DARPA is building an airship to monitor battlefield and airspace. It can track troop movements 180 miles away, track cruise missiles at 370 miles away and, unlike satellites, has the ability to “maintain watch over a huge, fixed position without blinking.” It’s a giant, radar eye in the sky.
What interests me here isn’t the military angle or the even the steampunk one. It’s how this contraption is powered:
Powering the system so it can stay aloft was another challenge. Batteries were too heavy, so engineers tried something else. They opted to use solar rays during the daylight hours and to electrolyze water, storing the hydrogen and oxygen separately so they could be run through a hydrogen fuel cell at night.
“Then we collect the water and run it again,” Clark said. “It’s a fully regenerative system.”
You get that? The entire power system on this thing is clean and regenerative. And what are we doing down on the surface? Burning coal? Houses should be built like this.
4 comments
Ruphos
July 8, 2009 at 6:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Houses also have much greater energy requirements than the, I imagine, extensive electronics in the airship.
Still, the ship is awesome and houses powered in similar ways would be quite neat.
John Macdonald
July 9, 2009 at 9:50 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s one hell of an exploded drawing. The thing is covered in ‘material’. What will they think of next?
Ryan Oakley
July 9, 2009 at 2:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Houses have greater energy requirements but they also don’t have to stay aloft. Even if a part of every house’s energy was regenerative, it’d be a big step forward. If only the civilians could get their hands on something like “material.”
John Macdonald
July 10, 2009 at 11:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Have you tried Chinatown?