People think mainly of the Hindenberg when you mention airships, but there were a lot of other ones that met tragic ends. The US Navy’s Akron and Macon both crashed due to storms, the former with the loss of all but three sailors.
I think the troposphere is just too turbulent for big fragile bubbles like this to work. Maybe if we had blimps like Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age - where they are made of diamond and use vacuum for lift - they could be strong and small enough to work. But the idea of using something like this to deploy wind turbines is just asking for trouble.
People think mainly of the Hindenberg when you mention airships, but there were a lot of other ones that met tragic ends. The US Navy’s Akron and Macon both crashed due to storms, the former with the loss of all but three sailors.
I think the troposphere is just too turbulent for big fragile bubbles like this to work. Maybe if we had blimps like Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age - where they are made of diamond and use vacuum for lift - they could be strong and small enough to work. But the idea of using something like this to deploy wind turbines is just asking for trouble.
Yep, the structure integrity is maybe a hardest issue here.