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by CraigJPerry 1612 days ago
That's an area i'd be quietly hopeful in. Assuming propulsion motors are available which are both:

  a) powerful enough to defend against wind acting against such a huge object
  b) responsive enough to change their thrust vector (power & direction) such
     that the associated PID loop can operate within some reasonable set point
     boundary
Then there are already open source hardware and software solutions available for this - i'm not proposing someone slaps a pixhawk 4 on a huge airship and gets a few mates over to help tune the PIDs in Ardupilot - i mean that the know-how is there. Translating that into a product that would be suitable for controlling such an aircraft would be do-able. Certification costs and expensive hardware suitable to run it all on are a different matter.

I guess this is a long way to say i don't think it'd be easy or cheap, but i don't think they'd have to make a break through innovation to make it possible.

1 comments

I think this is fundamentally impossible, win loads are powerfull enough to ouright warp and destroy giant ground based cranes like they were tissue paper if the operator makes a mistake, like lifting oart of a stadium roof in high wind. there are scary videos all over youtube. Those things and made of hige steel girders.

This is going to be a light, fragile airframe with much bigger 'sail' in the form of the airship - its the size of a stadium.

Nothing short of a rocket engine will be able to keep it in place.

The skin of a Boeing 747 is about 2mm thick. We’ve been hurling them at 600mph through storms for half a century at this point.

I don’t know for sure but i suspect the airframe of this concept is within reach of current tech.

The passenger planes have a tendency to break in half mid air if they are subject to sudden stress, turns, etc, like TU 144 did at a paris airshow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=57&v=iEsLQd_yY0s...