On Nov 8, 9:41*am, Jim Davis wrote:
William Mook wrote:
We are contemplating 16 million airships carrying 40 tons each -
0.64 billion dead weight tons - having a cycle time of 2.25 days
delivering delivering 140 billion tons of cargo per year - with
far greater flexibility than is possible with sea going ships.

How long do you imagine it would take to build 16 million airships?

The supply chain will take five years to engineer. Five years to
build. Five years to produce the fleet. As I mentioned before.
This is a production rate of 1 airship every 10 seconds once in full-
scale production. This will take about 2,000,000 workers at 100
centers and total $190 billion in capital expense along with another
$3.2 billion in development cost. The cost of each airship will be
$800,000 out the door and another $600,000 will be spent over its
useful life which is estimated to be 10 years. Over that time it will
ship 73,000 tons of material at a cost of $20 per ton - a penny a
pound.

We will produce a factory that makes factories - largely unmanned
production cells - one per week - like Henry Kaiser produced aircraft
carriers. Over a two year period we will grow from 1 production cell
to 100 - and production rate will grow from 32,000 per year to 3.2
million per year.

As a point of reference that's about 10 times the number of aircraft
built since the Wright brothers (100 years).

True, but since we won't be building these airships using existing
infrastructure, this isn't relevant.

Besides, most of those aircraft you cite were built during World War 2
- which proves my point about supply chain because of the 1.5 million
aircraft built since 1903 over half were built in the period from 1939
to 1945

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...aft_production

The world in this 7 year period produced nearly 800,000 aircraft of
all types.

This shows that when production is organized, significant things can
be done relatively quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militar...g_World_War_II

Look at aircraft carriers produced by the Allies. Note the vast
difference Henry Kaiser played in aircraft carrier production for the
Allies. His Vancouver shipyard produced its first Aircraft Carrier in
April 1943. He produced 50 carriers in less than a year! That's 3x
more than all the Axis powers put together. Throughout the war
Kaiser's dry docks and shipyards put out 140 major ships.

Now consider Automobile production figures before Henry Ford's supply
chain innovations and after Henry Ford's supply chain innovations.

Henry Ford organized an assembly line and outproduced all other
manufacturers at vastly less cost than anyone else - notwithstanding
the low levels of production and high prices before that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Au...uction_Figures

From 1899 through 1901 there were fewer than 700 automobiles produced
per year. Five years later Ford alone produced over 8,700 cars and
the industry nearly 20,000 copying his methods. Ten years after that
Ford produced over 500,000 cars and industry copying many of his
methods produced nearly 200,000 more. By 1923 Ford alone produced
over 1.8 million cars and the rest of the industry produced another
million.

This vast increase in the rate of production reflected the rate of
investment in new productive techniques and new supply chains.

Building and keeping in service 16 million airships of the type you
describe is far, far beyond global industrial capacity.

That is correct. To produce this many airships in five years and
maintain them over 10 years and produce replacements over that time
will require investment in a supply chain designed to achieve this
end. The present industrial supply chain is not organized to produce
vehicles of this type on this scale. Its a classic make-buy strategy
favoring make. The same supply chain that produces the vehicles will
make parts and maintain them and produce replacement vehicles
recycling parts and materiel from retired vehicles.


Jim Davis