Originally Posted by scuffers
No matter if it's in a car or a blimp, you still need to physically hold/contain the battery cells, and to make out weight is unimportant to Tesla is laughable.
Actually, I wasn't talking about the blimp, I was talking about the NASA research aircraft.
For a blimp, you probably can get away with much less batteries - It just needs them for takeoff and maybe some climb. On the other hand, that research aircraft has to drive 100kW worth of motors, while the Airlander has >1MW...
Originally Posted by Tourist
No, it had 66Kw over an area of 269.5 m2 at 135 micron thick. Not exactly heavy duty.
Airlander has more than 3500m2 to play with on top.
Thanks for these numbers. I'm also rather sure Solar Impulse had some batteries to keep flying through the night.
According to these numbers, something around 700-800kW should be possible. Of course, the payload will suffer, but I wouldn't be so sure how much, considering fuel also has weight. I wonder at what endurance will be the break-even point where solar becomes better than conventional engines.