this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Looks like this one's not as practical as I would like - airships aren't a great fit for this kind of shipping. Too bad. I'm very pleased with both the mooring mast design and the chance to push some views of solarpunk that aren't verdant summertime scenes. I try to research the postcards pretty well but read up on the wrong stuff this time - looked in to silos and grain and how they'd fit a solarpunk society, on screw elevators and their limitations, but didn't think to look at the cargo capacity for airships beyond the fact that some can haul some pretty big stuff
Maybe not for transporting the grain, but I could imagine them being very useful to transport the large machines for harvesting grain as they tend to be quite slow and road access will probably be not as good when most transport is done by means other than cars.
What is the cargo capacity of your average airship?
I'm not sure if there are enough out there for a good average - I think a lot of the existing ones are fairly small blimps used for advertising. But the cargo airship prototype I used for the photobash (Flying Whales's proposed LCA60T) touts a 96-meter long, 8-meter high and 7-meter wide cargo hold (or 60-tonne payload). Which seemed like a lot, to me, a person who would find a 60 tonnes of grain to be an unreasonable amount. But at the scale our society moves grain, It's probably not the best vehicle for the job.
I also thought 60 tonnes sounded like a lot, and I suppose it is for an airship. Your sentence about grain movement made me wonder about cargo ship capacities, and it's crazy. The little ones can hold a total of 28,000 tonnes and the big ones 400,000 tons. Railcars can hold over 100 tons each, while trucks about 50 tons of grain.
With those numbers in mind, maybe your airship illustration isn't off the mark. They could replace the trucks that transport grain to the mill/rail station.
That's a really good point! I'm glad
It is conceivable that unlike boats, autonomous airships may not need to be super big - they scale linearly. So a continuous swarm of small, lighter than air evacuated diamond foam devices could come, pick up stuff, and depart for local targets or far away targets via the jet stream. That also removes the need for the tower - they could pick stuff up right from the harvester.
Or, combined with the other idea to move the harvester; grain pirates! The small airship swoops down at night and picks up a some strip worth of grain, and is gone in the morning.
Tractor Jack takes to the skies! I love it.