A quick one based on u/Sam-Nales’s comment about combining airship mooring masts with screw conveyors/screw elevators similar to those used by grain silos on my last post over on reddit. I talked it over with the folks on the farming community: https://slrpnk.net/post/3643695 and feel like there’s a definite place for grain and silos in a solarpunk world. This was a quick one, the zoomed out scenes often are.
I’m not sure a mooring mast is entirely necessary here, with the big, recently-reaped fields to land on, but perhaps this farm is using a system compatible to other farms nearby who use more agroforestry, and wouldn’t necessarily like having to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships
What is the cargo capacity of your average airship?
I’m not sure if there are enough out there for a good average - I think a lot of the existing ones are fairly small blimps used for advertising. But the cargo airship prototype I used for the photobash (Flying Whales’s proposed LCA60T) touts a 96-meter long, 8-meter high and 7-meter wide cargo hold (or 60-tonne payload). Which seemed like a lot, to me, a person who would find a 60 tonnes of grain to be an unreasonable amount. But at the scale our society moves grain, It’s probably not the best vehicle for the job.
I also thought 60 tonnes sounded like a lot, and I suppose it is for an airship. Your sentence about grain movement made me wonder about cargo ship capacities, and it’s crazy. The little ones can hold a total of 28,000 tonnes and the big ones 400,000 tons. Railcars can hold over 100 tons each, while trucks about 50 tons of grain.
With those numbers in mind, maybe your airship illustration isn’t off the mark. They could replace the trucks that transport grain to the mill/rail station.
That’s a really good point! I’m glad