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!
I see.
In case an airship has their own crane that can reach the ground anyway, they can probably also use that to anchor themselves to the ground and pull themselves down, making ground operations faster.
Yeah, these don't seem like something that people would look forward to.
And while for the water surface, we can make breakwaters (which is pretty expensive in the first place), doing that for airships doesn't seem particularly doable.
And while there might be some sort of planning that can be done in case of a place full of skyscrapers, to make a port in the centre, having a pathway for the ships to enter and exit, while greatly reducing the winds at the port, that will probably not match the solarpunk theme at all.