Fortunately, now that everyone has a cell phone, all future airship disasters will be well documented from multiple angles and go viral in five minutes.
Unfortunately, all videos will be shot in vertical format, accompanied by shouts of “OMG the humanity!”.
I do like how the plane’s silhouette is that of a small, single-passenger plane, with main propeller moved onto the tail fin.
But does today’s viewing audience even have the patience to watch an airship crash? They usually aren’t high-speed affairs.
not only that, they don’t say whether the vehicle is itself an NFT or not.
Combustible fuels just add heat (energy) to the combustion air. Any source of heat will do the same thing.
Most of them would stick around for the huge explosion, then express their disappointment in the comments.
It’s fusion powered, not fission powered, so it doesn’t create radiation / nuclear waste, it’s just turning hydrogen into helium. So it’s not really a Hiroshima / Hindenburg waiting to happen… of course we haven’t even gotten fusion to really work yet.
I need a lawyer! I had this idea and drew a picture of this plane when I was 5. It’s an exact replica!
So seasteading, but in the air. Great
H-Bombs are fusion, and they aren’t exactly free of radiation (some, but not all of it is due to the small fission bomb used as the trigger for the fusion, but the fusion reaction itself isn’t that clean either)
Reminds me of the Khrushchev character in the Bickford Fuse
A. Hahahahahahhahahahahaha
B. Don’t worry about the carbon footprint. It’s nuclear! And constantly supplied by non-nuclear commercial airliners.
C. “Thee-eight-er”? Really?
Thank goodness this idea would never get off the ground…
I second the feelings of gtmac: hahahahahahahaha. Because it’s you know, fusion powered, the best kind if nucular. This one:
and they are going to start trials, luck willing, in 2025, with a machine which is huge and not exactly flyable.
What puzzles me is: what possessed this particular design studio to advance this idea? April the first is already past, so were they reharsing for the next one?
(As an aside: all the flying fission machines I ever heard of, like the Nerva rocket family or that Russian dingus that obligingly exploded on ramp recently, all use the onboard reactor to heat a liquid/gaseous medium and then spit it out from the machine’s butt. So the exhaust is indeed going to be a real glow-in-the dark beauty, but not much enviro-friendly).
Libertarians can’t even agree which way to point their repurposed cruise ships… now add elevation as one more variable where a consensus needs to be reached.
Why not add waterslides to the exterior or a mini-putt on the wing? The concept designers have zero clue.
Like a Midwest farmer who’s gonna show that NASA a thing or two about space travel. This idea started out with a rowboat and some ceiling fans.
Nuclear powered flight with some little extras:
The fallout from H-bombs comes almost entirely from the fission primary, as fusion doesn’t produce any radioactive isotopes to worry about. A fusion reactor would basically be “clean” in that sense.
But yeah, fusion does produce abundant ionising radiation, including neutrons, so it needs shielding and can potentially produce small amounts of low-level radioactive waste over time. Some people make claims about helium-3 or proton-boron-11 fusion being cleaner because it doesn’t produce neutrons, but this is silly because (a) those reactions are even less feasible than hydrogen fusion and (b) they would still involve a ton of braking radiation in the form of gamma rays. But sci-fi writers have really run with that one, as it is entertaining to pretend that helium-3 gives us a reason to go to other planets.
Granted, I didn’t watch the video, but all I can think of is “how are they going to deal with a bird strike on that giant bubble?”
For that matter, how would one make such a giant bubble that can cope with the windstream?
Also, they have no idea how wings work.
By flying in the stratosphere where birds dont fly. Its the only way to get around the drag problem too.
Depends on how you do it.
The simplest (and most dangerous) is a direct cycle where you route air straight through the reactor core and use it as coolant. The air heats up, expands, passes through a turbine to drive the inlet fan and then exhausts generates thrust. This is what the abandoned US PLUTO/SLAM supersonic cruise missile would have used and is used by the Russian Burevestnik which may have gone into production. The big issue here is that a breach of any reactor pin spills fission products into the exhaust.
There is also an indirect cycle where the reactor is cooled by a sealed liquid circuit containing water or metal and that then heats the incoming air. This is safer, but heavier and less efficient. It was proposed by the US with Pratt and Whitney doing a lot of work.
Ugh. A flying, nuclear-powered cruise ship. What could possibly go wrong?
