This is another bit of art from an ongoing solarpunk fiction project: a flying crane cargo airship docked at a mooring mast made from a recycled wind turbine tower.
I was looking for a modernized mooring mast design for a sort of prefab kit that might be used by frontier communities and one of the FullyAutomated devs suggested these reused segments because the turbines already get replaced regularly, and the structures meet many of the same goals with sideload and weather and even support elevators.
Realistically a lot of locations might use platforms on the ground which rotate so the airship can land and still weathervane in the wind instead of mooring masts. I've seen these called Boyant Aircraft Rotating Terminals or Depots. But some communities may not want to clear that much space, or might be supported by airships that don't land. Others may use mooring masts as a place for an airship to temporarily wait for access to a facility.
I've posted about airships a few times before. I think they have some good potential for certain kinds of cargo and especially for locations which are hard to reach overland, though I think that description might fit more locations if the solarpunk future deprioritizes cars and roads, and especially if a period of societal crumbles leaves behind extensive infrastructure debt.
Extrapolating modern designs with all the accompanying safety improvements is kinda hard when all you've got to start with is some lattice towers from the 1920s.
I'm not any kind of engineer, so it's mostly guesswork on my part. I wish the airship industry had had more time to iterate on this stuff. I know the designs and materials and control mechanisms of the airships have improved massively in the last century, but I'm not sure how the masts, especially simple, seldom-used ones like this might be redesigned. (With big airports I picture something like the Skylon Tower or Space Needle which rotate with the airship in the wind.)
If you're an engineer with the right skillset I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Nice art! I like the palette you used. Hard to believe airships will make a comeback but it is an interesting idea.
Thank you! The designs, propulsion, electronics, control mechanisms, and materials available have improved tremendously but starting up a whole new method of aviation in the modern day is difficult so we don't have a many good examples in use yet and that leaves us in a kind of odd speculative space. Modern aviation is rightly and respectably safety-focussed but it's hard enough to get even a new airplane design through (which is how we end up with these weird start-with-something-grandfathered-in-and-kludge-on-modernizations) let alone a whole different kind of commercial craft. But there are a few designs I'm excited about which seem to have a lot of potential, especially in replacing cargo helicopters in their niche.