The downside to airships like these is the wind. Fighting against the wind to get to your destination sucks in a low powered craft, if not outright impossible depending on conditions and power output. Maintenance needs to be high since you’re flying and crashing into the ground or ocean can be lethal. And letting everyone just fly as they wish would be brutal. Think of how bad traffic and accidents are in the city now, and how they’re not as bad because everyone’s on the ground already. Add in 1000 feet and some dickhead texting on his phone and running into your airship, or a bad driver coming in and plowing into 4 or more parked airships. We can’t have nice things because we’re slaves to love and can’t bear to cull the stupid out of our population. Best you can hope for is a jetsons style electric flying chair with a windscreen. Until you can’t charge it of course.
The downside to airships like these is the wind. Fighting against the wind to get to your destination sucks in a low powered craft, if not outright impossible depending on conditions and power output
It’s also their (potential) upside! You could say the same thing about sailing ships, and for the same reasons.
Maintenance needs to be high since you’re flying and crashing into the ground or ocean can be lethal
They certainly need to be robust, no doubt about that. You are more “floating” than flying though. Maintenance should be far less than an average jet airliner.
And letting everyone just fly as they wish would be brutal
If you are afraid of people having freedom, then you are afraid of yourself :(
I agree that letting people drive as they wish has been brutal, but this is largely to do with the speed they travel and their construction. Neutrally buoyant craft can be a lot more like bumper cars, there is a lot more distance and freedom of motion to avoid and or recover/decelerate from a collision, and speeds will generally be much lesser.
We can’t have nice things because we’re slaves to love and can’t bear to cull the stupid out of our population
Stupidity is an aspect of humanity, not an archetype. It cannot be bred nor murdered out. We are slaves to loveless, callous, ignorant [evil] slavers - not love.
Until you can’t charge it of course.
I agree there is a lot of r&d to do, but that’s exciting! Solar power might be a good way to go, even something as simple as simple as changing the color of the craft skin to absorb or deflect sunlight affecting buoyancy to rise or fall (gently).
Getting stuck in the age of sail was a thing. Waiting on the wind while you’re stranded and your supplies dwindling flat out sucks and can spell death if you’re not well supplied or rescued. Sailboats are still a thing albeit not popular anymore due to their drawbacks. Unpowered transoceanic flights are more of a niche than a desire of the average Joe.
Lessening the maintenance of a flying craft is something I won’t budge on and neither will any regulating body. Breaking down on the side of the road is terrible in extreme weather condtions(too hot or too cold) but at least you’re not falling out of the sky. A breakdown on an airship may be a gentle decent or it may be uncontrolled and slam the airship into a crowded freeway or a park or a school. If you’re leaving the ground, your maintenance MUST be a high priority, it can’t be lessened. Too much at stake for innocent people who had nothing to do with someone else scrimping on needed repairs.
Honestly I would love absolute freedom for all with its corresponding responsibility. But we have bad drivers, illegal drivers, hit and runs, risk takers and speeders(guilty). The airways are already fairly busy as is, adding millions more craft can be a nightmare for logistics. Right now any flying craft had to file a flight plan. A pain in the ass general drivers don’t need to do. Private pilot licenses already exist and could be expanded to include air ships if they were to increase in popularity but under no circumstances could an unlicensed party fly their airship. I would LOVE flying cars and VTOL anywhere, but it doesn’t take more than a few seconds thought to see accidents and drawbacks associated with such a system.
As for the lower speed collisions being less of an issue, no sadly. It’s not the 1950’s with 5mph bumpers where it’s expected you’ll touch another vehicle. If your airship basket collides with my airships propeller, damage can be huge if not fatal for one or both crafts. You don’t see hot air balloons playing bumper cars for a reason. A casual bump to a high voltage power line can be instantly fatal. Bumping into a building could destroy your airship and everyone onboard could perish without much chance to escape safely.
I love flying. I wish I could do more of it. I’d own my own small plane if I had the means and the money to build my own landing strip on my ranch. But allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to have an airship and fly however they want is a recipe for disaster. When the world was younger and the sky was less busy im sure it would have been great for a time. But the world we live in doesn’t make it very easy to pull off now. The road has rules, the ocean has rules and the sky has rules. Once we reach the stars, there will still be shipping lanes and again more rules. I would much rather the rules be simple and fair to everybody but they haven’t put me in charge yet.
Getting stuck in the age of sail was a thing. Waiting on the wind while you’re stranded and your supplies dwindling flat out sucks and can spell death if you’re not well supplied or rescued. Sailboats are still a thing albeit not popular anymore due to their drawbacks. Unpowered transoceanic flights are more of a niche than a desire of the average Joe.
All true. Waiting on the wind with a craft that can rise or fall easily shouldn’t be nearly as problematic, but wind power is certainly slower and more unpredictable no matter how you slice it.
Lessening the maintenance of a flying craft is something I won’t budge on and neither will any regulating body
The “regulating bodies” are the ones that prevent such individual autonomy and access to the skies - it’s core to their purpose/existence. This isn’t about maintenance schedules, or adherence to them - and that wasn’t the reason or method the dream of the “average joe’s” access to the skies was crushed. In any case, the maintenance on a neutrally buoyant sailing vessel will unquestionably be much lesser on such vessels - though that is not to say less important! No one wants anybody falling out of the skies - especially not over our heads!
You don’t see hot air balloons playing bumper cars for a reason
No one is saying you should! The chances for such a thing are far lesser is all, and design can play a huge role in that (as it could in cars too if we didn’t live in a malthusian and industrialized nightmare)
I love flying. I wish I could do more of it. I’d own my own small plane if I had the means and the money to build my own landing strip on my ranch. But allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to have an airship and fly however they want is a recipe for disaster.
There would undoubtedly be growing pains, but i am not envisioning giving anyone jet engines. Such needed safety margins and techniques to achieve them will never exist with that attitude, and are the purpose of its popularization. Almost nothing would be as dangerous or suicidal as “ford’s nightmare” we are currently living anyway.
But the world we live in doesn’t make it very easy to pull off now. The road has rules, the ocean has rules and the sky has rules.
But not rules we would or did choose for ourselves. They are certainly to our detriment as result. There is a reason for such authoritarian militarization of the skies, and it is the same reason we can’t just humbly request the stolen airspace back. If we really want to take to the skies safely (and slower, in my view) it is on us to do it and do so with new techniques! Sitting around for our enemy to “do the right thing” and return what they stole is not a good or effective plan. Dirigibles don’t need runways and are vastly more “green”/efficient even when equipped with giant diesel engines.
Once we reach the stars
And what if i told you that such rhetoric was only ever scifi (fiction) pushed by mass media? Would you still be content to “wait for the enemy to return what they stole from us”? Even if such a place existed, does it sound like a good plan in that case?
We agree that wind power is unreliable and slow for a means of travel.
I can’t get on board with airships having lower maintenance. Instead of a ridged skin of light material held onto the frame with rivets, you have fabric sewn together, glued, with gas bladders inside. All requiring inspections, repair, disassembly and replacement, not to mention the need to maintain whatever engine you use for propulsion unless you’re a wind only craft in which case you are at the mercy of whatever way the wind sends you. Inclement weather can cause massive damage, large hail can cause punctures and loss of gas, and you have a lower operating ceiling than a pressurized craft. Can’t fly over the storm and get above the weather in an airship like you can a passenger jet.
First I’m the villain for not allowing any and all to fly unrestricted and now you won’t give us all jet engines? Where’s my freedom sir! While I jest, people should be free to choose, and that includes their means of propulsion of choice. You can have a 4 cylinder I’ll take my v8, you can have wind power I’ll take a turbo jet. Freedom!
I don’t believe we’re living in fords nightmare. I believe a lot of personal choices made for selfish and foolish reasons have led us down this path. A lot of people view their cars less as extensions of themselves and an important tool for mobility and freedom and more as a mobile chair with an engine. They happily give away control and power for a neat feature, more perceived safety, more complicated repair and maintenance that ends up being far more expensive. While I’m no Ford fan, the assembly line giving more people access to an automobile has been a good thing.
The rules were not all chosen by us, this is true. Many rules I deal with daily were forced into me and decided long before I was born. I understand a general “no killing others” rule, good for society, but speed limiting all of us when some clearly have better skill and machines to match isn’t fair it’s downright criminal. But if it’s so hard to even grab that slice of freedom back, grabbing the whole sky is about as out of reach as grabbing the moon from the top of a ladder.
Dirigibles don’t require as long of runways in ideal conditions but we need to plan for bad weather bad wind, their large size requires a lot of maneuvering room and you’ll need to keep spare gas handy in a safe storage to add additional gas to peoples airships. This requires an investment of infrastructure that seems to only cater to the rich.
“Green energy” is a selling point that may as well be snake oil energy at this point. Wind is unreliable, still uses petroleum in the generator, non recyclable fibreglass blades(can’t we use these slow breaking down hunks to reinforce roads? Cmon man!) and kill birds, bats and insects. Solar is a pipe dream with low efficiency to start with, lose efficiency as they are used, require expensive rare earth material to construct them, and generate nothing when covered in snow. Hydroelectric dams are somewhat green, if you just ignore the massive environmental disturbance, construction with specialized concrete and massive use of petroleum powered vehicles for its entire construction. And they can’t be put just anywhere they require a specific head height and pressure to operate. Geothermal is nice but like dams have to be selective of their placement and no free lunch. A small house installation sure, but a power plant from geothermal for a city requires a lot of maintenance and is only really viable where the crust is thin to start with.
We need to knock off the green energy idea and work on a new form of portable energy, and also work at miniaturized nuclear. I’d take an electric car/truck if it was self contained, nuclear and just needed the power source swapped out every 10-15 years with the power and range staying consistent during that period. Driving an overgrown cell phone battery recharged by coal power plants that loses range every time it goes through a charge cycle is the opposite of ideal.
To answer your “to the stars” question, IF it was only sci-fi made up rhetoric, like pretty much every religion, it would be a huge blow to our need to explore. I don’t think for an instant that space is “fake and gay”, amateur astronomy has been a thing far longer than either of us have been alive and we have lots of info of stars and planets and moons that you can look into without having to listen to a single lying government body. The idea that this planet is all we have access to is like saying this glass of water is all the ocean we get. Totally untrue and easy for any curious person to look into.
Waiting for the enemy to return what they stole from us is of course a shitty strategy but no one can talk about any action to reclaim what’s ours on these forums without being called a glowy shill. 1776 proved a small dedicated group can achieve greatness for many, but they’ve done wonders in replacing our warriors with Avocado toast soy drinking pussies.
The downside to airships like these is the wind. Fighting against the wind to get to your destination sucks in a low powered craft, if not outright impossible depending on conditions and power output. Maintenance needs to be high since you’re flying and crashing into the ground or ocean can be lethal. And letting everyone just fly as they wish would be brutal. Think of how bad traffic and accidents are in the city now, and how they’re not as bad because everyone’s on the ground already. Add in 1000 feet and some dickhead texting on his phone and running into your airship, or a bad driver coming in and plowing into 4 or more parked airships. We can’t have nice things because we’re slaves to love and can’t bear to cull the stupid out of our population. Best you can hope for is a jetsons style electric flying chair with a windscreen. Until you can’t charge it of course.
It’s also their (potential) upside! You could say the same thing about sailing ships, and for the same reasons.
They certainly need to be robust, no doubt about that. You are more “floating” than flying though. Maintenance should be far less than an average jet airliner.
If you are afraid of people having freedom, then you are afraid of yourself :(
I agree that letting people drive as they wish has been brutal, but this is largely to do with the speed they travel and their construction. Neutrally buoyant craft can be a lot more like bumper cars, there is a lot more distance and freedom of motion to avoid and or recover/decelerate from a collision, and speeds will generally be much lesser.
Stupidity is an aspect of humanity, not an archetype. It cannot be bred nor murdered out. We are slaves to loveless, callous, ignorant [evil] slavers - not love.
I agree there is a lot of r&d to do, but that’s exciting! Solar power might be a good way to go, even something as simple as simple as changing the color of the craft skin to absorb or deflect sunlight affecting buoyancy to rise or fall (gently).
Getting stuck in the age of sail was a thing. Waiting on the wind while you’re stranded and your supplies dwindling flat out sucks and can spell death if you’re not well supplied or rescued. Sailboats are still a thing albeit not popular anymore due to their drawbacks. Unpowered transoceanic flights are more of a niche than a desire of the average Joe.
Lessening the maintenance of a flying craft is something I won’t budge on and neither will any regulating body. Breaking down on the side of the road is terrible in extreme weather condtions(too hot or too cold) but at least you’re not falling out of the sky. A breakdown on an airship may be a gentle decent or it may be uncontrolled and slam the airship into a crowded freeway or a park or a school. If you’re leaving the ground, your maintenance MUST be a high priority, it can’t be lessened. Too much at stake for innocent people who had nothing to do with someone else scrimping on needed repairs.
Honestly I would love absolute freedom for all with its corresponding responsibility. But we have bad drivers, illegal drivers, hit and runs, risk takers and speeders(guilty). The airways are already fairly busy as is, adding millions more craft can be a nightmare for logistics. Right now any flying craft had to file a flight plan. A pain in the ass general drivers don’t need to do. Private pilot licenses already exist and could be expanded to include air ships if they were to increase in popularity but under no circumstances could an unlicensed party fly their airship. I would LOVE flying cars and VTOL anywhere, but it doesn’t take more than a few seconds thought to see accidents and drawbacks associated with such a system.
As for the lower speed collisions being less of an issue, no sadly. It’s not the 1950’s with 5mph bumpers where it’s expected you’ll touch another vehicle. If your airship basket collides with my airships propeller, damage can be huge if not fatal for one or both crafts. You don’t see hot air balloons playing bumper cars for a reason. A casual bump to a high voltage power line can be instantly fatal. Bumping into a building could destroy your airship and everyone onboard could perish without much chance to escape safely.
I love flying. I wish I could do more of it. I’d own my own small plane if I had the means and the money to build my own landing strip on my ranch. But allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to have an airship and fly however they want is a recipe for disaster. When the world was younger and the sky was less busy im sure it would have been great for a time. But the world we live in doesn’t make it very easy to pull off now. The road has rules, the ocean has rules and the sky has rules. Once we reach the stars, there will still be shipping lanes and again more rules. I would much rather the rules be simple and fair to everybody but they haven’t put me in charge yet.
All true. Waiting on the wind with a craft that can rise or fall easily shouldn’t be nearly as problematic, but wind power is certainly slower and more unpredictable no matter how you slice it.
The “regulating bodies” are the ones that prevent such individual autonomy and access to the skies - it’s core to their purpose/existence. This isn’t about maintenance schedules, or adherence to them - and that wasn’t the reason or method the dream of the “average joe’s” access to the skies was crushed. In any case, the maintenance on a neutrally buoyant sailing vessel will unquestionably be much lesser on such vessels - though that is not to say less important! No one wants anybody falling out of the skies - especially not over our heads!
No one is saying you should! The chances for such a thing are far lesser is all, and design can play a huge role in that (as it could in cars too if we didn’t live in a malthusian and industrialized nightmare)
There would undoubtedly be growing pains, but i am not envisioning giving anyone jet engines. Such needed safety margins and techniques to achieve them will never exist with that attitude, and are the purpose of its popularization. Almost nothing would be as dangerous or suicidal as “ford’s nightmare” we are currently living anyway.
But not rules we would or did choose for ourselves. They are certainly to our detriment as result. There is a reason for such authoritarian militarization of the skies, and it is the same reason we can’t just humbly request the stolen airspace back. If we really want to take to the skies safely (and slower, in my view) it is on us to do it and do so with new techniques! Sitting around for our enemy to “do the right thing” and return what they stole is not a good or effective plan. Dirigibles don’t need runways and are vastly more “green”/efficient even when equipped with giant diesel engines.
And what if i told you that such rhetoric was only ever scifi (fiction) pushed by mass media? Would you still be content to “wait for the enemy to return what they stole from us”? Even if such a place existed, does it sound like a good plan in that case?
We agree that wind power is unreliable and slow for a means of travel.
I can’t get on board with airships having lower maintenance. Instead of a ridged skin of light material held onto the frame with rivets, you have fabric sewn together, glued, with gas bladders inside. All requiring inspections, repair, disassembly and replacement, not to mention the need to maintain whatever engine you use for propulsion unless you’re a wind only craft in which case you are at the mercy of whatever way the wind sends you. Inclement weather can cause massive damage, large hail can cause punctures and loss of gas, and you have a lower operating ceiling than a pressurized craft. Can’t fly over the storm and get above the weather in an airship like you can a passenger jet.
First I’m the villain for not allowing any and all to fly unrestricted and now you won’t give us all jet engines? Where’s my freedom sir! While I jest, people should be free to choose, and that includes their means of propulsion of choice. You can have a 4 cylinder I’ll take my v8, you can have wind power I’ll take a turbo jet. Freedom!
I don’t believe we’re living in fords nightmare. I believe a lot of personal choices made for selfish and foolish reasons have led us down this path. A lot of people view their cars less as extensions of themselves and an important tool for mobility and freedom and more as a mobile chair with an engine. They happily give away control and power for a neat feature, more perceived safety, more complicated repair and maintenance that ends up being far more expensive. While I’m no Ford fan, the assembly line giving more people access to an automobile has been a good thing.
The rules were not all chosen by us, this is true. Many rules I deal with daily were forced into me and decided long before I was born. I understand a general “no killing others” rule, good for society, but speed limiting all of us when some clearly have better skill and machines to match isn’t fair it’s downright criminal. But if it’s so hard to even grab that slice of freedom back, grabbing the whole sky is about as out of reach as grabbing the moon from the top of a ladder.
Dirigibles don’t require as long of runways in ideal conditions but we need to plan for bad weather bad wind, their large size requires a lot of maneuvering room and you’ll need to keep spare gas handy in a safe storage to add additional gas to peoples airships. This requires an investment of infrastructure that seems to only cater to the rich.
“Green energy” is a selling point that may as well be snake oil energy at this point. Wind is unreliable, still uses petroleum in the generator, non recyclable fibreglass blades(can’t we use these slow breaking down hunks to reinforce roads? Cmon man!) and kill birds, bats and insects. Solar is a pipe dream with low efficiency to start with, lose efficiency as they are used, require expensive rare earth material to construct them, and generate nothing when covered in snow. Hydroelectric dams are somewhat green, if you just ignore the massive environmental disturbance, construction with specialized concrete and massive use of petroleum powered vehicles for its entire construction. And they can’t be put just anywhere they require a specific head height and pressure to operate. Geothermal is nice but like dams have to be selective of their placement and no free lunch. A small house installation sure, but a power plant from geothermal for a city requires a lot of maintenance and is only really viable where the crust is thin to start with.
We need to knock off the green energy idea and work on a new form of portable energy, and also work at miniaturized nuclear. I’d take an electric car/truck if it was self contained, nuclear and just needed the power source swapped out every 10-15 years with the power and range staying consistent during that period. Driving an overgrown cell phone battery recharged by coal power plants that loses range every time it goes through a charge cycle is the opposite of ideal.
To answer your “to the stars” question, IF it was only sci-fi made up rhetoric, like pretty much every religion, it would be a huge blow to our need to explore. I don’t think for an instant that space is “fake and gay”, amateur astronomy has been a thing far longer than either of us have been alive and we have lots of info of stars and planets and moons that you can look into without having to listen to a single lying government body. The idea that this planet is all we have access to is like saying this glass of water is all the ocean we get. Totally untrue and easy for any curious person to look into.
Waiting for the enemy to return what they stole from us is of course a shitty strategy but no one can talk about any action to reclaim what’s ours on these forums without being called a glowy shill. 1776 proved a small dedicated group can achieve greatness for many, but they’ve done wonders in replacing our warriors with Avocado toast soy drinking pussies.