xkcd #3298: Aerospace Flowchart
xkcd #3298: Aerospace Flowchart
Title text:
Someday, we will find the problem that goes with this solution.
Transcript:
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Source: https://xkcd.com/3298/
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21 replies
What about huge underwater submersibles ?Won't someone think of the captains obsessed with the cleanliness of sheets?
China: "Hold my blimp."
I noticed the lack of a 'Yes' flow.
Last month I went on a Zeppelin ride, there are some tasks that airships do well. Tourism tours, long term temporary monitoring, some specific geo surveys and advertising.
I feel like you're ignoring how cool massive airships are
Can confirm, I went on a Zeppelin flight earlier this summer, can absolutely confirm that it was damn cool.
Could we put an airship in Venus's atmosphere? It seems like it'd be more useful than sending something to the surface, but I know nothing about the engineering involved.
I studied aerospace engineering. Can confirm
We should do it anyway, just to be sure.
These are good priorities. We fumbled her so badly
But what if the problem is that you want to be able to hover in one place and lift stuff without having to continuously spend energy on enough thrust to push that weight upwards?
Slap a camera and a bunch of batteries on a balloon and you can easily map large areas without recharging. Great for photogrammetry. You can also carry other instruments onboard.
Lifting stuff with an airship is surprisingly terrible.
Why?
Our old arch nemesis, physics....
The problem is not that you can't build an airship that can lift say ten tons of cargo.
The problem is what you do when you remove the cargo from the airship.
Without the cargo, the airship will be ten tons light, you would need to make sure you could hold it down against a lifting power of ten tons.
Ok, so let's just fill it with water on the return journey, easy!
How would you do that in sync with removing cargo, the cargo which probably is a cargo container, and is just disconnected, you can't just suddenly move ten tonnes of water onboard the airship, it takes time to fill up.
Ok so you get another container with a dummy load to enable a simple connect disconnect at the loading dock, fine that would work, apart from what you would do when the next load arrives, do you just manufacture dummy loads and take them back to the start, how do these get back to the other side where they are needed, and why don't we use the same method to move the initial cargo?
If you just have a tank for the water, you could just fill it before unloading.
Then you would need a heavier structure to be able to support twenty tons in total, ten tons need to be supported by the landing gear.
This makes things heavier.
Also, where do you get ten tons of water from, where you at the same time can't drive a truck?
Vacuum the lifting gas out of the giant balloon into some storage tanks to compress it and use some smaller balloons as a tiny giant airship to transport the apparatus back?
You need the lifting gas to fill out the envelope and maintain structural integrity, a floppy envelope isn't amazing at control
As I always say: Physics knows no favours and no bosses.
Boss wants me to do something that physic doesn't allow? I laugh at him for his hybris. No, won't work, because... See first line of this comment.
how hard would it be to have a big anchor that offsets the weight of a couple cargo containers while it fills a ballast with water?
A winch and cable, a balloon and a comfy basket, enough wine for a weekend. - Sales pitch for my floating AirBnB.
sadly there is no yes line in first triangle of flowchart.