Benclaman

4 ms·

1.
by Benclaman 11mo ago
The Git-style workflow is super clever. How do teams typically collaborate around it? For example, can multiple people work on different branches of the same agent (visual and code), or is the sync more linear?
2.
by Benclaman 5y ago
Remote pilot like a military drone operator! If a vehicle misbehaves, worst case scenario would be a total control failure (will definitely have redundancies designed in), which would result in the airship slowly falling to the ground. Hope
3.
by Benclaman 5y ago
The final one we're building will be 60 feet and have a 650lb payload, so would have to be an ultralight house! And you'd also need a place to park a 60'x20' airship. Or I suppose you could just keep it in the air? There
4.
by Benclaman 5y ago
We have a pretty cool plan for managing icing that I can't talk about here because of IP disclosure. In general we don't think icing will be an unsolvable problem.
5.
by Benclaman 5y ago
We anticipate these will have operating bases with lifting gas storage tanks, hangars, tiedowns, etc. The hybrid design we're using doesn't need ballast because the total vehicle mass is heavier than air. In emergencies, we would
6.
by Benclaman 5y ago
These are awesome questions! Here's a couple answers: 1) We're building our full size airship to fly at 60 mph, which increases the usability in inclement weather. 2) Joe answered this in another comment, but our airships use pret
7.
by Benclaman 5y ago
The economics on small airships only work if they're unmanned, and now is pretty much the best time ever to develop unmanned aircraft.
8.
by Benclaman 5y ago
We're not planning to build something that's 600 feet long and costs hundreds of millions, we're building something that's 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands. Unmanned blimps of this size don't require the
9.
by Benclaman 5y ago
This is exactly where we think the big market opportunity is!
10.
by Benclaman 5y ago
A bored or malicious person will definitely be able to shoot our airships. The nice part about an airship is that if you shoot it with a gun, the hole will be small so it will take a long time for the gas to leak out. The failure mode is th
11.
by Benclaman 5y ago
The goal is to make them completely autonomous, though a pilot observer will likely be required for the near future. Business model is something we're still figuring out. We have interest on both sides, but at first we'll definite
12.
by Benclaman 5y ago
A fleet for autonomous search and rescue would be awesome.
13.
by Benclaman 5y ago
We haven't filed for a BVLOS waiver yet, that's something we're planning to do in the next couple months. Full scale version will be unmanned.
14.
by Benclaman 5y ago
The inclement weather where our airships have the biggest advantage is in fog or limited visibility due to autonomy hardware/software in geographies with traditionally VFR approaches. Based on our experiences flying our current protot
15.
by Benclaman 5y ago
It depends. For example, small planes need runways to take off and land, and if the crosswinds are over 15 kts they aren't able to operate. In this same situation, our airships would be able to take off and land because they have VTOL