Solarpunk Travel

663 readers

15 users here now

Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.

related to sustainable travel:

[email protected] ← open to all train chatter (but note the instance is centered on the midwest USA)
[email protected] ← UK Rail and Trains
[email protected] ← UK public transport

related to travel generally:

[email protected] ← general travel
[email protected] ← general travel (this whole instance devoted to travel but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule there)
[email protected] ← Europe focus

The communities listed above are decentralized. Centralized instances are omitted as they go against the fedi purpose and it’s better to cultivate digital rights in the free world. That means instances that have a disproportionately large population or are centralized on Cloudflare are not listed.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air? (www.bbc.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The dream seems to be solar panels across the top and onboard electrolysis, and fuel cells. Then the same hydrogen that keeps you afloat is also your energy storage. A compressor to store extra hydrogen also seems like a good idea. I imagine we can make these into closed systems.

[–] PuddleOfKittens 3 points 6 days ago

The onboard electrolysis isn't as useful as you'd think - electrolysis is energy-intensive, you need water, acquiring water is energy a intensive, and water is heavy. Like, 8/9 of the weight of water is oxygen.

With current tech it doesn't make sense, but in a more sci-fi sense I think it does - the sky is full of dense patches of gaseous water, commonly known as "clouds", and if going through a cloud wasn't incredibly dangerous for airships then they could just do that, catch handfuls of cloud, then condense it and electrolyze it. That way the airship doesn't need to lift huge amounts of oxygen from lakes then dump it.

And if we're speaking sci-fi, making airships stormproof is basically mandatory, they can't outrun storms and due to their long flight-times (due to low speed), they're more likely to encounter them mid-flight.