No, it's just a water-walking horse.

The rich do have flying cars. They just call them private jets. The rich own mansions (huge houses) all over the world, private islands, mega yachts that contain smaller yachts, their own submarines, and now they even have their own rocket ships

They're on a carriage that's like pontooned at the bottom, being pulled by the horse and driver who each have their own balloons.

edit oh wait d'you mean the ones in the back right my bad dk about them

Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.

Yes, I did the math.

Hot air balloon pilot here: We do, indeed.

This is a "Cloudhopper". It's a hot air balloon with no basket: The pilot straps a propane tank to his back and wears a climbing harness. As you can see, the pilot is, effectively, walking on water with the assistance of the balloon.

Cloudhoppers are about 20,000 to 35,000 cubic feet, 40-50 feet in diameter. They are about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of most of the balloons you might see at a fair or festival.

And you don't have an issue with the carriage, with three people on it, where the only balloon is on the horse?

Whoever made this was an artist and sucked at physics

If we had spent the time working on the real problems, this would have already been solved.

Obviously they were assuming balloons were filled with supervacuum. We have had 100 years and not invented even that.

Truly we have failed our ancestors.

ah so german cacao is the red bull of the 1900s, it gives you wings.

attach giant balloons to ships

Sounds like you're vaguely describing a ground effect vehicle, basically a plane which coasts along the water. They're more efficient than actually flying due to exploiting the ground effect on the lift surfaces, but ultimately it's closer to a plane than a boat

The boat already floats. What is the point of making it lighter? Boats are handy for transporting extreme weights because water weighs more than air.

If it should fly then get a Zepplin

Any amount of water contact introduces a fair amount of drag. There may be an ideal point somewhere in the middle, but I think if you take this to it's natural conclusion you get a zeppelin.

I did a little bit of math and I think that to lift the payload capacity (including fuel and crew) of a modern day Panama canal ship you would need about a tenth of the peak U.S. helium reserve (a cube about half a kilometer long on each edge, about 1.3x longer than the long dimension of the ship)

I don't think you'd get the best fuel efficiency going upwind lol

Anything smaller would come with proportionally less downsides and at least proportionally less benefits. I doubt it could ever be a net positive in any useful metric.