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Giant Airships to Deploy Buildings by 2003
UniDyne writes: "CargoLifter, an airship manufacturer based in Germany, plans to build giant-sized airships to drop modular buildings in remote areas and help with disaster relief. These airships are the size of the largest building in my home city: the NationsBank Headquarters here in Charlotte! This article explains the possible uses of these airships and how CargoLifter plans to build a manufacturing hangar in North Carolina. They kind of remind me of something you'd see in an anime series." Mmmmm, CargoLifter.
I was senior crew on the worlds largest and most successfull airship company in the world. I have seen these far-fetched ideas for airships come and go over the years, and NOT ONE has materialized. NOT ONE!!! The airship has only been viable and only will be viable as an advertising platform. Advertising is the only market that has turned a profit in the airship world. While some of the ideas that have come and gone over the years have been good, for one reason or another, the only ones that succeed are those based on arial advertising. Trust me, I know.
If I remember correctly, it was the coating used to protect the fabric of the outer envelope that was the real culprit. The formula used had characteristics similar to those of gun powder, making the fabric burn like a huge fuse.
slashdot broke my sig
The fabric dopant contained iron particles. Result: the envelope, not the gas, burned. The hydrogen would escape too quickly, and it would not be mixed with air enough to burn efficiently.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Plus, that'll put them at least one county farther away from me in case they drop anything really heavy.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
And it's more difficult to veer into a Chinese fighter jet, too!
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How do they connect the building to the blimp? How do they keep the blimp stationary while placing the building on its destined site? And how do they diconnect the building? I can imagine the blimp will go up like a cork once the building is disconnected.
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I think that applies for most of the world's cities -and- suburbs.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Well, that's what one of NASA's Mars plans calls for anyway now. :)
Of course, the 'buildings' are rather dinky...understandable when you consider that each has to be a) extremely strong to survive reentry and b) small enough to fit behind a sanely-sized heatshield.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Sure, it sounds good now, but how long will it be until we have Frogstar fighters picking up buildings at will just because they want someone who is inside?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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It'd give them some interesting tools to put the hurt on someone they don't like.
"If you don't do what we want, we'll have Joey over here drop a house on youse..."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A few years back, I saw an article about Zeppelin AG's plans to re-enter the dirigible business.
They were actually going to call the new ship the "Zeppelin NT" (No, I am *not* making this up. At the time, the world was not yet aware of just how badly NT was going to suck.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
www.zeppelin-nt.com
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If there's not enough helium, they could mix in a bunch of Neon.
Wait a minute...
It would be the biggest HeNe laser in the world! Imagine the holograms you could make!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Umm, yes. "As long as the airflow is not turbulent". I'm afraid you are kind of making my point for me - lets's see one of these behemoths lumber its way out of one of these.
And your weather balloon analogy is rather weak - the airship would operate considerably closer to the ground, and at far greater stakes than the potential loss of a cheap radiosonde. Floating along with the wind sounds fine as long as there aren't high tension lines in the way, and as long as the idea isn't currently to stay tethered. In which case this would tend to happen.
You mean "lower the ratio", I think. Square-cube law, sort of?
That would fit better if the interior of the airship were the same density as the rest of it, instead of a much denser skin containing a mass of helium rather less dense than the air surrounding. If you simplify the math to a sphere, the real ratio would be between R^2:R^3 (square-cube) and PiR^2:4PiR^2 (area of a circle:surface area of a sphere), twiddled for drag coefficient and so on - if I'm not mistaken the square-cube law would only apply to the mass (not weight) of the helium enclosed.
Not the difference between the square of the wind velocity exerting force to blow away an elephant or a mouse, but to blow away an elephant-sized balloon versus a mouse-sized balloon.
There are good reasons why they are not used for passenger or military service otherwise, repeated attempts to use them have resulted in loss of the airships and their crews, for reasons totally unrelated to the Hindenberg - Bringing up their relative nonflammability is largely a straw-man argument in their favor.
Yes, they can be made to work in average weather and winds - but expecting this to keep them safe is about as intelligent as expecting building a seaside house at the same level as the average high tide and expecting it to therefore stay dry - and tides are considerably more predictable than sudden changes in the weather.
Pardon me, but I would greatly prefer these potential juggernauts to stay downwind of wherever I am when loaded down with the buildings, locomotives, et cetra the article envisions - if at all, considering again that the wind direction may change.
Near where I used to live, there was a company that made small buildings. Being as how this was in Wichita, KS, which at the time was home to the corporate headquarters of Pizza Hut, Inc., one of the buildings this small company had build was a small Pizza Hut restaurant intended for use as a temporary site (e.g. for servicing an event like Woodstock).
The building was a prototype, and thus sat on the lot of the company for some time. My friends and I always referred to it as P.H.E.D - Pizza Hut, Emergency Deployable.
Considering that the fast food chains have the art of setting up a building like this down to a science - a friend of mine went to work one day past an empty lot, and that evening the lot contained a nearly fully complete Pizza Hut - I wouldn't be too surprised to see the Big Boys using an idea like this.
Kinda like in Unreal Tournement - You get on the radio and call for a drop, they tell you to get clear, WHUMPH! There's a new Pizza Hut.
Or worse yet, McDonalds (shudder...)
www.eFax.com are spammers
If one of those airships crashes, the entire population of Charlotte will be talking like mickey mouse.
I've been reading about these monster airship/trucks for over twenty years now, and I can say in that time I've had some thoughts.
The most apparent thing, to me, was that it gives homebuilding a whole new dimension of economy. Imagine if you can a car built in your back yard -- importing the steel, the laborers, the machines to stamp the parts, all of it -- how much would that car cost? Well, that's how houses are built. Stick by stick, on the ground (yes, I know modularity has increased and all that). Theoretically, a house built in a factory, with quality control, on an assembly line, would reduce the price of houses to a commodity item.
As I am now old and cynical, I know that even if they cut the cost of home manufacture in half, we the buyers would never see the price decrease. The factories would eat the entire savings as new profit, put stick builders out of biz if possible, and use the profits to buy up related industries and strive for a vertical monopoly in time-honored fashion. Sigh.
I love the idea of simply building the house as a well-designed unit and flying it to a foundation somewhere. BUT -- think of this -- it means that houses could be built in national parks, wilderness areas, all the places it was impossible to get to before... but now it could be done. There is no advance so wonderful that humans can't find an evil use for it...
Another thing I thought of, long ago. A lot of municipalites are not going to allow factory-built houses to be flown in, to protect the local building trades. And most certainly Americans will panic (they are good at that -- the safest country in the world is the most personally paranoid) at the thought of a house flying overhead at 60 MPH. The Hindenburg is still, wrongly, viewed as the end of airships because they were unsafe.
A last thing. A few years ago, a researcher got a hold of an actual swathe of the cloth used on the hull of the Hindenburg. Apparently, the paint was incredibly flammable. When the Hindy went up, it was the paint that made it go WHOMPH into flame, not the hydrogen. The hydrogen, if you look at the film, was burning up in any case. The passengers did not by and large die of the fire -- they died from jumping off the ship. I remember it being said that if most of them had kept their heads and jumped off just before the ship hit the ground (and, I assume, ran like hell), they would have had a good chance of survival.
Pity -- primarily because of that disaster, airships died in the U.S. as a commercial venture. They were such magnificent beasts!
Yeah, I've seen that article and his sketches. He proposed dropping a bomb to make a crater for the foundation, too.
If they had one medium-sized airship ferrying around bulky medium-weight stuff like drilling rigs and transmission towers, and real customers using it, it would be a better company.
Mars's atmosphere is pretty thin, you'd have to make very very light airships. It'd be hard to make them strong enough to lift stuff.
I have read a lot of dismissive comments about cargolifter here. And it is true that they face a lot of technical difficulties.
But they are very serious about building this keeled airship (not a blimp, not a zeppelin).
They have build the production facilty in Germany, an incredibly big hangar. They do have lots of investors, many of them companies that will benefit from the finished product.
Yes their stock is slumping, but that is no wonder in the current climate at the stock exchanges, it _is_ a very risky venture.
But this is not some crazy venture, von Gablenz is going about it in a very level headed way. When they premiered on the stock market during the bubble, they did not go to the "Neuer Markt" where the bubble economy was rampant. They went into the MDAX. The DAX is Germany's equivalent of the Dow, the MDAX holds the next 100 smaller companies (not small caps, more like middle caps, damn my restriceted vocabulary). This means that they are very interested in a steady, level headed developement of Cargolifter, instead of making big bucks fast.
To sum it up: Cargolifter is a risky, crazy thing, but they are very sure of accomplishing this technological feat. The already have funding up to the finished full scale operating prototype (their estimates).
So watch out! If it can be done, their doing it. It is incredibly interesting technology and it will be fun to watch how they are going to do it. Their web site holds a lot of information and many good pictures of side projects and the big hangar. http://www.cargolifter.com
Marcus
"accidentally" start dropping buildings on London this could be a bit of alright.
KFG
Wired ran a much more in-depth article about this last August. It also discussed worldwide helium shortages which may come about because of such increased demand.
-Nev
In disaster areas I can see roads and transport being messed up badly, so againthe ability to go over the obstacles makes some sense there as well. Although clearing the landing site from things large boulders, errant children, panicked refugees, etc are separate issues.
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"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Hmm.. sounds like a wonderful target for a scud missile.
Or maybe just a good way to perform McDonalds Drop Testing. Hmm.. Science project, anyone?
Here's a link to the company's info on the CL160 airship: http://www.cargolifter.com/2001/content/solution_e /index-160.htm
Additional info on the company and its other products, etc. can be found here: http://www.cargolifter.com/2001/repository/portal_ noscript_e.html. There are even links to a theme park!
Buckminster Fuller had some idea akin to this. His plan was to mass produce his Dymaxion Houses and airlift them by zeppelin to where ever. I can't find an exact refrence to this, but I know I read it somewhere. Here's a good Buckminster Fuller page. http://www.cjfearnley.com/fuller-faq.html
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
It's about time that the world discovers that they can be user for other things than flying beer advertising. :-) Don't use cookies and can't be filtered out.
Hmm banner ads in the sky.
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Sounds like the StarCraft mechanism for moving and relocating buildings. Perhaps a model for relocatable buildings with 'plug-n-play' utility and land connections will be develop as a result of this ability. That is, companies can relocate their buildings on demand and plug them into landing platforms anywhere in the world. It also would be a major plus, as the article mentions, to land a hospital right in the middle of a crisis area.
Maybe the sight of giant buildings floating in the sky will become more common in the later century?
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
"I'm worried that one of these things will blow away with my new house attached to it."
or...
"I'm worried one of these things will drop a skyscraper on my house."
"What would happen if I poked it with a pin....?"
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suwain_2
When i read a popular science article over a year ago pertaining to this subject, i laughed. Now, i see that many of the predictions that were made are coming true... :-)... and if the engines die, it doesnt crash, and can be controlled slowly down to the ground, or it can wait for help.
Airships are simply safer and more economical... I dont think that anyone would think of using hydrogen anymore
They're more economical because they dont need engines to support them, and the helium (or whatever) can be reused.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The centennial for POWERED flight, perhaps, but airships (or at least their ancestors) were around long before the Wright brothers got off the ground. Sometimes corporate hype astonishes even me :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Compare that to the C-5 Galaxy, max wartime payload: 291,000 lbs (source: U.S. Air Force Online Encyclopedia). More than the biggest transport aircraft in the US! But easier to shoot down of course.
Man, I love these things. When I was a kid (well, a younger kid), I used to dream of piloting a giant airship. Come to think of it, I still do. There's something magical about a machine that moves through the air gracefully and silently, and looks as big as a mountain. Airplanes are cool, but they don't have that magical feel - it's very obvious that they are in the air through brute force, that the sky given the chance would hurl them to the ground. Airships just seem to belong among the clouds. Am I making any sense?
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