Intel’s 916,000-pound shipment is a “cold box,” a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long, nearly the length of a football field. The immense scale of the cold box necessitates a transit process that moves at a “parade pace” of 5-10 miles per hour. Intel is taking over southern Ohio’s roads for the next several weeks and months as it builds its new Ohio One Campus, a $28 billion project to create a 1,000-acre campus with two chip factories and room for more. Calling it the new “Silicon Heartland,” the project will be the first leading-edge semiconductor fab in the American Midwest, and once operational, will get to work on the “Angstrom era” of Intel processes, 20A and beyond.
I don’t know why, but I’ve never thought of the transport logistics involved in building a semiconductor fabrication plant.
They aren’t very good, and they probably can’t be. You’re limited by the laws of physics on what they can carry for their enormous size. The Hindenberg was the largest of them, but including passengers and crew together, it carried less than 100 people. They scale really, really poorly.
We can improve on old dirigibles somewhat with lighter weight materials and engines. We’re ultimately limited by the volume of the lifting gas, and we’re just not going to add that much more capacity. Even if someone figured out a vacuum dirigible (which would be very vulnerable to a puncture), it’d only improve things marginally. It’s an interesting engineering challenge, though.
One thing where dirigibles might be useful is windmill blades. Blades aren’t that heavy, but they can’t get much bigger while being transported on highways. Constructing the blades on site is another option, so we’ll see which one wins.
Science and engineering aren’t magic that makes everything better over time always, and people need to stop acting like it does. There are physical limits that we can’t breach. As another example, we haven’t significantly improved on the drag coefficient of designs by Porsche or the Chrysler Airflow back in the 1930s. There was a design Mercedes came up with a while back that’s based on the boxfish that did reduce it further, but its frontal cross section is so high that it doesn’t matter, anyway. (It’s also ugly as fuck, but that’s a different matter.)
Isn’t the more recent direction airships?
Lifting volume and flammability (is that a word?). It’s just a very volatile gas and we’re not going to magic that away with fancy tech. There are more reliable ways to move freight through the air.