51–60 of 70 posts
Surely the most effective way of improving shipping efficiency is to stop shipping as much? The principal of locality can be applied to far more than memory architectures.
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> that may be balanced out by higher climate change impact when it's mined. What do you mean by that? Natural gas is taken from oil wells, the exact same kind of holes in the ground that produce bunker fuel. It's the highest level on the refinery column. Edit: Here is a picture of the gas market right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#/media/File:Niger_De... If LNG pans out we would move those fires into t…
> Natural gas is taken from oil wells There's a large boom, not new at this point, in extracting natural gas via fracking. My understanding is that the process produces emissions with high impact on climate change.
Edit: If the concern is that the economics of NG are driving higher consumption, then you've got to realize that you could still reclaim the net win by doing some legal thing to halt consumption. The important variables here are damage per consumption and consumption: you want to lower both, but if an improvement in damage per consumption raises consumption you don't want to go back and make the damage per consumption worse. The only reasonable course of action if the damage was too high would be to go in and say, keep using the least-damaging fuel but you're going to have to burn less of it.
I love how the concept sailing ships look nothing at all like traditional sailing craft. Turns out that we have over a thousand years of experience designing and operating sailing cargo craft - maybe it wouldn't hurt to look at some of the older designs guys?
Have you taken a look at what designers do when they have access to modern materials and control systems? They don't design Triremes, for good reason. Have a gander at the America's Cup boats, for instance.
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And, I have to say, as a navy surface officer, I don't see how much of any of this is going to change the sailor's life. Living on a working ship is a bit like being a mouse on the deck of a lawnmower. For all intents and purposes, you're in the machine, and it will kill you.
> I don't see how much of any of this is going to change the sailor's life While sailors' lives are important in themselves, what do you see as the connection to the issue at hand, reducing climate change impact? > it will kill you Every sailor dies? I don't understand what you're getting at.
> Every sailor dies? I don't understand what you're getting at.
He means that life at sea is one of managed risk. For starters the ocean itself is hostile to human life. The machine is is also filled with hazards that will kill you if they aren't properly managed: steam, ionizing radiation, CO and CO2 build-up, combustion exhaust gasses, high pressure hydraulics, seawater flooding, electric shock and electrolysis hazards, rotating machinery hazards, the list goes on.
As someone that has designed (military) ships, here are my thoughts. - LNG is definitely happening, and that alone will make a massive difference in emissions. - No shit smoother bottoms and bulbous bows are better for efficiency, that's been standard practice for decades and large cargo ships are generally not that old. - Counter rotating props are interesting, I could see that being a big win but the mechanical com…
> As someone that has designed (military) ships Hey, me too! I see you were at Electric Boat. I was at NAVSEA HQ at around the same, probably making your life difficult. :) Though I did surface combatants, not subs.
As someone that has designed (military) ships, here are my thoughts. - LNG is definitely happening, and that alone will make a massive difference in emissions. - No shit smoother bottoms and bulbous bows are better for efficiency, that's been standard practice for decades and large cargo ships are generally not that old. - Counter rotating props are interesting, I could see that being a big win but the mechanical com…
I would expect counter rotating props to be more reliable. Instead of one big engine/prop you have two smaller ones. While it is more likely that something will break, it isn't a catastrophic failure: you continue to your destination using just the other engine/prop.
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Hydrofoils are generally higher drag at low speed, they only make sense when you want to go faster than displacement speed. That doesn't make sense for most cargo, anything time sensitive is going by air.
There is a large gap in price and performance between 15-knot container ships and 500-knot aircraft. The former costs $0.1 per ton and takes months (7+37+7 day cargo transit), the later costs $5 per ton and does it in less than a day. There are already lots of hydrofoil passenger ferries where passengers pay a lot less than a plane ticket but more than a slow monohull ferry ticket to get to a destination a bit more q…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, I have to say, as a navy surface officer, I don't see how much of any of this is going to change the sailor's life. Living on a working ship is a bit like being a mouse on the deck of a lawnmower. For all intents and purposes, you're in the machine, and it will kill you.
> I don't see how much of any of this is going to change the sailor's life While sailors' lives are important in themselves, what do you see as the connection to the issue at hand, reducing climate change impact? > it will kill you Every sailor dies? I don't understand what you're getting at.
As someone that has designed (military) ships, here are my thoughts. - LNG is definitely happening, and that alone will make a massive difference in emissions. - No shit smoother bottoms and bulbous bows are better for efficiency, that's been standard practice for decades and large cargo ships are generally not that old. - Counter rotating props are interesting, I could see that being a big win but the mechanical com…
What about solar? I know it does not scale down very well or work for the military, but solar seems useful for the largest ships. MV Barzan is a container ships that's 400 m x 58.6 m. If you take say 400m x 50m * 24% solar panels that's ~6500 HP in full sun. I know the engines are significantly larger than that but not sure how much they use at cruising speed.