[Toutouxc]

I'm not sure I understand your point, are you saying that airships don't work? Because the Hindenburg was able to take 100+ people across the Atlantic (86 years ago!), that's much more than the maybe 10-person "luxury RV" that the OP was suggesting. Today's Zeppelin NT semi-rigid airships are reasonably small and can carry 10+ passengers on shorter flights.

Yes, airships are expensive, inconvenient and slow, they leak helium and they require huge hangars and mooring masts, but that's far cry from "can't work".

[masklinn]

> Yes, airships are expensive, inconvenient and slow, they leak helium and they require huge hangars and mooring masts, but that's far cry from "can't work".

"Can't work" is a pretty good effective compression of "work on the barest of technicality while being more expensive, slower, less flexible, and less reliable than pretty much all alternatives".

Also the Hindenburg was absolutely not able to take 100+ people across the atlantic, half of that was crew which you don't usually consider "taken over" as they have to fly back. So Hindenburg took 3 days to carry 72 passengers across the atlantic, needing 40 crew to do so, at a ticket price of $7460 (one way, in modern USD).

By comparison, bloody Concorde transported up to 128, with a crew of 3, in 3.5 hours, at lower prices.

[doikor]

> By comparison, bloody Concorde transported up to 128, with a crew of 3, in 3.5 hours, at lower prices.

Pretty sure the crew of Hindenburg included a whole bunch of waiters, cooks, etc. just like the Concorde had flight attendants on top of its flight crew of 3. Hindenburg was basically a small cruise ship in the air.

https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/ has some nice drawings/photos about the interior.

Basically traveling on it was more like a nice sleeper train with cabins and a good restaurant than a modern airplane.

[cycomanic]

What sort of comparison is that the concorde was flying from 1976, the Hindenburg disaster was in 1937. You say can't work is a good compression of not economically feasible and you come to the economically feasible by comparing 1937 tech/economics with 1976 one?

For comparison a commercial plane service didn't even exist for airfoil planes in 1937. So by your argument it was impossible to fly across the Atlantic (it wasn't actually, people had done it but your argument is uneconomical=impossible) , but nowhere close to bringing 100 passengers across.

[maxwell86]

> Because the Hindenburg was able to take 100+ people across the Atlantic (86 years ago!), that's much more than the maybe 10-person "luxury RV" that the OP was suggesting. Today's Zeppelin NT semi-rigid airships are reasonably small and can carry 10+ passengers on shorter flights.

You can also build a car with square wheels and cross north america in one.

> I'm not sure I understand your point, are you saying that airships don't work?

No, I'm saying that companies that try to sell airships don't work.

These companies are good at raising money, because the idea they sell is simple to explain, and many people don't do due diligence.

But in the same way that a car with square wheels is a worse solution to the problem, along pretty much any axis of comparison, than any of the alternatives available in the market, so are airships. With the difference that airships are also way more expensive than the solutions that are already in use.

This is why companies that build and try to sell them, default in 3-5 years after having raised the money.

---

The only types of airship that "works" are balloons able to cary 2-5 people. The weight is small, so the balloon surface is also small against the wind, the components required to drive them are simple and easy because the balloon is "small", and their use is purely occasional and recreational (or a tourist attraction where you can charge a bonus), so cost isn't a "huge" issue. People pay for the "fun", not to go from A to B.

[phreeza]

Why is it that small craft work but large craft don't, when two of the main problems you mention (leakage and wind shear attack surface) scale favourably with increased volume? Both should scale as 1/r per transported mass if my math is correct?

[maxwell86]

> Why is it that small craft work but large craft don't,

Because the goal of small craft is to go with the flow wherever the wind brings you, because that's fun.

The goal of commercial crafts is to go or transport stuff from A to B, independently of wind, and they are really bad at that.

[phreeza]

So you're saying a luxury air yacht could work after all?

[maxwell86]

No, because people buying a luxury air yacht care about going from A to B.

If your claim is that there is a market for luxury air yachts that are extremely expensive to maintain, require a huge crew 10x larger than a yacht, are 10x "smaller" than a yacht, and can't remain stationary somewhere nor from A to B, but instead only can go "wherever the wind goes", then I don't believe you.

Feel free to prove me wrong. But the amount of yachts in Montecarlo during the F1 grand prix suggests that a significant market of the luxury yacht market does care very much about going from A to B, and about being able to remain stationary in their yacht somewhere.

So not being able to go from A to B and having to put your "yacht" inside a crappy hangar without views to be able to stay at one particular place pretty much kill the idea.

[phreeza]

OK fair enough, I was thinking more about the operations within a day, when the travel style of a Goodyear blimp would be sufficient. But you are right that long distance point-to-point travel would likely be a requirement for the longer timescales.

FWIW I'd be really interested in a writeup of your actual napkin math that convinces you of the infeasibility so strongly.