My caving experience is less than yours, but I want to echo what you say. The average person envisions spacious tourist caves, not belly-crawling 800 yards through muddy gravel which has been more my experience with wild caves in the American Midwest. Gear gets shredded in caves worse than maybe any other environment, and slows you down like nothing else.

There was a recent David Attenborough narrated documentary about a huge cave system in I want to say Vietnam. In the behind the scenes making of short they said drones would not work underground due to some built in programmed restrictions. They had to contact the manufacturer to get the firmware changed to allow it.

Not mentioned here but I believe this is the correct series: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/mediapacks/planet-earth-thre...

Are you sure you're not overlooking the fact that the use case you describe is exactly what was intended by the engineers who designed this airship?

Its portable, and meant to be brought into a cave, for the case where caverns and halls are found, and need to be further explored safely.

> the one time when this would be helpful is when you enter a space with an extremely high ceiling

Yes, that is the intended use case.

Yes, I'm sure this article is interesting but only photos of this strange device will satisfy me. Thanks.

Edit: concurring with the person complaining about Facebook which I cannot access

Whyyyy Facebook?? [facepalm]

If they really want visibility, use an open platform!

Friend of mine is in business of storing natural gas in salt caverns (https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/storage/basics/). They do scan these by dropping a sonar in a drilled shaft, but this approach has limitations. Using a moving scanning airship might be helpful.

So the snak character build is +5 for narrow entries but is nerfed when the exit is a hole in the ceiling of a larger cavern, an area where the ballon is +8. Ultimately what we need is a hybrid build between ballon and snak, an inflatable snak ballon if you will, should be +3 on both. The second win is that snak motility can be driven by controlled focal inflation/deflation cycles.

See https://www.vinerobots.org/ which work like a 触手 (tentacle monster, pronounced shokushu) from an H anime.

Looking at the pictures below, it does look like they need something more narrow for realistic cave use, but they probably will need greater lift than what they get with their current low surface area shape.

Caves are dark, wet, slippery and might not even contain breathable atmosphere in some cases & could get flooded in minutes, with deadly results.

Having a foldable flying drone you could use to scout for you could help a lot when exploring caves.

As for the cave scanning - I think that is mainly so they can set their design constraints & later the bot can take over, possibly including SLAM[0]. There are already designs like that that have been tested in unexplored flooded caves[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEPTHX

https://www.xkcd.com/2128/

> 5 Use case: cave exploration as an artistic manifestation

I guess that's their answer, where calling it art is kind of a sophisticated way of saying "because it's cool". Also, the cave in question is close to them and somewhat recently discovered.

Since even a moderate breeze would make this uncontrollable in open atmosphere, it seems like a cave is one of the only places this airship can be used. And even then many caves have strong drafts that could totally disrupt use.

I watch a lot of videos of caving and cave diving disasters. I've often thought how useful something like this would be for rescue operations, especially since a number of the stories feature the rescuers dying as well.

We've basically got those now. https://www.core77.com/posts/133629/A-Throwable-Panoramic-Th...

this seems to come up often on HN!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547946

I thought you were going to mention concrete canvas, which stiffens into a semipermanent (10 year) structure when wet:

https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/

Bring your own cave?

Clean out your desk