191–198 of 198 posts
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How do you drive a container ship over land? I Think the point is that you could use this across the USA or other large geographic bodies for similar efficiency that you see with a container ship on water.
Wonderful thing called a railroad network.
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Helium is scarce in much the same way that crude oil is scarce: there are plenty of reserves still in the ground, but we are consuming them orders of magnitude faster than they were produced, and as the reserves dwindle the costs of extraction will rise. Helium is a chemical element, and aside from nuclear reactions (which are economically infeasible for non-microscopic quantities) we can't produce more of it.
Did you mean to imply we are consuming crude oil "orders of magnitude faster than [reserves are] produced"? Because that isn't true - the amount of oil "known reserves" is how much we've bothered to find and figure out to tap thus far, but whenever it seems like we might be running out we just go find and figure out how to produce more such that total known reserves are approximately stable-to-mildly-increasing. Here…
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On the contrary, the rational way of solving a complex problem that cannot be addressed entirely is to break it down into smaller ones, estimate their individual cost/impact/risk and start with the most cost-effective options. In fact, people who actively shame others for eating meat, having vacations, and raising kids, are doing exactly that. Except, instead of optimizing the ecological impact, they optimize their o…
Not eating meat (or eating less meat) is VERY cost-effective and very easy to do.
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On the contrary, the rational way of solving a complex problem that cannot be addressed entirely is to break it down into smaller ones, estimate their individual cost/impact/risk and start with the most cost-effective options. In fact, people who actively shame others for eating meat, having vacations, and raising kids, are doing exactly that. Except, instead of optimizing the ecological impact, they optimize their o…
Not eating meat (or eating less meat) is VERY cost-effective and very easy to do.
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Hope they still get covered with a thick layer of thermite.
You mean "thermite, the well-known incendiary compound"? https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Thermite
If they were serious they would have calculated the max theoretical energetic efficiency of Zeppelin cargo hauling and realized they should stop
Can you expand, or give some numbers?
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There was a company working on hydrofoils for cargo ships in one of the recent YC batches. No idea how it’s going, but they at least seem to think it’s possible to put foils on something large.
Boundary Layer Technologies is developing small cargo hydrofoils to compete with air freight. This may be a viable niche market. But their design looks like it has only about 1% of the capacity of the largest displacement hull container ships. Hydrofoil technology doesn't scale. And the cruising speed won't be much over 50kts.
You are right on that we're developing small cargo ships at about 1% of the largest containers ships. However, a comparison to the largest container vessel is not fair. Our concept has 160 twenty-foot containers (TEU), which is the same as fourteen 747 cargo airplanes and can complete on freight duration with airfreight. Most air freight takes 3-7 days despite a 12 hours in-air transit time, and the remaining time is sitting around airports. We can deliver in 6 days across the pacific ocean, and port wait times are minimal because of our small vessel. Though, if you pay 10x the premium, you can get FedEx or DHL to deliver up to a 1 ton anywhere overnight. Airfreight moves 35% of the world's cargo value and is a $100b market, and a single airplane is only 0.06% capacity of the largest container ship. Hardly niche.
If the hydrofoils ships are too large, they will spend too much time filling the vessel rather than delivering point-to-point cargo, improving the service. Most ocean lines make 4-6 stops at ports, while a small foil ship can load quickly and make no stops, thus significantly reducing the door to door duration.
Correctly pointed out, hydrofoils do not follow the same scale laws as standard buoyancy vessel. The amount of cargo that can be delivered increases with the cube of the length assuming all else scales, meaning the fuel and crew cost per container decreases drastically with larger ships. That's why we see mega-20,000 TEU-container-ships. Hydrofoil ship lift capability scales linearly with plan area of the foil, so we don't gain much making them mega-ships.
Airships are cool. I'd like to see one built.