How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
lowtechmagazine.com
How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#2> The amount of cargo that was traded across the oceans in 2019 equals the freight capacity of 22.4 million EcoClippers. Assuming the EcoClipper500 can make 2-3 trips per year, we would need to build and operate at least 7.5 million ships, with a total crew of at least 90 million people. Those ships could only take 0.5 billion passengers (12 passengers and 8 trainees per ship), so we would need millions of ships and crew members more to replace international air traffic.
Interesting article but I'd like to hear about other large scale sail boat designs, perhaps even mega-catamaran sailboats..
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#3> The amount of cargo that was traded across the oceans in 2019 equals the freight capacity of 22.4 million EcoClippers. Assuming the EcoClipper500 can make 2-3 trips per year, we would need to build and operate at least 7.5 million ships, with a total crew of at least 90 million people. Those ships could only take 0.5 billion passengers (12 passengers and 8 trainees per ship), so we would need millions of ships and…
These people are really serious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2WKJtbm8yM
IDK how many forrests have to be cut down though.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#4Make it big, get it up out of the water.
The larger your ship is the more efficient it can be, and the less of it in the water the less energy is needed to push it.
So make big big ships with really really big sails. You want the ships to fly with just the keel in the water to steer against the wind.
You might think I'm joking or talking nonsense, but look up Alexander Bell's cellular geodesic kites, and Bucky Fuller's "Cloud Nine" floating city.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#5I hope we get rid of cargo ships that burn matter. But sails are too high maintenance to be scalable.
Last year, as an experiment I've launched a tiny solar-powered boat ([1]). Ultimately, it was too small and underpowered only making ~900km ([2]) before dying.
I hope to build a bigger drone boat next, hopefully with an ability to move up to 1 tonne of cargo. Apparently, it's possible, but (unfortunately) requires very delicate engineering.
For bigger boats solar does not seem to scale. It appears that nuclear is the ultimate future for megaships.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#6I hope we get rid of cargo ships that burn matter. But sails are too high maintenance to be scalable. Last year, as an experiment I've launched a tiny solar-powered boat ([1]). Ultimately, it was too small and underpowered only making ~900km ([2]) before dying. I hope to build a bigger drone boat next, hopefully with an ability to move up to 1 tonne of cargo. Apparently, it's possible, but (unfortunately) requires ve…
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.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#7I hope we get rid of cargo ships that burn matter. But sails are too high maintenance to be scalable. Last year, as an experiment I've launched a tiny solar-powered boat ([1]). Ultimately, it was too small and underpowered only making ~900km ([2]) before dying. I hope to build a bigger drone boat next, hopefully with an ability to move up to 1 tonne of cargo. Apparently, it's possible, but (unfortunately) requires ve…
This. Anachronism is not the answer. These newly built tall ships will never be anything more than in essence a vanity project for brands that want to highlight their environmentalism.
If you want an efficient modern cargo sail ship, you should start with freestanding self trimming wingsails. These have roughly 3x more lift vs drag at the same sail area. But far more importantly: they can be controlled entirely by deflecting a small control surface, similar to the rudder on an aircraft. This can be automated nearly trivially with commodity hydroelectric actuators, redundant electronics, etc.
Making those out of a sustainable material vs the common composites is an open project. But I strongly suspect even using modern materials, over the lifetime of the ship, such a ship would have better net carbon footprint than modern tall ships, if you're honest about the staggering amount of labor that goes into building and operating tall ships, and the footprint that has.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#8Book recommendation if you found this article interesting (and haven't already read the book, a classic) :
Eric Newby, The Last Grain Race
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#9I would expect a 21st century sailing ship to have sails built like wind turbine blades, positioned autonomously.
Re: How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
#10Does anybody have a good book or good resources for nuclear powered merchant marine? Naively it makes sense that nuclear power could support much larger ships and go much faster than diesel, but i don't know how true that actually is.