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The world’s largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley::As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes
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Look at all the advertising space on the side of that baby.
Enjoy the good life on the Offworld Colonies!
Veritasium made a video recently about the pros and cons of airship feasibility. It’s quite interesting.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
The airship — its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway — has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.
This morning, the airship floated silently from its WW2-era hangar at NASA’s Moffett Field at walking pace, steered by ropes held by dozens of the company’s engineers, technicians and ground crew.
The first lesson its engineers hope to learn is how Pathfinder 1’s approximately one million cubic feet of helium and weather resistant polymer skin will respond to the warming effect of Californian sunshine.
At the start of September, the FAA issued a special airworthiness certificate for the Pathfinder 1 allowing test flights in and around Moffett Field and the nearby Palo Alto airport, and over the southern part of the San Francisco Bay.
That will involve a long, slow slog to validate the new technologies and to demonstrate, to the FAA and paying customers, that a new generation of super-large airships can match the generally excellent safety and reliability record of today’s commercial jets.
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Lemmy doesn’t have a BlimpKink community, yet :(
Pretty excited about this project.
I’d be really excited for a vacuum ship
The crew capacity seems to be limited for its size. Compared with airships from a century ago. No smoking salon :-) etc. Maybe its the helium instead of hydrogen?.
The Hindenburg had 50 sleeping cabins.
They need to use this as their commercial: https://youtu.be/8_xaSom3Lro
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That’s a lot of helium. WILL NOONE THINK OF TEH CHILDRENSES?!?!?
Think of all those party balloons not sent up into the air to choke turtles out to sea!!!
Think of all the funny squeaky voices not done by daddies to amuse their offspring and they end up passing out from oxygen deprivation!!!
What a waste to put it in this dumb thing that’s gonna blow up anyway killing loads of peepos.
Not as large as the Cargolifter, which has only been built as 1:8 model for testing, but still impressing.
Ok? You can’t really call it the largest airship when it was never built.
I propose a new airship design called Cargohauler, it’s basically a Cargolifter but scaled up 2x. Your puny Cargolifter is nothing in comparison to my Cargohauler
This just in, I am proposing a new design called the JumboPumper. It is like your puny Cargohauler, but 4x as large!
I just stated that there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money. I am impressed that Pathfinder 1 was actually built.
One-upping is aggressive. The better way to say it would be: “there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money”.
OK. I didn’t intend to sound aggressive.
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I don’t think that the Imperial Star Destroyer qualifies as air ship.
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I just stated that there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money. I am impressed that Pathfinder 1 was actually built.
