> So it is huge, but well within historic capabilities - and materials science has come a long way since then. I'm quietly hopeful for this.
The problem is not building the thing (though it is one problem), it's that if you're using this as a crane you're moving an entire baseball field with a decimeter if not centimeter-scale precision.
The problem seems to scale with the weight carried.
I have no intuitive feel for how heavy 250 tonnes is, but even if current crane tech can move that weight with centimeter precision, they're explicitly marketing this for tasks where the current tech has issues with access, which implies they don't think it competes directly with traditional cranes on their own territory, but does work well enough in specific circumstances to be an option.
Maybe its a bad idea overall, or unrelated business model issues render it a dead-end, but beating the current product in every concievable metric in every concievable use case is not necesssry for a product to be a success.
That's an area i'd be quietly hopeful in. Assuming propulsion motors are available which are both:
a) powerful enough to defend against wind acting against such a huge object
b) responsive enough to change their thrust vector (power & direction) such
that the associated PID loop can operate within some reasonable set point
boundary
Then there are already open source hardware and software solutions available for this - i'm not proposing someone slaps a pixhawk 4 on a huge airship and gets a few mates over to help tune the PIDs in Ardupilot - i mean that the know-how is there. Translating that into a product that would be suitable for controlling such an aircraft would be do-able. Certification costs and expensive hardware suitable to run it all on are a different matter.
I guess this is a long way to say i don't think it'd be easy or cheap, but i don't think they'd have to make a break through innovation to make it possible.
masklinn|4 years ago
The problem is not building the thing (though it is one problem), it's that if you're using this as a crane you're moving an entire baseball field with a decimeter if not centimeter-scale precision.
ZeroGravitas|4 years ago
I have no intuitive feel for how heavy 250 tonnes is, but even if current crane tech can move that weight with centimeter precision, they're explicitly marketing this for tasks where the current tech has issues with access, which implies they don't think it competes directly with traditional cranes on their own territory, but does work well enough in specific circumstances to be an option.
Maybe its a bad idea overall, or unrelated business model issues render it a dead-end, but beating the current product in every concievable metric in every concievable use case is not necesssry for a product to be a success.
ClumsyPilot|4 years ago
CraigJPerry|4 years ago
I guess this is a long way to say i don't think it'd be easy or cheap, but i don't think they'd have to make a break through innovation to make it possible.