I saw a comment on HN about how airships would be better if scaled up, and we should build a 1km long Hydrogen lift airship with carbon fibre and kevlar.
Building houses en-masse, in factories with efficiencies of scale, has the problem that they have to fit on a truck trailer and be driven carefully down fixed-width roads and over and under bridges. Having all the labour commute to the building site every day and move all the parts there, that seems inefficient.
So make a house factory, making houses bigger and nicer than trailer homes, airlifting the houses from the factory to the site. Then the work on-site is foundation and preparation, and connecting things up. Googling the weight of a house shows "A 2,500-square-foot house with one floor weighs about 500,000 lbs. or 250 tons." which was roughly the lift capacity of the Hindenburg, and 5-10x more than a heavy lift helicopter.
Probably stupid, but fun. Something to do with $300Bn even if it's a money loser, just for how cool it would be. Better than buying Twitter.
I saw a comment on HN about how airships would be better if scaled up, and we should build a 1km long Hydrogen lift airship with carbon fibre and kevlar.
Airships got a bad reputation because of the Hindenburg. Besides a few airships, they basically havent been touched in 75 years. Materials science has greatly improved since then.
A modern take on an airship should be super effective. The thing is... they arent as fast as an airplane but boy can they ever lift. You could move heavy goods across continents for practically no cost.
Personally I think Toyota's bonehead move to get into hydrogen cars was just a mistake. They could produce hydrogen based airships with their tech and become a giant.
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I saw a comment on HN about how airships would be better if scaled up, and we should build a 1km long Hydrogen lift airship with carbon fibre and kevlar.
Building houses en-masse, in factories with efficiencies of scale, has the problem that they have to fit on a truck trailer and be driven carefully down fixed-width roads and over and under bridges. Having all the labour commute to the building site every day and move all the parts there, that seems inefficient.
So make a house factory, making houses bigger and nicer than trailer homes, airlifting the houses from the factory to the site. Then the work on-site is foundation and preparation, and connecting things up. Googling the weight of a house shows "A 2,500-square-foot house with one floor weighs about 500,000 lbs. or 250 tons." which was roughly the lift capacity of the Hindenburg, and 5-10x more than a heavy lift helicopter.
Probably stupid, but fun. Something to do with $300Bn even if it's a money loser, just for how cool it would be. Better than buying Twitter.
Airships got a bad reputation because of the Hindenburg. Besides a few airships, they basically havent been touched in 75 years. Materials science has greatly improved since then.
A modern take on an airship should be super effective. The thing is... they arent as fast as an airplane but boy can they ever lift. You could move heavy goods across continents for practically no cost.
Personally I think Toyota's bonehead move to get into hydrogen cars was just a mistake. They could produce hydrogen based airships with their tech and become a giant.