btw cargo ships are already incredibly efficient tho.
even if they produce a ton of co2, when divided by actual amount of goods delivered, they are hundreds of times more efficient than trucksYeah, we really should swap out all those trucks crossing the Atlantic with cargo ships.
Why don’t we just replace all the trucks on the road with cargo ships?
Trains
Ocean trains
Oh absolutely. But why not make them even more efficient?
1,000x efficiency is good
100,000x efficiency is better.
Besides, now is the best time to do all the r&d for when fossil fuels are non-existant. Better to figure out how to mixmax wind while you have other options than when you have no choice.
My company makes sustainable packaging, and the primary way we compete as a sustainable bag product for our food grade division is eliminating the CO2 costs associated with shipping overseas (most reusable grocery bags are made in China).
As a result, it takes around 600 of our paper bags to be as bad for the environment as one reusable bag.
While overseas shipping is necessary and as efficient as it can be (so far!), it is still a major greenhouse factor (so far!)
Also everything that touches a container ship ends up on a truck at some point, so there’s not really any savings there.
Fingers crossed for the Golden Age of Sail Part 2: Wind Boogaloo, even if it hurts our bag division a bit. The net gain is too good to ignore
I think nuclear ships are more likely than giant sailships
Maybe, but nuclear cargo ships were tried before (e.g. NS Savannah, Otto Hahn) and failed because they were too expensive.)
#BringBackTrains
Kind of hard to send cargo by train across an ocean though…
Ramps. Jump it over the ocean.
Twas in reference to trucks. Highways have replaced rail and so trucks have replaced trains.
When russia collapses and the US turns Siberia into west Alaska we can just build a bridge across the Bering strait.
Yeah but in the future Arasaka is going to lay a ton of AI controlled mines all over the ocean and lose control of them and ocean travel will be impossible. Oh wait, that’s just a ttrpg and a video game. A corporation would never do something like that in today’s world…
They also use the fuel we can’t use elsewhere and many do in fact use wind power in the form of giant kites when the wind is appropriate.
Use fuel we can’t use elsewhere? They use this refuse fuel because countries literally have laws banning their use within their maritime boundaries, because they’re just that awful to burn. This shit fuel is used in international waters precisely because there are no international laws banning this.
Many use kites? The ship with the kites were a proof of concept, not a widely adopted maritime practice.
Okay but can we compare them with trains first.
Sure! What trains deliver goods across oceans? Or between distant continents?
Oh are we not just measuring distance? Because I don’t see any trucks crossing the ocean either.
They beat trains. In fact all forms of goods tranports exponentially.
Doesn’t mean they don’t pollute, but …at least you get something out of it? When American stop buying cheap Chinese shit and Chinese stop buying cheap oil from the Gulf, and when everyone stops buying produce out of season locally …you see where I’m going with this.
And that’s on top of cargo ships using the nastiest fuel IIRC.
Yup, that they do. Even what it’s pegged to for hedging - home heating oil on the Nymex - is somewhat cleaner.
I was ready to mock this, but the more I look into it the more sense it makes.
Honestly I had the same thought process
If you want Atlantic trips to take months it sure does make a lot of sense
From the article:
Estimated average speed of the Oceanbird is 10 knots. A transatlantic crossing with 7,000 cars onboard will take around 12 days (today’s crossings takes about 8 days).
Sounds utterly acceptable.
From the Wikipedia article linked below:
A rotor ship is a type of ship designed to use the Magnus effect for propulsion. The ship is propelled, at least in part, by large powered vertical rotors, sometimes known as rotor sails. German engineer Anton Flettner was the first to build a ship that attempted to tap this force for propulsion, and ships using his type of rotor are sometimes known as Flettner ships.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
See also the Magnus effect.
So nice of Magnus to put aside his chess career to help the planet
Not to mention his career as a chaos demon
The guy created LazyTown too, so he’s good on my books
What an extremely cool thing to learn! And the gifs on the article are very helpful
Curve ball boat
I know it’s just me, but everytime I hear the expression ‘What a time to be alive!’, I think of the voice of the host of the Two Minute Papers YouTube channel.
Edit: I thought it was just me, but it wasn’t just me
I think of this scene:
A fellow paper enjoyer!
Hold onto those papers!
Isn’t it like 20% fuel reduction only? Not insignificant
There are lots of grand claims for the potential of wind assist on ships, but I suspect they’re based on idealized physics and best cases. Actual results seem to be less impressive https://www.ics-shipping.org/news-item/potential-of-wind-assisted-propulsion-hindered-by-perception-and-funding-challenges/
They claim 5-10% fuel savings, which is decent, but not earth shattering. Pyxis, which started operation in August with two big wing-sails, is likely to be the best current practical evidence, but I haven’t been able to find any results online. Speculation that it might reduce fuel consumption by 3 tons/day, which is about what you could get just by slow steaming.
You see all sorts of claims on Tradewinds and Lloyd’s List, hard to know what the facts of the matter are. None of my clients (as far as I know) use them, so no first hand experience for me.
Do cargo ships go under bridges?
Many do not. Few bridges cross major harbor entrances.
But I’ve also seen this concept before. The sails retract. If you look closely you can see how they’re segmented.
Wow! Would love to see them retract, sounds really cool
Certainly not this one
Boats with sails?? Blasphemy!! How are they going to stop when they get to the edge??? Argh,me and me mateys need fossil fuels…mo mercury mo problems, ya heard?
You sunk my cargoship.
Let’s be real, we all love movies with wind powered fantasy-esque ships or conventional public transport. Sailing is just so cool and trains and trolleys are convenient or in my mind even whimsical. Why shouldn’t we take modern approaches to sustainable and minimally polluting technologies?
I took a road trip halfway across America and I have to say, having a ticket for a sleeper car would have been cheaper, faster, and convenient. Why can’t we have that option?
That doesn’t look practical at all. The point of cargo ships is to move containers, so they put them out in the open for rapid loading and unloading… Plus this “aerodynamic” design makes no sense. Most of the drag comes from what’s under the water at low speeds and if it’s a sailboat the wind will be behind them. At the scale of cargo ships some are 400m long, meaning these sails could be 200 m or more high… the small flexible blades on a wind turbine are 80 m at most.
On-deck cargo ships are not as common as you think they are. I mean sure, they’re everwhere, but they’re also VASTLY outnumbered by the amount of roll on/roll off ships. While they are for utterly massive ones, those massive ships are forced to dock at massive ports that have the infrastructure pre-built. Most of the world doesn’t have those massive ports or they have smaller ports that are closer. There are a massive amount of cargo ships that are instead a ‘roll on/roll off’ type, similar to a ferry. That’s what this ship is. The minimalistic design is odd but likely has far less to do with aerodynamics as it does with structural integrity and the fact that it’s a cargo ship. It’s also a concept image so any visual design could be left until the final stages, provided it doesn’t impact hull integrity. It doesn’t need a bunch of random designs on the outside. All other cargo ships are done in a streamlined fashion. The length of this cargo ship is actually 200m and the length of the sails are 40 meters. They’re also sails and not wind turbine blades, are retractable, turn 360 degrees, tilt and designed to be retroactively attached to multiple other ships.
Seems pretty practical to me. It’s almost like the people who designed it knew what they were doing.
This trend of looking at something, making wild assumptions based off of no data, and then judging based off of those assumptions without ever even attempting to verify them? This really needs to stop.
You’re kinda right. The person you were replying to was talking about container ships that operate on liner services, and indeed rotor (or other, there are more than one kind) sails would be impractical.
However, the vast majority of ships are not RoRos. In fact, they make up a tiny percentage of the global fleet. These kinds are sails are designed for bulk carriers and tankers which, along with container ships, make up the majority of the global fleet. If you want I can post the actual numbers (I am in the shipping and oil industry and have access to the proprietary sources that track this stuff).
The EU is making a massive push, mostly through ETS, to curb ship emissions by a signifiant amount, 40% less starting next year, and going to 50% then 70% the following two years. So sails in various forms are finally becoming a viable commercial (partial) solution.
Please don’t post proprietary data to internet without prior approvals, it might get expensive to you.
No.
if it’s a sailboat the wind will be behind them.
Sailboats are fastest when sailing across the wind, called a “Beam Reach”
Like the other person said this is a roll-on-roll-off cargo boat meaning it transports automobiles and cargo trailers. But I believe this specific one only does new cars.
As far as being aerodynamic, on a normal boat having things like biminis up can make docking difficult but with sail boats in general, a draggy top can hurt upwind performance. Meaning if you have some sleek aero superstructure then you might be able to sail 30° from the wind, but a bunch of biminis, a big square pilot house, etc might push you to 45° from the wind.
As an example, this boat might do 45° from the wind and exposed containers might push it to 55°, but that’s still better than a lot of old ships which had terrible up wind performance.
There is a different one that’s a retrofitted container ship with smaller sails. They do take up the space of a few containers but not many as far as I remember.
Edit: also every spec in this is just an example.
This looks like it might be a roll-on/roll-off cargo ship, which have covers like that. But at the speeds a ship travels aerodynamic drag is minimal so you’re right about that.
And those sails will make going under bridges pretty hairy unless they can be stowed somehow.
They’re telescoping so they can retract them for bridges or inclement weather.
Looking at their website, it looks like the wings fold in half and then lay down.
The sails in the render look segmented into 4 separate parts that are nested in one another, so I imagine they can retract into themselves from the looks of it.
Edit: Yep
Ah, okay. Like an upside down daggerboard.
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Well, they did think about for more than 10 seconds. In fact, they made a company out of it. You are the one who thought about it for 10 seconds and then gave up…
Please, expand on the downsides of using wind power to reduce fossil fuel usage.
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They will if it’s subsidized.
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They will if the fuel cost savings are larger than the loss in revenue.
Wait, why does this not sound fine? Oceanic cargo is basically the most tolerant of the the reduced speed you might see.
They’re not claiming to have invented sail power, just to have made a way to make it viable for modern container ships.Small correction on a right thinking comment: modern for any kind of ship other than container ships. Although if it takes off (which is something people have been talking about for 20 years), someone will eventually figure out how to stick some kind of sale on a post-Panamax boxship.
