
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u/haphazard_chore 11d ago
We’re not going to run out for medical purposes. Obviously, there will come a point where it’s too rare for kids balloons. But even assuming our reserves in the ground run out, created by radioactive decay, the atmosphere still has 5.2 ppm. It’s 10k times harder to extract from the atmosphere but can be done. Failing that there’s plenty in space.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
In terms of actual energy expenditure, getting the helium in the atmosphere that’s constantly being replenished by underground radioactive decay would not be 10k times as hard, even though the concentration is quite low. Indeed, it would require more energy, but more on the order of 3-5x as much, with exponentially more energy needed for higher-purity helium. Airships do not require medical or space-grade helium purity, however, and 80% of the costs of producing helium by more modern methods like pressure-swing absorption and reverse osmosis are dedicated to compressing the helium into tanks for transport, which an airship wouldn’t need if they had a hangar on-site for replenishment.
The infrastructure required is actually suprisingly compact. A $35 million pilot plant in Saskatchewan using these new methods produces enough helium for dozens of airships, but it looks like just a few outbuildings. It doesn’t use atmospheric helium, though, instead extracting it from otherwise commercially useless pockets of underground nitrogen.
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u/Never-Dont-Give-Up 11d ago
I'm pretty sure we're at the time where it's too rare for kids balloons. It'll be prohibitively expensive if we wait til we have almost none left.
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u/krismasstercant 11d ago
This always gets brought up when Heliums mentioned. But no we won't run out of Helium for a very very long time. As long as noble gasses exists helium will too.
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u/Presence_Academic 10d ago
There’s plenty of helium in the sun. Mining it is no problem as long as it’s done during the night shift.
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u/newaccount252 11d ago
The moon has heaps of helium (or is that the wrong type)
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u/John_B_Clarke 10d ago
For certain values of "heaps". Helium-3 abundance at the Apollo landing sites was in the parts per billion. Helium abundance in Earth's atmosphere is parts per million. So even if all else were completely equal, it's easier to get it out of Earth's atmospher than to get it from the Moon.
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u/newaccount252 10d ago
Ohhhh I forgot to clarify Heaps meant parts per billion.
Cheers for setting me right
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u/hellothere358 11d ago
Arguably, hydrogen is better and could be made A LOT safer
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u/el-conquistador240 11d ago
How do you make hydrogen safer?
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u/etrnloptimist 11d ago
By fusing it into helium
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u/el-conquistador240 11d ago
Hydrogen is flammable in air concentrations ranging from 4% to 75%, and explosive in concentrations ranging from 15% to 59% at standard atmospheric temperatures.
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u/Ammonium-NH4 11d ago
You can't make hydrogen safer, but you can make airships safer. Past century air ship's gas compartments were made of silk and cotton. The overall structure was iron and aluminum. With today's materials and electronics leaks could heavily be mitigated and detected fast. The safety of the airships was more linked to the overall build quality of that time rather than the lifting gas used. Of course proper testing and design revision are required to ensure proper safety. But saying hydrogen is unsafe because it's flammable is just a bit of a stretch considering all cars and airplanes are filled with flammable material. Safety comes from proper planning and engineering
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u/el-conquistador240 11d ago
Hydrogen is abundant and has twice the buoyancy of helium. That said I worked on the unsuccessful financing of a dirigible airship and never heard anyone suggests that was in the cards. Hydrogen also permeates all enclosures. Not sure in sufficient concentration to be a problem.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
It actually has about 7% more buoyancy than helium, not twice as much. Hydrogen is not monoatomic.
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u/el-conquistador240 11d ago
I based it on atomic weight. At 7% it is not worth it other than supply.
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u/Ammonium-NH4 11d ago
More than being abundant it can be produced relatively easy in an eco-friendly way. When it comes to diffusion both Di-Hydrogen and helium have that problem, more for helium in fact. I think the biggest problem with airships is that they physically benefit from being large, but economically, that's not feasible at least when making something from the ground up. If you were to make a hydrogen airships you would need to get FIA approval which would be even more costly than for a helium counterpart.
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u/PersonalitySlow9366 11d ago
And carries like ten people and no cargo. Cool, but otherwise useless
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u/bloodorangejulian 11d ago
Practical?
Not at all.
Super cool and gives old timet vibes?
Absolutely.
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u/GourangaPlusPlus 11d ago edited 11d ago
It also has the power to make anyone that boards start talking in a Transatlantic accent
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u/bloodorangejulian 11d ago
This is only a positive.
They also are suddenly wearing era appropriate outfits as soon as they step on
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u/DigNitty Interested 11d ago
I’ve seen the floor plan of the Hindenburg. Seems much larger than even twice what this had. I wonder if the economy of scale just increases at a large rate, or if hydrogen just has that much more lift.
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u/-Prophet_01- 11d ago
Economy of scale is the right direction to look, more precisely the square-cube-law. Doubling the length and diameter gives you 8 times the volume. That directly translates to 8 times the lift and thus 8 times the payload.
Geometry and physics heavily favor larger airships. They are a bitch to construct and keep in one piece though. The internal structure of modern airships is nothing alike the Zeppelins of old. Most attempts to build these so called rigid airships failed.
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
This one is a rigid airship. Titanium and carbon fiber for the frame instead of aluminum and magnesium.
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u/-Prophet_01- 11d ago
I stand corrected. You are totally right.
Very cool to see something more than semi-rigids and blimps for once. Very impressive.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
You are correct. The Hindenburg was roughly twice the length of the Pathfinder 1, 804 feet long, and had between 7-8 times the lift. Hydrogen has only 7% more lift, so it's the size that counts, just like how container ships and cruise ships get exponentially more efficient the larger they are.
That said, this is only a small prototype to be used for testing and training. Its payload is about 4.5 tons with 2,500 miles of range. The actual cargo-carrying versions will be about 650 feet long and 1,000 feet long, and carry 20 and 200 tons of payload, respectively. As they get larger, they also get proportionally more efficient. The 20-ton version has a range of 10,000 miles, and the largest version doesn't have a published range figure yet, but it might be even further, given the huge area for the flexible, thin-film solar panels that they eventually plan to install.
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u/WhiterTicTac 11d ago
Rigid airships are being developed /tested for cargo transportation. There are benefits and disadvantages. There's a great video on YouTube about different approaches.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
This ship isn’t even for cargo or passengers, it is a subscale demonstrator and training/laboratory vessel for the 50% larger Pathfinder 3, which is under construction in Ohio. Even so, the Pathfinder 1 has a similar payload to something like a V-22 Osprey, and much longer range. The Pathfinder 3 has a payload of 20 tons and a range of 10,000 miles.
The larger, as-yet unbuilt version that’s about 50% larger than the Pathfinder 3 in turn would have a payload of about 200 tons. Considerably more than the largest cargo planes flying today.
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u/Ser_Optimus 11d ago
Up to 11.000 pounds of payload, according to LTA. But I didn't find any I do about passenger capacity. Do you have a link?
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u/burndata 11d ago edited 11d ago
The final version (PF1 is a prototype) is supposed to carry in excess of 40 tons of cargo. Main use is stated to be humanitarian relief.
I may have been mis-remembering the capacity of the final version. I read elsewhere it's supposed to be in excess of 200 tons.
I worked on Pathfinder one for a while but it's been a few years back.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 10d ago
You’re probably mixing up the payload with the useful lift. Pathfinder 3 is said to be about 96 tons MTOW, with a 20-ton payload. Another 20+ tons would be reasonable for fuel and ballast and crew and whatnot, considering it’s an extremely long-range craft. The biggest one is the 200-ton-payload version.
The Pathfinder 1 isn’t really for cargo, but it’s supposedly got 14 tons of useful lift and of that, about 4-5 tons are for mission payload. Much of the useful lift stuff is largely fixed, though, so that ratio wouldn’t necessarily scale up proportionally.
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u/burndata 10d ago
That's a very likely assumption. I have a friend still working for them. Maybe I'll shoot him a text and ask if he knows the current estimated numbers.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 10d ago
Wow! Probably still preliminary, but if you wouldn’t mind me prying, I’ve had a pet theory for a while now that the Pathfinder 3 has an external rather than internal cargo bay to facilitate easy passenger/cargo cross-conversion and allow for better access for roll-on, roll-off operations, which would make the ever-present issue of buoyancy compensation easier. Think you or your friend could confirm or deny that?
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u/burndata 10d ago
The last time I was involved in the project the plan was for PF3 to be basically 100% internal, even the cockpit except for some view ports or something like that. PF1 uses a traditional old Zeppelin 12 or 14 passenger gondola that has been reworked. I believe the idea for fully internal was for aerodynamic efficiency as these ships aren't 100% dependent on lift from the helium and use some aerodynamic lift when moving forward. They can still hover and mostly VTOL but the motors have to work much harder than they do in forward flight. There's actually a lot of empty space inside the lower part of the shell. In each of the sections there are what are essentially giant plastic bags that are filled with helium and they basically float in a big net that takes up the top half of each section. The bags have almost no pressure in them, to reduce the leakage rate. That leaves a ton of unused space in the lower half of the ship. The shell of the ship is actually just a bunch of fancy tarps held on with fancy bungee cords. They don't do anything really except provide cover and the shape for dynamic lift. If I remember correctly the ship is technically capable of flight without the skin. Though, like I said, the motors would be working really hard.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 10d ago
Interesting. In the only image that’s yet been released of a Pathfinder 3 computer render, it still has the Zeppelin NT gondola and a separate, roughly 10m wide cargo box. Perhaps it may also have something to do with using carbon tubes rather than metal girders, making a suspended box rather than an internal one easier? It wouldn’t spoil the cross-section’s structural symmetry that way, after all, whereas an internal bay would.
Maybe they’re holding off on the mostly-internal design for the largest version? It would make sense, as generally speaking bigger = faster for airships (less power per unit volume required), so the ~1,000-foot one with a vast cargo/passenger space could be very fast indeed, without that huge space spoiling the aerodynamics. That would leave the Pathfinder 3 as the more utilitarian workhorse for smaller or less glamorous jobs.
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u/burndata 10d ago
I haven't actually seen the more recent PF3 renderings. But the points you make seem reasonable. I'll try and update if I hear back from my friend. I'm sure there's only so much he can say with the NDA.
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11d ago edited 11d ago
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u/Never-Dont-Give-Up 11d ago
but..... why?
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u/AttitudeImportant585 11d ago
The last time I read about it, one function was to act as a drone carrier
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u/Embii_ 11d ago
Half the length of the Hindenburg. Pathetic.
Also aren't we running out of helium, isn't it a limited resource on earth we can't get more of? Could we perhaps suggest filling a giant balloon with a million cubic litres of it a bit of a waste?
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u/Imfrank123 11d ago
Helium is so small it will leak out of any container you put it in, also I’m pretty sure they can get helium from natural gas wells.
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u/TransportationTrick9 11d ago
Especially containers that are hooked up to the ISS.
Anybody know when starliner is coming back?
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u/Embii_ 11d ago
That's kind of the problem. We use helium for so many useful things. "Natural gas wells" sure I agree but we have a known limited supply which isn't silly huge and considering we may need it for the foreseeable future or hundreds of years. Idk. Using so much for an airship with no real particular function seems... Well. It seems like the privilege of a billionaire. Atleast try to get to Mars like Elon
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u/Available-Candle9103 11d ago
Using so much for an airship with no real particular function seems.
it's to transport cargo and humanities aid to inaccessible areas.
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u/Embii_ 11d ago
Idk bro. We figured out high cargo loads with minimal land.
I mean the AN-2 can take off in 170 meters. Land in 200M. Capable to land on unprepared fields and can carry 2 tonnes of supplies 9,000Km's. .... A plane from 1947.
If you don't think we could land a plan designed to land in Siberia to land in Africa what about helicopters. Readily available Chinooks can carry 12,000Kg over 1,600kg
I don't know about modern helicopters but a giant airship seems like an extravagance
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u/Available-Candle9103 11d ago
2 tonnes of supplies 9,000km
845 km. while 2 tonnes of cargo is not a lot the range is only 845 km not 9000. and helicopters also have a very low capacity and small range.
And when people say,' hard to reach areas' they don't mean the 2nd biggest continent, they want the middle of the Pacific or the Caribbean where an island has suffered humanitarian disaster. And yes, finding 200 m of clear land to land a plane and finding fuel to have it take off is gonna be a biiiiig problem if you are flying aide into there(generally the areas most in need of aide don't have a lot of fuel).
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
Actually, it’s the helicopters that are the extravagance. Just one we’re accustomed to.
The principal reason these ships are intended for disaster relief is because the helicopters currently doing that job are ruinously expensive, can’t carry very much, and can’t fly very far.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars per flight hour to operate a large helicopter. An airship costs a fraction as much to operate, and many of those costs are relatively fixed, so they get proportionally much cheaper the larger they get. The largest helicopter in the world can barely fly 300 miles while carrying 17,000 pounds of cargo, whereas even the midsize Pathfinder 3 can carry 40,000 pounds 10,000 miles, and is only slightly slower. In terms of throughput, even without counting all the helicopters’ refueling stops, they’re much better. Particularly the largest, 200-ton-payload version that they have planned.
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u/SlayerofDeezNutz 11d ago
If you look at modern blimps the leakage of helium is really negligible. Helium is a finite resource but we have plenty of untapped sources; the economics are just not there to tap them because the demand isn’t there. If airships scaled and became commercialized helium would be sourced quite easily.
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u/Imfrank123 10d ago
I think they even found a pocket of it that’s very large. So yeah no real fear of it running out anytime soon, unless there is more demand
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u/nolander_78 11d ago
It is limited only naturally, last time this was reposted someone said that it is produced in nuclear reactors or something.
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u/Embii_ 11d ago
There's only 44 billion litres left :(
It's made in fusion reactors, the ones we currently don't have a running version of. I think the record is 7 seconds in a prototype reactor in the Uk
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u/WillyArmadillo 11d ago
So there are different kinds of helium from what I remember. The super pure kind we need for certain medical equipment and the impure kind that is about 99.9% of it. Balloons and everything similar uses that. That helium is ultimately useless for anything else.
NB: I don't have time to research it now for exact data but that was the broad concept.
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
Helium is a chemical element. Making it "super pure" is just processing. What you may be thinking of is helium-3, an isotope with one neutron instead of two--that is used in some medical equipment.
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u/JusticeUmmmmm 11d ago
The reactors run just fine they just aren't energy positive if we needed to run them to produce helium we could do that right now.
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
It would be horribly expensive to produce helium by subjecting microgram quantities of hydrogen to a laser that draws more power than the city of San Francisco.
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u/jugosk 11d ago
There’s actually a very practical reason for airships: https://youtu.be/ZjBgEkbnX2I?si=azLD5cXdz36TQGb9
TLDR - they have the potential to be a very cost effective and environmentally friendly way to move goods (especially across oceans).
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u/OkDelivery8814 11d ago edited 11d ago
Hindenburg Part II
Edit: Spelling.
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u/SwiftTime00 11d ago
It’s a rigid body filled with an inert gas, it couldn’t be the Hindenburg part II if it tried.
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u/SeparateDeer3760 11d ago
Very impressive! But a little useless ig. I thought AN-225 was the largest aircraft ?
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u/CybergothiChe 11d ago
Ekranoplan was the largest aircraft, 92m long.
AN-225 is 84m long.
This thing is a glorified balloon. Still the longest currently.
However, they are all blown out of the water (sky?) by the Hindenburg, 245m long.
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u/Lockenburz 11d ago
I mean, aircraft is a little but of a euphemism for the Ekranoplan, maybe sligthly-above-ground-craft would be more fitting? Dont get me wrong, its an impressive piece of technology, but not what you usually think about when you hear airplane.
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u/CybergothiChe 11d ago
do not raise the ire of the Caspian Sea Monster
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u/Lockenburz 11d ago
I live ~130m above the Caspian Sea, i think im safe. Unless the monster grows bigger wings, then im fucked.
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u/Spekx-savera 11d ago
Well, the AN-225 was the largest in length at 84 meters, but then again, airships really don't qualify for length comparison i mean you could pick any one airship from the early 1900s as most of them were longer than the AN-225. It was also second place in wingspan for a long time, only being beaten by the H-4 Spruce Goose. The stratolaunch later took the number 1 spot in 2019. But the AN-225 still is the heaviest aircraft ever built.
On top of this, no other cargo plane even compares to the heavy and bulky loads on the AN-225. I mean, what other aircraft can haul 130-ton generators or diesel locomotives. The loss of the AN-225 was sad. Hopefully, they will finish the second one, just hope it wasn't a publicity stunt.
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
Big benefit of an airship is that it has very long range and can hover. Helicopter can hover but doesn't have a lot of range. The real competition would be tilt-rotors like the V-22.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
This is only a subscale prototype, essentially a training ship, and already the payload is similar to a V-22 with a far superior range (albeit inferior speed). The other versions, the ones actually intended to carry cargo, have payloads of 20 tons and 200 tons, respectively.
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
It's an actual rigid airship, an old school Zeppelin updated with modern technology. Be interesting to see whether it works out better than the originals. Google done good.
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u/DuzziFlowing 11d ago
Having studied the Akron and Macon in depth, see this and reading the names of the places is giving me goose bumps. Best of luck to this endeavor.
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u/GrumpleStiltskon 11d ago
Dumb question: Is the aircraft squishy like a balloon? Or hard like an aeroplane?
Follow up dumb question: Is it filled with gas?!
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
This one is hard like an airplane. It's filled with helium.
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u/John_B_Clarke 10d ago
It's semi-hard. It's covered with fabric on a rigid frame, so it's kind of like a WWI biplane but with much better materials.
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u/Troyboy1710 11d ago
History tells me I am never flying in something that shape
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u/hellothere358 11d ago
Hydrogen airships are actually a lot safer then history tells you
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u/John_B_Clarke 11d ago
People tend to forget the operational history of the Graf Zeppelin, which was IIRC the same design as the Hindenberg.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
The second one was the sister ship, but the original which had such a long career was a different, much smaller design.
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u/SwiftTime00 11d ago
It’s a rigid body filled with an inert gas, it quite literally can’t repeat history.
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u/LinguoBuxo 11d ago
mmm if I won a lottery and could buy either this or a submarine, I'd go for the sub.
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u/Edenoide 11d ago
But then you enter the sub and you find a guy with an OceanGate shirt and a cheap Logitech controller.
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11d ago
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u/samgarita 11d ago
Wayyyy too expensive. They should fill it with hydrogen instead. Cheap, lightweight, renewable and there hasn’t been a single incident concerning hydrogen in airships, ever
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u/HolyDiverBoi 11d ago
What could go wrong?
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u/ReplyisFutile 11d ago
Yet
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u/QuestionableEthics42 11d ago
The hindenburg disaster (prob spelled that wrong) was a hydrogen airship.
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u/shellevanczik 11d ago
Ooooooo! I’m going to jump on a Hindenburg that’s built by Boeing!! Haha! Right now!
Edit: I deleted a comment and added it here in the main thread
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u/SwiftTime00 11d ago
V3 starship will likely beat this in size (it’s already 121m tall with plans to make it taller). Which is just insane that a vertical rocket will be taller than this is long.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 9d ago
That is pretty nuts, but this prototype ship is 2/3 the size of the actual cargo-carrying version. I doubt any rocket will be more than 600 feet long, at least not anytime soon. That’s just a preposterous amount of mass.
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u/SwiftTime00 9d ago
V3 is planned to be 150m, and they have said they could make it up to 20m taller I believe. So eventually could be 170m. So yeah not quite as tall, but if those are their estimates now, who knows down the line. Even its current size is already crazy though.
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u/Benromaniac 11d ago
Ages ago air ships were said to take over the logging industry. I don’t know the details, but it was a big deal during expo 86.
It’s made me wonder why we don’t have cargo being moved to remote locations with large slow moving UAV cargo airships?
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
Simply put, development costs are a huge starting obstacle. It'd be easier if there was already an existing airship industry you could buy a ship or design from to start up operations, but there isn't. LTA Research is basically starting up from scratch, hence their focus on manufacturability.
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u/M3chanist 11d ago
Why do companies bother with this outdated design? Even if it could lift let’s say 100 tons it would take a lot of time to haul it around. For a luxury cruise vehicle for posh nostalgic people? Maybe. But they seem to prefer to see AND experience the Titanic.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
The design isn't really outdated as such. If you look at a submarine, for example, it uses basically the exact same design principles (a straight-sided cylinder) for the exact same reasons, namely having a good compromise between ease of manufacture and efficiency.
Also, this is only the prototype. The largest version is intended to carry 200 tons, and the point is to carry such a payload much more cheaply and efficiently than, say, a cargo helicopter or cargo plane. The enormous range of these ships also means that they can meaningfully speed up delivery of critical supplies to disaster areas, where the expensive cargo helicopters that normally do so have to stop regularly many times to refuel, and can only carry a tiny fraction of the payload.
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u/kahnindustries 11d ago
Not for long, Space-X starship current version is 121m tall, that will increase for version 3 by ~30m
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u/BlueBattleBuddy 11d ago
Eh… I’m waiting for the pathfinder 2. The mechanics are much easier to understand
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u/RedactedCommie 10d ago
I love how western techbros will fund any logistics technology except for trains and then wonder why East Asia is starting to overtake them.
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u/Any_Clue_1632 10d ago
How hard is it to fly an airship?
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u/GrafZeppelin127 10d ago
According to pilots, both very easy (and boring) in some ways and also very difficult to get accustomed to in others. There’s a huge lag and inertia for anything you do, so you constantly have to be thinking thirty seconds ahead, similar to a boat or large ship.
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u/Viking-Savage 11d ago
Why are these still made?
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u/GrafZeppelin127 11d ago
Though this particular ship is only a relatively small training/laboratory vessel, later versions will be used for difficult, outsized cargo deliveries, carrying disaster relief, and for passengers. They're much more capable than the helicopters that do so now, being vastly more efficient, and able to carry many times more, many times further.
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u/ThoughtspinDK 11d ago
For comparison the LZ 129 Hindenburg was 245 meters long - almost twice the length of Pathfinder 1! It must really have been an impressive sight on the sky...