[HN Gopher] Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with car... ___________________________________________________________________ Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships Author : prostoalex Score : 35 points Date : 2021-08-27 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com) (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com) | joshuaheard wrote: | I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of | another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this | sort of transportation need. | bee_rider wrote: | Apparently they are getting ~70% of their lift from the buoyancy | and ~30% from their propeller. | | In the video included in the article, they show their prototype | flying. It is surprisingly lively for a blimp (I guess owing to | the fact that it gets/needs lift from the propeller), darting | around in an almost fish-like fashion. I dunno, still skeptical | but the video does make it seem much more plausible, at least. | hellbannedguy wrote: | This has been on here a few days ago. | | I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the | payload. I belive it's 675 lbs. | | That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I | have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, | and bring it home in one piece.) | | It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of | material though, but not near power lines. | drewrv wrote: | I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since | their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, | it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the | airship and maintenance. | | Put differently, if they're cheap enough you could just buy 100 | and ship 67,500 lbs a day. | elihu wrote: | The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're | moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can | presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near | power lines. | | 675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery | that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially | in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving | places that are currently served by planes and helicopters, | like remote locations in Alaska. | joefigura wrote: | Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a | truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle | mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less- | than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly | inefficient, particularly in low density areas. | abakker wrote: | Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each | of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have | a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with | wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust? | thrill wrote: | Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today. | Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light | weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not | usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to | be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there | may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for | example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the | destination. | | There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little | familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their | target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on | minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape. | | This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time | for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than | a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long | skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. | Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read | through it. | petermcneeley wrote: | The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant | wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against | the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow. | | Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag | factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about | the motors they are using (energy -> drag work). | | Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag | is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something | like 300km/h. | | TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse | joefigura wrote: | One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75 | mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph | number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range | in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than | enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days | the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are | grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant | EMM_386 wrote: | They responded to my question about this here: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849 | MichaelGroves wrote: | Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern | weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid | storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did. | | Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium | instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest | airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS | Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 | aboard. | jen20 wrote: | This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded | wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the | leap" however! | glitchcrab wrote: | Yeah I had the same confusion when the Launch thread was | posted. Choosing company names is hard. | joefigura wrote: | The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We | often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more | if it's a recurring point of confusion. | frakkingcylons wrote: | Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting | discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515 | joefigura wrote: | Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > Buoyant has built and flown four prototype airships. The most | recent sub-scale ship that went to air is 20 feet long, with | airspeeds of up to 35 miles per hour and a payload capacity of 10 | pounds, but the ultimate aim is to build an airship that's | capable of delivering up to 650 pounds of cargo at a cruise speed | of around 60 miles per hour. | | For depot to depot delivery, how does that compare with an 18 | wheeler truck with 30,000 lbs carrying capacity going down the | road at 60 miles per hour? | not-my-account wrote: | How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or | rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order | to be profitable? | | The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", | yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be | interested to hear how this is all being taken into account. | | [1] | https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... | [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 | ummonk wrote: | We aren't running out of helium in the short-medium term but | it's still definitely a limited resource and there is a | legitimate concern about losing access to terrestrial helium | once we've extracted all we can. Unlike fossil fuels, helium | isn't something we can synthesize from elements that are | abundant on Earth. | elihu wrote: | In their Q&A thread the other day I believe they said that | helium price isn't likely to impact them all that much in the | short term. Maybe they'll use hydrogen at some point in the | future, but it seems like they don't think it's necessary for | their business model to work, given the relatively small size | of their airships. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-27 23:00 UTC)