A quick photobash based on a comment about combining airship mooring masts with screw conveyors/screw elevators similar to those used by grain silos on my last airship post. I had these ideas in my head of how the mast could look, and figured it was worth a small detour. It might not be practical, but I’m pleased with how it came out. This was a quick one, the zoomed out scenes often are. (I have been told by a farmer that a loading elevator (the kind with a chain of buckets) would fit better).
I talked it over with the folks on slrpnk.net here and feel like there’s a definite place for grain and silos in a solarpunk world. Grain plays a huge role in feeding our society and seems to act as a kind of strategic food reserve - so it seems like even a solarpunk society with a focus on local agriculture and balancing their production to limit waste may want the means/surplus to provide for their global neighbors in hard times.
As for whether an airship should be hauling grain - I based the airship on Flying Whales’s proposed LCA60T cargo airship, which touts a 96-meter long, 8-meter high and 7-meter wide cargo hold or 60-tonne payload. This could put it roughly on-par with a truck pulling a Super-B double trailer unit, which can do around 50 tons of grain. For contrast, looking at cargo ship capacities, the little ones can hold a total of 28,000 tonnes and the big ones 400,000 tons. Railcars can hold over 100 tons each.
Airships’ (potential) ability to carry awkwardly-large things overland, like windmill parts, or to lift heavy stuff straight up into the sky like a flying crane are probably their best applications. But I think I can see them fitting into the niche currently occupied by trucks - hauling grain from farms to railyards or docks. Similar capacity, and they don’t need roads. If our solarpunk society does what a sizable contingent of folks in the genre/movement would like and deprioritizes cars, I think roads would fall apart pretty quick.
Around here at least, roads, bridges, etc require constant maintenance to remain anywhere approaching driveable. Winter breaks them with frost heaves and pot holes, spring turns their footings to muddy slop or washes them away in floods. The maintenance is constant and expensive. And that’s mostly for the standards of small passenger vehicles. 18 wheelers and the big double-trailer rigs need even better roads.
If our solarpunk society has resource limitations, as most societies do, and they’re prioritizing big infrastructure stuff like trains, ropeways, etc, it’s possible the roads out to a lot of farms might fall into disrepair enough that a burgeoning airship industry might start to look like a feasible alternative.
I’m not sure a mooring mast is entirely necessary here, with the big, recently-reaped fields to land on, but perhaps this farm is using a system compatible to other farms nearby who do more agroforestry, and wouldn’t necessarily like having to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships