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How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

#61

Post by gabereiser »

throw0101a wrote: post #50
gabereiser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larger sailing vessels (10m+) are actually moving towards solar + hydroelectric with lithium batteries (48v) to power electric engines and generators. Sailing with wind power uses the hydroelectric generators and solar. Motor sailing uses solar and you regen a little bit from hydro or a wind turbine. https://www.sailinguma.com/

Dan and Kika of Sailing Uma themselves recognize that this setup is not for everyone. Here's an interview with them on Sailing Ruby Rose on the subject: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOAXi5huV1U A better solution, for the time being, may be what Rebuilding Tally Ho is doing and use a hybrid engine: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xohxmwPfctg He specifically chose a Beta Marine (marinized Kubota) diesel that has…

Awesome thanks for that! I wasn’t aware of Beta Marine’s hybrid engine. Looks awesome but definitely pricey.

Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

#62

Post by gabereiser »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #11
gabereiser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larger sailing vessels (10m+) are actually moving towards solar + hydroelectric with lithium batteries (48v) to power electric engines and generators. Sailing with wind power uses the hydroelectric generators and solar. Motor sailing uses solar and you regen a little bit from hydro or a wind turbine. https://www.sailinguma.com/

The article essentially dismisses lithium batteries as non-sustainable.

All batteries are non-sustainable. They burn out eventually.

Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

#63

Post by _carbyau_ »

carapace wrote: post #55
_carbyau_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ok. But my limited understanding of material science says no. For now at least. Material strength doesn't scale well to go "properly big big" in the sci-fi sense. OTOH, I am constantly amazed by what material science keeps managing to do, so I have hopes that maybe one day your dream will be true.

Cheers! Are you familiar with Bucky Fuller's concept of "tensegrity"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ He pointed out that the struts could recursively be made out of tensegrity structures. Or you can make them out of balloons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity I was being a little coy in my previous comment. The structures I'm thinking of are more like…

While not aware of the phrase tensegrity I have rarely seen various forms of "floating tables".

Initial thoughts:

- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.

- could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot.

- maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections.

- I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play.

- As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity".

Including an airship with a toe in the water. :-)

Finally, I simply don't know enough.(Do we ever?) It looks cool and is worth investigating further. I am going to lose lots of time thinking about, checking out and printing out occasional bits from thingiverse now!

Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

#64

Post by carapace »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #63
carapace wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheers! Are you familiar with Bucky Fuller's concept of "tensegrity"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ He pointed out that the struts could recursively be made out of tensegrity structures. Or you can make them out of balloons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity I was being a little coy in my previous comment. The structures I'm thinking of are more like…

While not aware of the phrase tensegrity I have rarely seen various forms of "floating tables". Initial thoughts: - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect. - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot. - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs t…

Cheers!

> - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.

I recommend building physical models. It's hard to convey how strong and light these structures can be. Very "against intuition". :)

> - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-2014...

Yes. :)

> - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

Bucky again.

(Kevlar tendons and carbon fiber struts...)

> - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play.

I'm not an engineer, but we can already build some impressive structure w/o advanced materials. Cf. "bamboo scaffolding" (DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&at... )

I'm imagining swarm cellular kite robots that can self-organize to create whatever size lifting body is needed. I'm thinking about things like how to move millions of people at a time (which we might want to do due to climate change, etc.)

Have you read Vinge's "Rainbows End" (sic)? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End ) There are buildings in the story that are too flimsy to stand up without active control and feedback, something like that could work with these kite-bots.

> - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity".

We don't have to go that far (although it would be neat if we could, diamond vacuum bubbles?) Did you read about "Cloud Nine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere)

I've thought about this a lot but not yet gotten my act together enough to do it. I wrote up some of it here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C202012290... ("heliotrope.pajamas" is my mailing list if you want to reach me in re: this stuff)

Well met!

Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #33

A natural gas powered container ship would probably have lower emissions per unit of cargo moved than the proposed "eco" sailing ship, which has low cargo capacity by modern standards. The big problem with cargo ships from a pollution standpoint is that they run on really crappy "bunker oil C", which is about halfway between jet fuel and asphalt. Heavier than seawater. One of the biggest sources of preventable pollut…

[deleted]
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