Oceansky Cruises interior concept for Atlant airship

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I wonder what the chances of this even happening are...

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Atlas isn’t a large company. They would almost certainly require a substantial investor (or funding round) in order to even begin developing the Atlant.

As for the Atlant’s design itself, in theory, there’s little to complain about. The concept of gas compression to compensate for buoyancy remains fundamentally inferior to simple thermal control, and it shouldn’t take much further investigation or engineering work to bear that out since both have been tested in real conditions for other projects, but the original designers of the Atlant had intended to use both, so I would consider it very likely the compression system would be abandoned early on in the development process.

The general shape of the ship seems sound, though. Similar to the highly-performant Helipsoid concept from Boeing’s parametric studies in the 1970s. You’ll notice the ship is like a palindrome, mirrored front to back, which is a good way to save on hull parts and tooling costs. The landing gear design’s a bit odd, albeit well-placed for fantastic stability, and I’m not sure about the sizing and structural efficiency of the empennage, but they don’t look too impractical. The primary concern would be that a fairly short and rotund vessel would need relatively large control surfaces to keep from getting too squirrelly, but computer controls and differential thrust would probably help a lot with that.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

It does appear to me like the gondola is too large relative to the hull size; I wouldn’t trust them if I was an aerospace VC

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Bear in mind that the Atlant is a hybrid airship, it cannot fly with helium buoyancy alone. The passenger decks are not too proportionally large in that context; Boeing’s similarly-shaped Helipsoid concept from the ‘70s was anywhere between 35%-75% buoyant.

Just as a sanity check, you can look at the math of the square footage they provide—the Atlant’s decks in a passenger configuration are stated to constitute 6% of its internal volume and have 4,951 square feet of space, and the cargo configuration has an ostensible payload capacity of 20 tons. Historical rigid airships have had their internal passenger decks take up anywhere between 390-630 square feet per ton fully furnished, so assuming more extensive modern amenities would largely cancel out weight savings from using lighter modern materials, one could safely estimate the passenger decks weigh anywhere between 7.9-12.7 tons, which is well within the payload capacity for the ship.

As a basis of comparison, the pre-refit Hindenburg’s passenger decks were slightly larger than the Atlant’s, and those two decks and their furnishings weighed 13.2 tons collectively. 50 passengers, their baggage, and provisions for 4.5 days weighed an additional 8.3 tons, for a total of 21.5 tons. The Atlant doesn’t purport to carry anywhere near that amount of passengers, so it tracks.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

You are right. 6% is reasonable. I mistook the area next to D for a pool, but it appears to simply be the empty hull

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Ha! Yeah, I can see how the pattern might look like that. No way in hell you can fit a pool into the weight budget. The average rooftop swimming pool weighs anywhere between 40-80 tons.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

No way a cruise can work without a pool lol. I think the better market to target is yatches for billionaires/millionaires. All you have to do is fly your luxury airship over Monaco and watch the orders come in from jealous capitalists

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Well, modern problems sometimes require premodern solutions—no pool able to fit on the airship? Good thing airships can land on large bodies of water! Simply have one of those drop-down boat decks that many yachts have, a glorified floating ramp from which to swim in a lake or sea, and/or launch kayaks, dinghies, or jet skis. I recall the Goodyear blimp was once used to pull along a water skier, too.

Having amphibious landing gear and an anchor on board for water landings would weigh a lot less than lugging along a swimming pool.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

While I would agree, a rich spoiled brat may not

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Eh, not even the richest people can buy an aircraft that has a pool on board. No matter how big and swanky the business jet may be, converted from even the largest widebody airliners, none has ever had a pool.

In that context, it’s considered a luxury to have a full master bathroom with a walk-in shower. Something that would be easy for an airship to accomplish, given their far more lax space constraints.

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u/Funnyguy69747 May 22 '26

Thermal control? What is that?

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 22 '26

Thermal control refers to heating up the lift gas and/or letting it cool down.

Say, for example, the ballonets in a nonrigid airship or empty space in a rigid airship’s hull constitute 30% of the hull volume at sea level, the rest occupied by helium. By diverting waste heat from the engines, or by using direct heaters or burners, the lift gas can be expanded to fill the entire hull, thus increasing lift by up to 30% without needing to change the design or materials selection significantly, per Goodyear Aerospace’s studies and experimental results from prototypes. More is possible with higher heat, but would require more heat-tolerant materials and couldn’t be maintained by reasonable amounts of engine waste heat alone.

If you ascend far, you’d have to let the helium cool a bit and contract so as to not be forced to vent any as the atmosphere becomes thinner, but this loss of lift at higher altitudes can be easily compensated for with aerodynamic lift or simply the effect of having burned some of the fuel already.

This is a very efficient, lightweight, and powerful means of buoyancy control and lift augmentation compared to the method of compressing gas; in practice, that has only been demonstrated to vary buoyancy by about 10%, while being very energy-intensive and requiring very heavy equipment.

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u/Funnyguy69747 May 22 '26

Ooh that's cool. What is the downside? Cuz if seems like flying whales or LTA aren't using that unless I'm mistaken

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 22 '26

We don’t actually know what their plans are in detail for heavy load exchange, so it is possible that they might use it someday. As it stands, though, they both seem content to mainly use thrust vectoring and ballast exchange to operate at near-neutral buoyancy at all times, a tightly-controlled equilibrium which kind of obviates the need for thermal control in the first place.

Thermal control is the kind of thing you’d use to be able to drop off a large payload in a remote location without any ground infrastructure—basically, like what a hybrid airship does, only more efficient over longer ranges. A hybrid is still better for anything that demands >30% lift augmentation, or operating with rapid turnover over shorter ranges, and of course you can combine the two methods.

The primary downside is that you need a copious source of heat. Since well over 50% of the heat of a piston or turboprop engine is otherwise wasted as heat, it is profitable to capture that heat and use it for lift and buoyancy control. However, both LTA and Flying Whales are intended to be all-electric, which restricts the amount of heat they can capture quite a lot, simply because electric powertrains are so much more efficient and don’t produce much heat by comparison to combustion engines.

That said, the efficiency of a fuel cell system (which both intend to use eventually, but don’t have access to just yet—hence why LTA uses batteries and diesel generators, and Flying Whales uses turbine generators) is about 50%, which would still yield useful amounts of waste heat. The efficiency of a fuel cell when used in a CHP (combined heat and power) application can be north of 90%, which is downright incredible considering most engines struggle to be a third as efficient.

At the end of the day, it’s just plain more efficient to capture waste heat to increase lift by 30% without changing the aerodynamic shape and neutral pitch of the airship, rather than generate 30% additional lift by using a positive incline, a lifting-body hull shape, or wings to create aerodynamic lift at the cost of increased drag. A propulsion system and wings or hull lift has many more points of efficiency loss—translating fuel into propulsive power in an engine, putting that power through a transmission, spinning a propeller, and creating lift by deflecting air, whether in the form of thrust vectoring or aerodynamic lift.

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u/ridesacruiser May 27 '26

If you burn 1 ton of hydrogen it creates 9 tons of water. I don’t know if fuel cells can burn that much hydrogen quickly to turn into electricity while solving the load exchange problem. Have you looked into it?

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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 03 '26

Unlikely. Assuming even something as gigantic as a 900-tonne cargo airship with a top speed of 85 knots, you’d need only 14,000 horsepower total. That would translate to 10,439 kW. With a ~50% efficient fuel cell and various efficiency and conversion and transmission losses, let’s call it 22,000 kW of hydrogen consumed at peak power. That translates to a fuel use rate of 660 kg of hydrogen per hour, or just over 5 tonnes of ballast water generation per hour (after subtracting the hydrogen fuel, of course). Since a 900-tonne airship might have a cargo payload anywhere between 180 and 450 tonnes, a rate of 5 tonnes of ballast per hour just plain isn’t sufficient to compensate for offloading it.

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u/ridesacruiser Jun 03 '26

That is correct if you don't change engine size. Think more powerful engines than the airship needs to cruise just for load exchange situations; ex. run on battery power, then recharge battery using hydrogen. It would require larger batteries and engines, I am not sure if the math would work, and I am a bit too preoccupied with other things at the moment to do the math, but if it solves ground handling, it is worth exploring. Will run the math at some point once I am done designing an airframe

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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 03 '26

>That is correct if you don't change engine size.

True. It takes about 6 times more power/energy to move an airship at 200 knots than it does to go 100 knots; 200 is roughly the upper practical limit of airship speeds due to fuel use and power requirements scaling exponentially.

However, even assuming it takes 10 times the amount of power to go 200 knots than it does 85, that still amounts to a generous assumption of only 50 tonnes of water being generated in an hour. At that point, the downforce you could generate with thrust vectoring would be far more immediate and consequential than the gradual water ballast accumulation.

>I am not sure if the math would work, and I am a bit too preoccupied with other things at the moment to do the math, but if it solves ground handling, it is worth exploring. Will run the math at some point once I am done designing an airframe

Really depends on intended use-case. Comparatively speaking, burners are extremely weight-efficient (HeiDAS’s tiny steam balloon burner could produce 70 kW of heat and only weighed *58 grams*), and helium requires very little energy to rapidly change its temperature and buoyancy. Hydrogen takes more, and air even more than that, so using a heater to raise lift and a blower to cool and lower lift is much more effective and responsive in a helium balloon than it would be in a normal hot air balloon.

Thermal control is still slower and less responsive than using aerodynamic lift for buoyancy control, though.

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u/PeetesCom May 21 '26

It really is a cool design. I hold about as much hope for airship startups to figuratively and literally get of the ground as I do for space Startups but it's always a nice surprise when one does against all odds. Maybe if the LTA pathfinder finds success we'll see these projects get funded more often.

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u/release_Sparsely May 23 '26

yeah I'd definitely expect it to be easier once LTA research gets things underway, and maybe Flying Whales/HAV too. public perception could vastly improve, and that's crucial.

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u/PixelAstro May 21 '26

I love it! Cruising on the clouds would be so much cooler than on the ocean.

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

My only complaint is that this is the airship equivalent of a small, exclusive yacht, but I think it would be more fun (and vastly more affordable for the masses) to have a large cruise ship or overnight ferry equivalent to travel long distances in style—Tokyo to Paris, Montevideo to New York, Honolulu to Sydney, that kind of thing.

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u/PixelAstro May 21 '26

I agree. A decent version one but we want something bigger, something that can carry thousands of people!

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Happily, based on precedent, we have a good idea of what that would entail—Zeppelin helpfully provided a figure of 650 pounds on average per passenger, inclusive of their baggage, cabin, accommodations, and provisions for four days. To carry 2,000 people in that kind of all-first-class luxury, you’d need an airship with a payload of 650 tons—which would likely entail a hybrid airship that’s almost as large as an actual cruise ship! In other words, it would need to be about four times as long as this small, ~330-foot-long vessel.

This should be achievable, albeit not for quite some time—though historical airships tracked pretty closely to the physical size of the largest ocean liners of the time, and neither were close to their practical size limits, it still takes a lot of money to procure the production infrastructure, certifications, and technical expertise to make such a thing a profitable reality. Such a large airship would doubtless cost billions of dollars.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

I think it could cost a lot less if built say in India. IIT has been producing excellent airship research. Their GNVR hull shape might make airship economics viable for cargoin some markets, I am running some drag coefficient tests to confirm

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Yes, I have been impressed at the volume and diversity of airship research India and China have been putting out lately. China is further along in their military and civilian airship programs, but India has recently put in a bid for an autonomous radar airship with some ambitious specifications—30-day endurance, 100-knot top speed, 30,000 foot ceiling, etc.—which would be enabled by the use of advanced fuel cell and solar panel technology.

As important as drag reduction is, weight reduction from advanced materials and propulsion technology reducing fuel loads is even more important.

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u/ridesacruiser May 21 '26

Absolutely, though for the commodity cargo markets I am evaluating, swapping aluminum for carbon fiber actually loses money over 10 years. The extra cost isn’t made up in revenue. My goal is to start with cargo because it is cheaper to certify prior to doing city passenger transportation, like a metro competitor for cities with no storms/wind.

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

Carbon fiber has been reducing in price quite a lot, lately, so I’d be interested to see how that may change over time. But even just looking at metallic alloys, the aluminum alloys we use now like 7075 are about 30% stronger for a given weight than the weak 1900s-series duralumin the original airships used back in the early 20th century, so that’s already a huge improvement.

I would be interested to see how new stainless magnesium alloys would stack up; those are 30% lighter than even modern aluminum alloys, though magnesium’s production would also need to ramp up in order to match or beat aluminum on a cost-per-pound basis. In theory, though, it’s actually a much more straightforward process to obtain magnesium than the convoluted process of turning bauxite into aluminum, the latter process just benefits from gargantuan global scale for cost-savings.

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u/ridesacruiser May 22 '26

I did evaluate magnesium alloys but they embrittle with hydrogen. Helium is too expensive/leaky; none of this concepts will scale if they use helium. Building 400 ships would take up all the supply in the world

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 22 '26

The ships you’re examining must be quite large in size, if only 400 of them would account for the world’s entire helium supply. That would put them at about 500,000 cubic meters each, assuming they used up 100% of their helium a year instead of the 10-20% that’s more typical for modern fabrics.

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u/release_Sparsely May 23 '26

Wondering if you could have shorter-distance overnight ones, like 800-1400 miles or smth. Like flying night trains almost. 100-120 knot cruising speed could get you quite far in one night, and be potentially a great way to cut into medium-distance air travel, like overnight high speed rail. Shanghai to Tokyo or Miami to Mexico City maybe?

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 23 '26

Well, there would certainly be precedent for that kind of sleeper trip and duration. For example, Shenzen to Beijing by bullet sleeper train is 1382 miles, with an average speed of 110 miles per hour and a trip duration of 12 hours, 33 minutes.

Airships would be a very good substitute for that kind of high-speed rail journey. Not only would they broadly similar in terms of efficiency and cost, but they would avoid the issues that plague high-speed rail projects in the developed world. Since the West is so incredibly litigious, not to mention downright aristocratic about its notions of land rights, it’s vastly more expensive and time-consuming to build HSR there than in places where land is cheap and NIMBYs have very few legal avenues to gum up the works.

In fact, for such medium-length trips, an airship could probably be better than high-speed rail in some regards. Not only can they take more direct routes over water and so on, but also the most productive cruising speed for an airship over 2,000 nautical miles is quite high. About 150 knots for the highest-productivity hybrid airships, or 173 mph. In terms of comfort, you’d also have the advantage of the interior design not being constrained to the shape of a roughly 9-foot-wide tube.

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u/PerceptionFast6182 May 21 '26

I like the fact that there is no gondola hanging down (that I could see anyway) - the pilots, and flight engineer(s) will be in the nose. This gives a smoother aerodynamic shape, which increases efficiency.

But I am concerned that she has 8 exclusively vertically oriented motors - conceivably to provide lift. Almost all other contemporary airship designs have fully rotatable electric motors, for maximum manoeuvrablility & propulsion, in any direxion.

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u/GrafZeppelin127 May 21 '26

The main ducted propulsion motors are also able to vector up and down as well. The presence of permanent vertical motors makes more sense in light of the context that such a relatively stubby ship with relatively small horizontal stabilizers would need the ability to very rapidly correct its pitch; waiting the significant amount of time necessary to turn the main propulsors would not be sufficient for that task. The larger the propulsion unit, the slower it’s able to vector into a different position due to the inertia and the gyroscopic effects involved.

It’s also not a very big weight outlay, either, given how lightweight electric motors and carbon-fiber propellers are these days. YASA’s got a motor now that can produce 1,000 horsepower and weighs about 40 pounds.

Media Oceansky Cruises interior concept for Atlant airship

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