[krisoft]

I think comparing it to a plane is misplaced. They call it a crane. Presumably the load and the craft arrives on a truck and you use it to hoist the load up the last few maybe hundreds of meter max. Do i read that wrong?

Edit: yes! I was reading that wrong. To quote the relevant part: “SkyLifters fly from job to job, so they can do work in locations that would be challenging for land cranes.”

[masklinn]

> Presumably the load and the craft arrives on a truck

Nah they're absolutely gigantic and usually semi-rigid (especially if you have solar panels on top).

SkyLifter seems very cagey about the purported crane's dimensions (couldn't find anything on the subject), but the Airlander 10 (which I understand only lifts 14t) is 90 x 43 x 26... meters.

IIRC the rule of thumb is that you need 1m3 of helium to lift 1kg, to lift just a 250t payload you thus need 250000m3 of helium.

According to skylifter's "design" page the lenticular envelope has a height of 1/4th the diameter (3 units wide, 0.75 units deep). For a cylinder that's 108m wide and 27m high, so taking in account the lenticular shape we might be closer to 120m/30m (400ft wide by 100ft high). That's the size of a baseball field, and 14 stories high.

And that's only taking the payload in account, not the solar panels, not the cabin, not the engines, ...

[Already__Taken]

If you rent a crane though you're also paying for the crew to drive the thing to you. This really has a chance of just auto-piloting over to the job to be then be run by an operator.

[masklinn]

You'll definitely be renting the crew. The skylifter website specifically mentions the one crew. And per my calculations the thing is the size of a cricket or baseball field, there is no way it'll be flying itself.