Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "Should Airships Make A Comeback?" video.
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For helium this partly works, but you still have the significant problem that you would need to have these helium facilities at places to land, which is in direct opposition to the whole benefit of airships that you don't need extensive infrastructure at the place you are landing. It's simply way easier to just balast the ship. For hydrogen, building fuel cells that can turn these very high amounts of hydrogen into electricity in a feasable amount of time, is basically equivalent to building a powerplant on board. And that obviously defeats the purpose of the airship as well, in addition to somehow needing to store that energy or connect it to the powergrid, which again uses a lot of infrastructure (you can't just connect these amounts of energy to the grid directly, you'd need a powerstation to do that or the grid will overload and basically fry your computer at home if you happen to live close to offloading). Hydrogen is also quite inefficient to make electrically, so you'd also waste a ton of energy turning electricity into hydrogen and back again all the time. At that point you might as well just use a plane. And that's not even talking about the safety concern mentioned in the video with constantly on and offloading hydrogen in an airship.
So yeah if you think about it shortly it might make sense, but if you think about it a bit longer, you'd soon realise that just adding balast is a far easier way to deal with the problem.
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@Watcher3223 Yes, problem is still that that is quite heavy to build on the ship, which you have to transport everywhere. So your He compression tank, which has to be pretty big, since you're not just blowing up a few helium balloons, is gonna be pretty heavy if you want a decent pressure to build up. Every kg of compression tank is one that you can't use for cargo. It also costs a ton of electricity to compress that He every trip, and the whole point of an airship is to be far more energy efficient than a plane (along the other things mentioned, but it's still pretty imporant to not cost a ton of electricity every trip). And that still doesn't solve helium leaking. He is super small, so it needs to be significantly better closed off than just normal airtight to actually stop He from leaking into the atmosphere, so you probably still need to regularly refill the airship. I think it's still way cheaper to just balast the ship by transporting something like a load of water (unless you're transporting to a desert, water is basically free and wildly available anyway in amounts that matter for this usecase, and if it isn't you can always use some other common practically free material, like sand or rocks). And that's only if you assume the ship regularly empties without being refilled. But honestly every km travelled without cargo is pretty bad economically anyway. Trucks, ships and trains always try to fill up with new stuff at their destination or at least close to it. Sometimes it's inevitable, but preferably you'd load up every time you unload. I just don't really see how the balast issue is actually an issue, it's quite easy to deal with. Just transport anything that has weight, that shouldn't be too hard to do in 99% of usecases. Even in cases like disaster relief, where you probably don't leave the disaster site with useful tradegoods, you can probably still bring back rocks or sea water or something other extremely common. Or a bunch of people even, if the disaster calls for evacuation (although that's probably not enough, people are very light compared to the space they require, assuming humane conditions).
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@headphoneguy9086 how would that work? Air is very light, so to get any reasonable amount of ballast for the ship, you'd need either a huge part of the space of the ship, or some absolutely insane pressures. Both would be a bad idea. If it is big there's very little space left to actually generate lift, so the cargo capacity goes down massively, really high pressures is difficult and extremely energy expensive to achieve (if it is 1/20 of the volume, which is still a huge volume, you'd need close to 200 atmosphere of pressure to ballast the ship, which is practically unfeasable, and even if it is, would be so energy intensive, that you would have been much better off just using a plane or even a helicopter). Also it would cost a lot of electricity. It just seems way easier to just put some rocks on the ship. These all sound like incredibly difficult and energy expensive solutions for a very simple problem.
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