Modern cargo ships are so huge traditional sails wouldn’t provide enough force to push them around. Neither will these kites, mind you. But, supplemental energy will still be a bonus, and a kite can reach higher and sit in faster, more stable winds.
Modern cargo ships are so huge traditional sails wouldn’t provide enough force to push them around.
Believe it or not, “proportionality” is a thing. You make the ship bigger, you make the sails bigger to match. Simple! Granted, previously, making sails bigger was limited by the weight of the things when hoisted by men operating manual winches, but now we’ve got motors now to solve that, and higher strength-to-weight ratio materials, too.
Point is: I maintain that, in principle, you could make a post-Panamax sailing ship – even a traditional fully-rigged one – if you really wanted to, and it would be capable of sailing at hull speed on wind power alone. It’s just that they don’t want to for reasons unrelated to technical feasibility.
A bigger challenge would be sourcing enough shantymen to be feasible. I’m not sure that the world has sufficient production capacity to provide the necessary rum for more than a handful of ships.
You underestimate the force of wetted surface area resistance. The sail area needed to move a modern cargo ship at the snail’s pace of old sailing ships would be unmanageably large. You simply couldn’t hold enough sail area to get them near their current speeds. These hybrid sail concepts are nice, but all they do is save some fuel.
So, I got that information from a different Lemmy comment, and on the spur of your contradiction I went looking myself. My search results are flooded with mostly useless news articles (they went to tell stories, not relay technical information). Regardless, the most ambitious claim I’ve seen is to reduce emissions by up to 90% for a ship design that can’t handle shipping containers and is about 1/4 the size of the largest ships being produced today.
Don’t get me wrong, I want this to happen. In fact, I would ban carbon-fuel shipping today, if I could make it happen. That being said, I don’t think we’ll ever get back to 100% wind power.
The sail kite project has had claims of up to 10% fuel savings for about 20 years, now.
It’s all moot when we should just be focusing on figuring out practical nuclear shipping. It’s the only way to meet or exceed our current standard and be carbon-free. The NS Savannah proved it could be profitable ages ago, and that without any economy of scale to reduce costs.
Hmm i feel like there it was a case of working against the ocean whereas here I think it is working with the wind so it shouldn’t be THAT bad… but who knows…
Modern cargo ships are so huge traditional sails wouldn’t provide enough force to push them around. Neither will these kites, mind you. But, supplemental energy will still be a bonus, and a kite can reach higher and sit in faster, more stable winds.
Believe it or not, “proportionality” is a thing. You make the ship bigger, you make the sails bigger to match. Simple! Granted, previously, making sails bigger was limited by the weight of the things when hoisted by men operating manual winches, but now we’ve got motors now to solve that, and higher strength-to-weight ratio materials, too.
Point is: I maintain that, in principle, you could make a post-Panamax sailing ship – even a traditional fully-rigged one – if you really wanted to, and it would be capable of sailing at hull speed on wind power alone. It’s just that they don’t want to for reasons unrelated to technical feasibility.
You’re assuming everything scales linearly, which is not necessarily accurate. The square-cube law rains on many people’s parades.
I can see how you’d think that, but I’m really just asserting that these specific things scale well enough to still work at post-Panamax size.
A bigger challenge would be sourcing enough shantymen to be feasible. I’m not sure that the world has sufficient production capacity to provide the necessary rum for more than a handful of ships.
I have it on good authority that the Wellerman will handle this issue, along with any concerns with tea and sugar supply
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Not really. Drag grows with area and so does force from a sail. The larger ships will be faster per unit volume if anything.
Sailing cargo ship is a thing. There’s a record breaker recently in fact.
You underestimate the power of wind, stranger.
You underestimate the force of wetted surface area resistance. The sail area needed to move a modern cargo ship at the snail’s pace of old sailing ships would be unmanageably large. You simply couldn’t hold enough sail area to get them near their current speeds. These hybrid sail concepts are nice, but all they do is save some fuel.
So, I got that information from a different Lemmy comment, and on the spur of your contradiction I went looking myself. My search results are flooded with mostly useless news articles (they went to tell stories, not relay technical information). Regardless, the most ambitious claim I’ve seen is to reduce emissions by up to 90% for a ship design that can’t handle shipping containers and is about 1/4 the size of the largest ships being produced today.
Don’t get me wrong, I want this to happen. In fact, I would ban carbon-fuel shipping today, if I could make it happen. That being said, I don’t think we’ll ever get back to 100% wind power.
The sail kite project has had claims of up to 10% fuel savings for about 20 years, now.
It’s all moot when we should just be focusing on figuring out practical nuclear shipping. It’s the only way to meet or exceed our current standard and be carbon-free. The NS Savannah proved it could be profitable ages ago, and that without any economy of scale to reduce costs.
They found out rhe hard way with the Ever Given
Hmm i feel like there it was a case of working against the ocean whereas here I think it is working with the wind so it shouldn’t be THAT bad… but who knows…
It was more a comment on the power of wind on a modern container ship.