4 ms·

There’s more than enough energy in the wind, and modern sailing technology has come a long ways. Some modern recreational sailboats can cross an ocean as fast a

• nradov 11mo ago
  Bullshit. We're not talking about recreational yachts here. There is not enough energy in wind alone to move huge merchant vessels at economically viable speeds across oceans.
  • fgfarben 11mo ago
    ...how do you think trans-oceanic trade was done before steam or diesel powered ships? Plenty of customers don't care about latency, just cost. No fuel = no fuel cost.
    • nradov 11mo ago
      You're really missing the point. The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower. Not even remotely comparable to the current global trading system. Customers care about total cost, not just fuel. There is also crew wages, maintenance, insurance, capital depreciation, etc. Sailing vessels that carry useful amounts of cargo are much slower than equivalent motor vessels so all other costs go up. Fuel is cheap.
      • solresol 11mo ago
        > The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower. Surprisingly, no, it wasn't. I'll slightly fudge the numbers and talk in terms of proportion of world trade that was carried by ocean-going vessels (because if you double the population then it's reasonable to talk about doubling the number of ships). The world economy was very globalised in 1913. That level of globalisation in trade wasn't matched again until the 1990s. We're only a little more global now than we were in the age of sail. The British navy and merchant fleet was a wonder of its era.
        • adwn 11mo ago
          Show your work. Without numbers, those are all just assertions. And the assertion that the world's economies were more globalized before WW1 than after the Cold War is particularly dubious.
      • _yb2s 11mo ago
        > You're really missing the point. The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower. At the end of commercial merchant sailing, the largest steel hulled merchant sailing vessels were about 1/10th the cargo capacity of a modern container ship, but actually pretty comparable in speed, which is limited more by the physics of displacement hulls in the water than the propulsion method. Historically, sailing ships risked becalming, but that is no longer a risk, with improved weather routing and backup engines that allow them continue at full speed if the wind dies. Considering that the cost of modern shipping is 50-60% fuel cost alone, and that in principle with modern tech sailing vessels won't require large crews, it is not clear to me that it can't be economically viable nowadays even at the scales already possible a century ago, nor that it would be impossible to develop tech to scale merchant sailing up to modern container ship sizes.
  • _yb2s 11mo ago
    It is much harder to get consistent high speeds on a smaller sailboat than a larger one. Back in the “golden age of sail” the highest cargo capacity sailboats were also the fastest. It will absolutely require new boat designs and engineering to create massive modern shipping boats, but the fact that recreational boats can sustain high speeds across oceans at small scales proves it is possible at larger scales needed for shipping. There absolutely is a lot more energy in the wind than you need for this. Even with old sail tech it was already closer than you might expect to modern container ships. Look up the Preussen, launched 1901. It could do over 20 knots and carry 8,000 tons of cargo. Although small by modern standards, there are economical viable smaller container ships operating today in that speed and cargo capacity range. Even if you still had an old low tech boat like the Preussen nowadays, modern sail technology and hardware, plus better weather routing data would make it substantially faster, and require a tiny fraction of the crew that was initially required.
• forgotusername6 11mo ago
  When engines first replaced sail, sail boats also required far higher crew numbers to operate. That's not the case today
  • _yb2s 11mo ago
    In principle, with modern solid wing sail technology and computer controlled sail trim, a sailing vessel needs no more crew than a motor vessel.