[davidhyde]

I'm calling bullshit on this. Slick marketing driven website, low resolution photos of actual prototypes, hand-wavy FAQ and no other technical details. They claim speeds of 40 knots but does that mean that can stay stationary in 40 knot winds (the same as traveling at 40 knots) or that it can hitch a ride on high winds? The wind forces on the balloon look they would be far too high for those tiny fans to counteract even with its flying saucer shape. And solar panels to power them? Come on!

250 tonnes is A LOT to lift. Look how big a hot air balloon needs to be to lift a few passengers in a basket. Sure helium has more lifting power but it doesn't create miracles. That means the balloon would have to be absolutely massive. Far bigger than the CGI renders they show on their site. Helium is very expensive and a lot of it will leak out of a balloon like that even if you can reclaim the bulk of it back at the storage site.

I'd like to be proven wrong because the idea seems wonderful but the only thing they may be successful at doing is lifting some money from the hands of some gullible investors.

[masklinn]

> 250 tonnes is A LOT to lift. Look how big a hot air balloon needs to be to lift a few passengers in a basket. Sure helium has more lifting power but it doesn't create miracles. That means the balloon would have to be absolutely massive.

Agreed, per my calculations it'll need to be around 120m wide, and 30 deep (lifeisstillgood comes up with slightly smaller numbers of 100 x 25, possibly because they used 1.1kg / m3 where I used 1 for the lifting power of helium). That's more or less a baseball field.

And it's just for the naked payload, you still need to account for the envelope itself, the solar panels, the cabin, the engines, the batteries, and the fuel (as, per site, it has a biofuel backup). That probably adds a dozen tonnes at least (the solar panels alone would be 5-10 depending how much of the top's surface is covered). By the end you're probably looking at a men's cricket field, one on the large size.

[dogma1138]

Indeed, the Hindenburg could lift over 200tons however it’s useful lift (lifting capacity minus its own weight and structural limitations) was only about 10 tons…

Even if we ignore the lifting gas requirements just the structural requirements to be able to tie 250tons to the lifting body make this pretty much impossible.

This makes solar roadways and the air condenser solar water bottles seem viable.

For comparison the Airlander and P-791 only lift about 10-20 tons…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_P-791

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlande...

[masklinn]

> Indeed, the Hindenburg could lift over 200tons however it’s useful lift (lifting capacity minus its own weight and structural limitations) was only about 10 tons…

TBF it was 10t cargo on top of crew (40), passengers (50), and luggage. So probably closer to 15~20 useful lift.

[bambax]

Yes. Also, I was unable to find any information about the gas itself. The word "helium" isn't found on the website, they only mention "LTA"... Using helium could probably not be called green or sustainable, as it's not a renewable resource on earth, AFAIK.

[ZeroGravitas]

I thought the website was more engineery than slick, but more specifically, the up to 250 tonnes appears to mean, we can envision building one of a sufficient size to deal with that. They have mockups of a 2, 25 and 250 tonnes, and the scale of the big one does seem very large:

https://www.skylifter.eu/air-crane/

So is this reaction just getting caught up on combining images of the small model, with the load capacity of the (theoretical) biggest model? There's lots of things, like cranes, that have a fairly standard size and a few mega sized examples used for very specific tasks.

[kumarvvr]

My thoughts could not have been captured better than this.

This whole thing, like that flying wind-turbine thing or the solar road thing, is just bordering on plausible but so far away from feasible that one has to doubt the whole effort.

Its hard to imagine, in todays world of information at our fingertips that anyone could fool or misguide someone else, but as the current state of the world is, not only is a con job possible, but its getting easier and more profitable. The trick seems to be to be to make an idea, as I said above, bordering on the plausible but far away from feasible.

[jokoon]

Yeah 250 tonnes is a lot.

Not sure if there is an alternative to helium or hydrogen, like maybe a void container, but it would still be heavy.

I guess they will suffer from bad press if they can't prove this can work. Easy to lie to investors but unless they have a prototype, I'm still very skeptical.

[lazyjones]

> 250 tonnes is A LOT to lift. Look how big a hot air balloon needs to be to lift a few passengers in a basket.

Does it scale? Can you strap 10 of those things together (perhaps using some sort of scaffolding) to lift 10x the weight?

[masklinn]

In the sense that lift is linear by volume yes, but the driving complexity I expect would increase superlinearly.

If you're strapping 10 things together, you're now dealing with a much less rigid structure, the straps/scaffolding are significant points of failure, and the attachment points don't scale the same way so you have to add an even more complex (and tangle-able) web of cabling for your payload.

[Toutouxc]

Yes, individual cells filled with lifting gas scale nicely (after all that's how rigid airships are made), but the main issue here is "big", not the actual arrangement or architecture. You need BIG to be able to lift HEAVY.

[aggrrrh]

I wonder if it would work in Venus atmosphere?

[Toutouxc]

Operating a blimp on Venus would be a bit tougher than on Earth, partly because the density of Venus atmosphere is only 95 % of our air (less lift per lifting gas volume), and also because of the incredibly violent 100 m/s winds, 93 bar pressure and a temperature of 470 °C.