Honestly if they've improved the efficiency of sails then that's great, but this marketting text is still silly enough to go here.
Sort of like the white explorers "discovering" Machu Picchu...
i was reading about this stuff when we had a thread about hare-brained eco-schemes, what's significantly different about this technology is it's "self rigging" and computer controlled. it's a sailing ship with low enough labor costs to maybe be feasible for commercial use.
it's also intended to be retrofitted onto existing cargo ships to drastically reduce fuel consumption and emissions, but they're still in the design/concept stage and have only recently announced that they're building the first full-scale prototype sail.
it's pretty neat and good within the acknowledged confines of the economics, tbh. still think it'd be more fun to employ 80 people rigging but c'est la vie
We'll heave him up an away we'll go
'Way, me Susiana!
dash mine drown-ed corpse against the rocks and feed me bloodied bits to the mako
Though experiments at upgrading sails are century old, first rotor ship was constructed in 1924 and this looks like next iteration of turbosail, tech from 1980's.
i don't think lateen yacht rigging is that transferrable to cargo, maybe someone's trying to up-scale it that way too... but looking at old clippers it seems very challenging
damn, that sounds cool. it might be more expensive or not automated enough wrt trimming (surely they could figure this out) & that's why the op sort of thing are getting more hype
or the op type is gadgetbahn snakeoil and actual sail-powered cargo will eventually be mostly automatic clippers
Related tech, I think someone's been working on spinning cylinders as sails. They're omnidirectional or something, pretty cool. But industry dummies fret over sails on cargo ships because "muh cranes". Like bro, we've split the atom, we've put people on the moon, we edit DNA, we have quantum computing, someday we'll have nuclear fusion... And y'all say you can't figure out how to stack boxes around a freaking pole, or maybe have an enclosed deck that side loads? Just a little bit of a work around to help our planet not turn into Venus?
Rotor ships are old tech! They existed and worked in the 1920s!
Let's combine ships and trains. Tug a bunch of engineless freight ships out to sea and then link them up with a ship with huge efficient sails that can tow a bunch of open ocean container barges. No idea if it's practical or not but I like the idea of sailing trains.
They force starving swimmers to pull the train-ships
I'm guessing braking without (1) causing a pile-up or (2) snapping the tow-lines will be a problem.
i googled it and i did find the quote but it was from some kind of "isnt science cool?!??!?!? I LOOOOOVE SCIENCE" type shit rag, writing about the project.
"isnt science cool?!??!?!? I LOOOOOVE SCIENCE"
Alex Kurtzman writing team taking notes right about now.
Yea it's a great idea but the absolute lack of historical literacy to write "worlds first wind powered sailing vessel" is mind blowing. They're fucking named after the thing that catches the wind to make it go.
Watching training videos on how to be part of the amazon aquatic rowing fulfilment center
The Onion:
"When Boeing's airplane fuselage's all imploded, CEO's brainstormed ways to use all the left over wings. In a genius move using the now spare wings has improved efforts to reduce fossil fuel use /green house gas emissions while also adding a new revenue stream to the beleaguered aircraft company. What was this genius idea? Mounting the wings on top of cargo ships..."
forgot the word "cargo" before "vessel". Looks like they're actually building these things though so it'll be interesting to see if they work
Most of the big sailing ships we think of in the past were for cargo so 🤷
Oldest known sailing ships were made by Egyptians around 4000 BC, and through small, they did have sails and most likely were used to carry cargo. First historically mentioned sea cargo was iirc pharaoh Cheops importing copper from Sinai.
going back to 4k bce to organize an anti cargoship luddite movement amongst the copper ass-porters of tge sinai desert
It's also fugly as hell as if someone merged Greek triere, British clipper and tesla car.
