Imagine a World where Amazon makes this a reality, excited or scared?

[DonFerrari]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

DonFerrari said:

1. It is possible to make maintenance during operation if it is designed like that, just like ships can and receive maintenance while still on the water and even during mission.

2. You can certainly make use of solar energy for the mothership if it doesn't need to be moving constantly

3. Regulation changes when technology changes

4. If the mothership can fly to high altitudes it would be outside of weather troubles such as rain and storm. And if it have capability of moving around it can dislocate from problematic cumulus nimbus that approaches.

1. The main problem in an Airship is that the Helium Ballons inside the rigid structure and the external hull need to be checked for holes. While you can make some small checks of the inner balloons depending on how they are arranged and if they are accessible from all sides, but for thourough checks the airship needs to be in a hangar. (That hangar is another problem btw, as it would need to be much larger than those we have for planes as an Airship is much larger in height).

2. The Mothership ain't the problem here, unless there's a leak. It's more that, to make it worthwhile, they would need to load up  several tons of goods to make it worthwhile, and loading so much packaged for end-users and pre-prepared to be shipped by drones takes a lot of time, time that a truck delivery could use much more efficiently.

3. True, but it takes time. And not everybody is in favor of so many drones, so it could take a long time to convince the lawmakers to support such a bill.

4. The mothership, yes. The drones, not so much. So they would need to wait for better weather conditions. Plus, the Airship probably needs to fly lower to release the drones in the first place.

1 - You can certainly design the ballon to have the continuous test done in locu, with system redundancy so you can take out one ballon for external test on periodic calendar without having to put the airship down.

2 - That is a different problem but not necessarily how you describe. They could have means to load the airship using aircrafts or others that would pair and unload.

3 - I understood this thread is about it happening in the future, not in the next couple years.

4 - The rains aren't permanent and you can drop the drones when it is appropriate so I don't see the weather being a problem. Also I guess it is manageable to have the drones to fly up and down from the airship. If the drones can't go down they wouldn't be able to get back.