• Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      1 day ago

      The rich do have flying cars. They just call them private jets. The rich own mansions (huge houses) all over the world, private islands, mega yachts that contain smaller yachts, their own submarines, and now they even have their own rocket ships

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 days ago

      They’re on a carriage that’s like pontooned at the bottom, being pulled by the horse and driver who each have their own balloons.

      edit oh wait d’you mean the ones in the back right my bad dk about them

      • MeekerThanBeaker@lemmy.world
        8·
        2 days ago

        Back right?

        I see two in the back left and two more in the back middle without balloons. The two in the back right are the carriage passengers.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      3 days ago

      Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.

      Yes, I did the math.

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
        49·
        3 days ago

        You did the basic math, with your spherical balloon. What about giant cylinders? Then you could really pack it in.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          55·
          3 days ago

          Sure. You could do a cylinder of three quarters of a meter across which seems like a reasonable footprint for someone to stand in. That’d only have to be, uh, 325.5 meters tall to have the same volume.

            • ReanuKeeves@lemm.eeEnglish
              20·
              3 days ago

              Your asshole “buddy” constantly throwing sharp objects at your balloon causing you to be wet all the time and laughing as you ask your mom if she can mend your massive cylinder for the 13th time this month

              • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayEnglish
                5·
                3 days ago

                I’ll just compress more helium and make the balloon metal so its stronger and holds more in a smaller space

                • sushibowl@feddit.nl
                  5·
                  2 days ago

                  I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

                  Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?

                • ReanuKeeves@lemm.eeEnglish
                  6·
                  3 days ago

                  Your buddy has figured out that all they need to do is snip the ropes on your cylinder which will make it fly away and now you gotta ask your mom to buy you a new cylinder until your whole family is broke and homeless

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
          11·
          3 days ago

          You could use spherical balloons with really long, but different length, strings for each person. Of course you’d have to avoid tangling your balloons together while walking around like that and given wind can vary with elevation…

      • tyler@programming.dev
        21·
        3 days ago

        You could use hydrogen, which is less dense than helium. Then if it catches on fire like the Hindenburg you’d already be in the water.

        • perestroika@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 day ago

          It wouldn’t help. The thing that gives you lift is the mass of displaced air. Difference from the (lack of) mass of the lifting gas is minimal.

          • tyler@programming.dev
            2·
            15 hours ago

            It would, but less than the density difference, since you’ve removed weight from the balloon thus gravity has less of a pull on the balloon. My wife (a PE in thermodynamics) was the one that verified that comment before I posted it, hence why I didn’t say it would increase lift by the difference in density.

      • Neverclear@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        19·
        3 days ago

        Note that you wouldn’t need 77 kg worth of bouyancy from the balloon. The shoes would provide some lift, more if you made them out of some type of foam.

      • afronaut@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        What if the balloons were long and vertical like the ones in Dune? That could allow them to walk closer to one another.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          I addressed that in another comment here. The long and short of it (very long, as it happens) is that the volume you’d need is still the same. So your elongated balloon would have to be well beyond what most people would consider to be ridiculously tall. 325.5 meters tall, in fact, given the 0.75 meter diameter I assumed to start with. I figure most people could probably stand in a 0.75m circle provided they didn’t wave their arms around a bunch.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          3 days ago

          This I am fairly certain we do not have the technology to achieve. Anything vacuum filled that large would need to have walls so thick so as to completely negate any buoyancy effect. I don’t know of any modern material that would simultaneously be rigid, strong, and light enough.

          • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
            12·
            3 days ago

            Cool sci-fi concept tho

            What other sorts of random issues would be solved by this super material :opens notepad: I mean, everything, right? It would have to be so strong, so light and so economical. You could make actual BattleMechs from it that wouldn’t just sink into every surface they walk on. Shit, Dyson Spheres I guess.

            …so why would we use weird balloon floaties? Isn’t it fun how technology answers it’s own questions?

      • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
        5·
        3 days ago

        Ok but hear me out

        One really BIG balloon with rope systems you could hook on to so multiple people could walk around under the same balloon area.

        • Hoimo@ani.social
          3·
          2 days ago

          If everyone is connected to the same balloon anyway, you could even do without the balloon and build a structure over the water to hang your ropes from.

        • BootyBuccaneer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          Revolutionary. I hear hot air is really good for inflating things. I wonder if you could use some sort of flame thrower to keep the balloon afloat.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Hope that lake doesn’t have any breezes or gusts.

        … Also, assuming you just did the calc for neutralizing the weight of said person…

        Even if there was no wind… they could not walk.

        Walking requires weight to work.

        A surface you can push off of.

        It seems like the picture shows one guy with walking sticks, which I guess might kinda work if the lake is less than about 2 or 3 feet, or under a meter deep… not too many lakes like that.

        Maybe something like stilts… or … huge snowshoe/flipper type things… might work?

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
      55·
      3 days ago

      Hot air balloon pilot here: We do, indeed.

      This is a “Cloudhopper”. It’s a hot air balloon with no basket: The pilot straps a propane tank to his back and wears a climbing harness. As you can see, the pilot is, effectively, walking on water with the assistance of the balloon.

      Cloudhoppers are about 20,000 to 35,000 cubic feet, 40-50 feet in diameter. They are about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of most of the balloons you might see at a fair or festival.

    • Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world
      14·
      3 days ago

      There’s an episode of Nathan For You where he uses giant balloons to help someone who weighed too much to ride a horse normally. Great show

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
      14·
      2 days ago

      And you don’t have an issue with the carriage, with three people on it, where the only balloon is on the horse?

      Whoever made this was an artist and sucked at physics

      • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        2 days ago

        The carriage could be on a barge and is just being pulled by the horse. How is the horse getting traction? And why is that man using a cane on water! The small balloons could just be artistic license for the drawing.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 days ago

      I’d be ok with splashing. I want this!

      Edit: Perhaps the shoes have keels or fins at the bottom and they use a skating-like motion to move around.

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    Now I’m wondering why we don’t attach giant balloons to ships to reduce water resistance by cutting down how much of the ship needs to be underwater. Perhaps it’s because you would need more size for the balloon, and maybe the air resistance and water resistance needs to even out due to physical laws that I’m too lazy to think about?

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Sounds like you’re vaguely describing a ground effect vehicle, basically a plane which coasts along the water. They’re more efficient than actually flying due to exploiting the ground effect on the lift surfaces, but ultimately it’s closer to a plane than a boat

    • IndustryStandard@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 days ago

      The boat already floats. What is the point of making it lighter? Boats are handy for transporting extreme weights because water weighs more than air.

      If it should fly then get a Zepplin

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Any amount of water contact introduces a fair amount of drag. There may be an ideal point somewhere in the middle, but I think if you take this to it’s natural conclusion you get a zeppelin.

      I did a little bit of math and I think that to lift the payload capacity (including fuel and crew) of a modern day Panama canal ship you would need about a tenth of the peak U.S. helium reserve (a cube about half a kilometer long on each edge, about 1.3x longer than the long dimension of the ship)

      I don’t think you’d get the best fuel efficiency going upwind lol

      Anything smaller would come with proportionally less downsides and at least proportionally less benefits. I doubt it could ever be a net positive in any useful metric.

      • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
        2·
        2 days ago

        Hydrogen for sure. Partial lift for a boat has a lot of applications. Much more cargo than an airship, with no complications in flying empty. A fairly flat triangular “balloon” can be used as a solar platform, a sail, and be put in neutral wind mode down to the deck.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
    28·
    3 days ago

    I love that the balloons are far too small. Like they didn’t understand the elements and buoyancy well enough to know the balloons have to be much larger. Not like we have negative mass particles.