21–30 of 65 posts
Someone should make a sport out of this. We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry. Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't m…
Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't m…
Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started. Hawaii is looking at running some next year. https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...
"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship." Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship. Not sure why the article decided to compa…
This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL. Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).
What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time
"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship." Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship. Not sure why the article decided to compa…
This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL. Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).
A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't m…
I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations. The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days. You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which…
"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship." Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship. Not sure why the article decided to compa…
> "The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war." Check of oil prices same day article was published: WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl