Get 10% Off Your First Site And Domain At Squarespace
https://www.squarespace.com/found

NEW CHANNEL:
   • Nazi Sun Gun - Using The Sun To Melt ...  

Original animations here:
   • Nuclear-Powered Sky Hotel  

Discord:   / discord  
My News Channel:    / @aviationstationyt  

Join this channel to get access to perks:
   / @foundandexplained  
Patreon:
  / foundandexplained  

With all pop culture, it has a humble beginning. Back in the far off year of 2012, an artist by the name of Tony Holmsten created an art series called killer is dead.

In it, he featured what can only be descriptive is a Miyazaki era laputa creation that seems to defire gravity.

While impressive, its our next artist, Alexander Tujicov
Who turned it into a 3d model. Its been so popular that hes increased the price up to 500 usd - which credit where credit is due, the 3d is so good that it fooled the world.

Then enters our hero of the story - Hashem Al-Ghaili. As part of some worldbuilding on reddit, he used the model to describe a fantastical flying hotel.

One that could carry 5000 passengers all over the world with luxury that isn’t even found on cruise ships. Everything from restaurants, shopping malls hospitals to even a 360 sky deck.

Such a large aircraft of course, would require a powersource that is equally bonkers. Fusion nuclear power. With near unlimited nuclear fuel, it could fly forever and never have to land.

Which btw, is the same concept behind the equally insane lockheed flying aircraft carrier which i covered on the channel - which you can watch here.

To ensure a safe passage, the plane would use state of the art artificial intelligence to pilot the craft and navigate turbulence - using what the author describes as noise cancelling technology.

Passengers would fly on convered 747s from the ground up to the sky cruiser to dock, and from there, experience the very best that the earth, and sky, has to offer.

The media once catching wind of this, went to town and declared that engineers in germany were working on this concept and that it could by flying within the next 10 years. Outrageously claiming as much as the dubai airline emirates already making orders - something that really puts to show how little research some news organizations do.

Its not the first time that the media has fallen to the hype of a flying sky hotel. Back in 2009, the media was tricked that the Mi-12, the worlds largest production helicopter, had been bought to be turned into a helicopter hotel - or dubbed the “Hotelicopter”. Which I think is a fancinating concept.

So what would it be like if this plane actually existed?
Well for one there are all sorts of engineering questions, let alone the laws of thermodynamics, that we need to take into consideration.


The first is the power source. Fusion energy doesn’t exist, and using nuclear power, even fission, onboard a plane, is a immature technology. I’ve covered in detail the experiments to build a nuclear powered bomber, and while in theory its something possibile, it might not be exactly something you want to do.

With 5000 passengers onboard you would need to absolutely make sure the radiation shelding is up to spec, and that there is a safe way to evacuate all the passengers within 60 seconds on the ground - something that clears aircraft to fly by the FAA.

Other questions raised are about where on earth this would take off to begin with, perhaps out in the middle of a desert somewhere, and how on earth it would be resupplied with food and water. Even the best aspirations require more than just

Lastly, we didn’t even mention the cost to build such an aircraft, nor the new engineering technologies we would need to develop to build it.

But theres one gaping question I have. Would it even be any good to be onboard? If you are like me and have flown long haul across this planet, there isn’t exactly a ton to see once your up in the sky and flying. I’m not saying the view isn’t utterly spectature, but after a while your just looking at clouds. Any landmark or site would be quickly flown by and you would blink and miss it - an advantage that our humble cruise ship has over this aircraft.

And as one redditor put it, "I'd like a zeppelin, but more expensive, more difficult to operate, and more dangerous, please."

But what if we wanted to make a sky hotel? What would that actually look like?