What the Post Is Playing With
The "flying airport" is a recurring obsession in aviation history: from the airship carriers of last century (the U.S. military actually built two, "airborne mother ships" carrying fighters), to the floating cities of science fiction, to the revival of the "mobile takeoff-and-landing platform" concept in today's drone era. The post strings this thread together to play with—engineering's impossibilities and possibilities, history's accidents and obsessions, paired with old photos and design drawings—it's the classic HN "useless but fascinating" content.
Why It's Worth Keeping a Slot For
This one has nothing to do with AI, and we won't pretend it does. We keep it because content like this has its own value: a history of engineering imagination. Every era has its "know it's very hard but still want to build it" thing, and the flying airport is to the twentieth century roughly what artificial general intelligence is to now. Reading the stories of those old engineers struggling within technical constraints is a mirror for today's frontier chasers. Also, the comments, as usual, gather a crowd of aviation-history enthusiasts, and the trivia they add is even more than the main text—worth scrolling to the bottom.
via: Hacker News