[Wytwwww]

Even if they solve most of the technical issues could this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under what circumstances?

It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..

> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm

Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)

[usrusr]

Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.

[Wytwwww]

> market segment

So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?

[brohee]

Big transformers are now limited to boat transportation, and it's a constraint on grid design. I assume this is also the case for other industries that become river bound but wouldn't necessarily be so if not for equipment transportation. So this could be a game changer (more so I think than this faster than boat slower than plane thing).

[usrusr]

Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained by land transport.