Forget the balloons. I want that water treadmill unicycle!
I’m pretty sure they actually exist
I’ve seen bicycle paddle boats; where can I find a unicycle paddle boat?
When you have the chance to ride a water horse? Forget it.
millicycle
They were very into helium and balloons
We do have the technology for this… right?
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
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.
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.
The pilot straps a propane tank to his back
And if you’re willing to do that you’re sent to nearest psychiatrist, right?
You can’t get a balloon pilot’s license without a formal diagnosis. :)
Already nightmare fuel even with just the basket. But THAT is just foolishness. Pardon my language.
This is the coolest shit I’ve seen all month. Just when you think the world is running out of interesting ideas, you come across something like this and realize you will never see it all.
Windsurfing? 🏄♀️
Or kitesurfing
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.
What if the balloon was rigid and filled with vacuum?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Zeppelin skating. In the air. We should start this business.
Are we…
Are we doing this right now, BootyBuccaneer?
Fuck it I’m in. What could I possibly lose besides a couple limbs and my life savings.
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.
We thank you balloon master!
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.
What if the balloons were long and vertical like the ones in Dune? That could allow them to walk closer to one another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You did the basic math, with your spherical balloon. What about giant cylinders? Then you could really pack it in.
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…
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.
I fail to see the problem.
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
“Bro your mom mends my massive cylinder every day.”
I feel like this whole thread was a setup for this. Bravo!
I’ll just compress more helium and make the balloon metal so its stronger and holds more in a smaller space
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?
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
I actually went to that timeline! And its more complex than you think because well yes, there technology is far cooler and more whimsical, abd yes there world is more socialistic, has more free time, better prices and less of a late stage capitalism nightmare…
But you should just see how many racial slurs those people used just this morning and half of those women cant vote and have polio.
Also I am pretty sure left-handed people got hunted to extinction for some reason
Timeline hopping is a mixed bag
I understand why you didn’t stay in that one, but why the hell would you come back to this timeline??
Well I went to a timeline where Reddit managed to organize a nuclear attack against Russia and it backfired HARD, a timeline where we never moved on from the 90s which sounds awesome and it was but the uncriticized ultra-consumption of those times eventually laid waste to the world, a world where JK Rowling succeded at making TERFs the mainstream feminism wave, a timeline where X is the ONLY major website left in the world and its as awful as it sounds, a timeline where being a CIS man was illegal, a timeline where Musk is president, a timeline where pernanently horny sentient sex-robots rule over humanity and a timeline where the soviet union defeated the United States during the cold war so “President” Putin is the most powerful man in the world.
So yeah…I think there is a problem with my dimensional hopper, it only sends me to “dark” timelines
Which way to the sexbot timeline?
Its in the XYZ 234.ERE12 quantum coordinates, warn you though they are HORNY!
Back? They’re just passing through
Yeah I will NOT be staying here, the fallout-like timeline was better which is saying something
There are two people water-walking without balloons behind the two women on the left. Time travelers? Aliens? The JFK assassins? We deserve the truth!
We got much better things though.
Requires disposable income :(
Balloons and watercycles wouldn’t?
Balloons are surprisingly cheap for a finite gas resource
Literally just build a bridge, you hyper-individualistic consumer-centric assholes.
I think the idea here is people want to go out and enjoy the day. Not just walk across a bridge. Next time think before you comment. You sound rarted as fuck
rarted? If you’re going to insult someone at least spell check yourself, lmfao.
Nah, you just dont know the old meme
Oh no, the Groypers are here.
So, they did predict the water rising.
I do like how it has the sensibilities at the time. Being super dangerous to anyone who uses it.
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?
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
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
attach giant balloons to ships
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.
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.
I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.
Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.
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
I meam, we did get water skiing and stuff like that.
I feel ripped off yet again!
The two Jesuses in the background don’t have balloons!
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
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.
They just thought they’d do everything they did back then, but on water? And with mini blimps?
Fuck being able to buy a house or afford rent, people need mini blimps! (Right, it’s not just me?)
They just thought they’d do everything they did back then, but with balloons. They could already walk on water back then.
