Were we not getting airships for this purpose? The ones with a butt?

A diagram comparing it to the 747s and oil tankers mentioned in the text would have been appreciated.

OK, looked it up. 108m v 72m. Kvikk diagram, pretty much to scale:

       ,    ||
   WR  ============
       ‘    ||

       ,  \\
   747 ========
       ‘  //

This reminds me of an excellent series of lectures I once attended about how you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator, you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper, and you can't have practical electric lighting without inventing a whole lot of power generation and distribution technology, or efficient vacuum pumps.

Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.

seems silly to embrace the design of a plane that is made to move 2 static length blades when even longer blades have been shown to continue the trend of cheaper MW.

the article mentions that 3d printing is a no-go due to the facility needed to print the blade in -- seems like it'd be better to pursue an unfolding container factory with a printer in it and how to transport that thing with conventional craft than to go all-in on a new unproven airframe made for very specific parts.

plus that way the length of the product isn't set in stone, either.

I say this as a total layman -- i'm just taking the articles stated reason for no 3d printing and running with it.

Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.

craft the blades onsite?