Friday, April 20, 2018

Another Interesting Conjecture Concerning Cargo Containers

I know. I can hear the voices asking, with great incredulity: "You're doing a conjecture on cargo containers? Seriously?"

But hey, you have to understand something here. Public logistics, across a wide spectrum, locally, regionally, nationally, and for the rest of the world, is of absolute concern if you are someone who thinks in terms in full integration of any number of critical social needs. If you can't get it where you need it, when you need it, what good is it going to do you, after all. And what I am talking about here applies to just about all areas of human effort.

So yes, I do think providing conjecture here is just as important as any philosophical one might be.

That being said, what I am wanting to talk about now is what might be a better way to go about having container traffic done by airborne Dirigible Blimp train; specifically referencing how you do the interface between loading, and unloading such long craft, without necessarily having to have an airfield, in the ordinary sense, involved at all.

This has been bothering me for a while now, actually. 

Originally I thought you might use existing airports in a new way for these new kinds of trains. I thought you might want to try having the trains come in quite slow, and just after crossing over the runway beginning, would begin lowering containers down; either to waiting carts being towed below, or just down to their own wheels (taking the weight penalty) so that they could then self steer themselves to appropriate cargo gathering areas. Thus, with one pass, you could unload entire train, and then, with another slow pass you could pull up waiting convoys of outgoing, self steering containers.

And the thing is, you might actually be able to make that work, but even if you could, it wouldn't be the most elegant way to do it by any means. And would undoubtedly take some serious effort to solve all of the problems associated with it. But what if you took another approach altogether?

What if you designed a new kind of airborne cargo container. One that was built of the lightest composite material truss work you could come up with, from either natural, or carbon/natural, fiber combinations, that would have special mounting sockets on all four corners. These sockets would allow for the connection of completely autonomous, singular ducted fans, on a gimballed mount, units. Units that would have their own battery packs that would give them (at the very least), say, 30 minutes of flight time to either fly up to and mate with a container, in flight, inside an airtrain unit; and then recharge so that it would have another thirty minutes of flight time to get the container back on the ground. And of course, you could reverse the process to get new containers back up to be shipped to new locations. And in this, you could have the airtrains orbiting over a port marshalling yard almost anywhere you might want to have a port at.

The big downside here would be the clouds of these autonomous lifting/landing fans flying around wherever you put the new ports at (though one assumes that existing ports might actually handle this sort of thing quite well). Some existing airports might handle it quite well, and some not so much at all, but you could compensate for that, I think, by just co-locating airtrain ports, with already existing, large warehouse facilities.

Just something to think about as you give logistics the consideration it really deserves.







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