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This ship carries 5300 tonnes of cargo. The average transoceanic container ship carries around 150,000 to 250,000 tonnes.
by BurningFrog 1y ago
This ship carries 5300 tonnes of cargo.
The average transoceanic container ship carries around 150,000 to 250,000 tonnes.
- adriand 1y agoCould you have autonomous ships this size, like a waymo for the ocean?
- gtowey 1y agoWhat would be the point? Ships are complex machines and the ocean is an incredibly harsh and unforgiving environment. You would need crew to simply maintain the ship while underway and fix things that break (which pretty much always happens). Next, these ships can be downright dangerous for other, smaller ships. It has happened before that large cargo ships have killed people on sailboats when they didn't keep an adequate lookout. I wouldn't trust an autonomous system to have enough accuracy to avoid running over other boats.
- jopsen 1y agoAlso if the ship is large enough to send economically feasible, the value of the cargo is so huge that a few crew won't affect the bill.
- hgomersall 1y agoThere are plenty of reports of crews being overworked and underslept, so clearly some shipping companies still cut corners as regards staffing.
- mmooss 11mo agoI read about the US Navy's work on autonomous ships. One big challenge is the lack maintenance. Sailors can perform periodic and break-fix maintenance throughout the journey, and if something unpredictable happens, they can handle it. The autonomous vessels need far higher robustness, not only to function without maintenance for months at a time, but reliably enough that few of them end up lost or stranded at sea.
- BurningFrog 11mo agoYeah, you may not need a crew to steer the ship, but it's far more effective to do maintenance while it's moving cargo than while it's doing nothing in a port.
- sneak 1y agoIt also broke shortly after beginning and didn’t make the trip by sailing.
- scuff3d 1y ago1 of their 2 sails broke. They completed the trip on one sail and their back up engine. Especially in a prototype, proving something can go wrong and you can still complete the mission is valuable data. You wouldn't prototype something like this at full scale.
- opdahl 1y agoDoes anyone know how well this scales? I assume it just doesn’t make sense to actually make one of that size when they are testing out the concept.
- titannet 1y agoA "normal" ocean-going Ro Ro ship would be over 200m long and quite a bit higher. Typically only the lowest deck can carry trucks and heavy loads and the upper decks carry cars. Their solution of only having the heavy load deck is sensible since they need a low center of gravity to counteract the sails and any added deck height hurts the sailing characteristics. With all that said, there is not much to scale it up. They could make it a bit longer but probably mostly easily: risk in bad weather, structural integrity demands from the added sails and all that may quickly add up.
- xmcp123 1y agoI did some searching around for this (not a subject matter expert). Basically the sail area grows with length squared, but ship mass and resistance grows roughly with length cubed. So propulsion gets weaker with size. To move a full sized freighter, you would need a mast the size of a skyscraper and we don’t currently have materials that can support that. If we did have a material that supported sails that large, it would still be a problem because you are functionally making the ship top heavy (when wind is applied) increasing how likely it is that the freighter rolls over.
- rmah 1y agoIt scales horribly. Essentially, as the ship gets larger, the sail area has to be even larger (proportionally) to maintain the same speed. Further, the larger the sail, the more susceptible to damage and the harder it is to control.
- rdtsc 1y agoUse it for luxury goods! "Why _my_ iphone arrived in Baltimore on a clean cargo ship, so yeah, ..." I am only half joking. Anything luxury of vanity related, just add the fact they've gotten to the consumer on a clean ship and you'll find some people to pay extra for it. The more expensive the better. They can brag about it to each other.
- NewJazz 1y agoConspicuous nonconsumption of fossil fuels... Hmmmm. I doubt Apple is lunging to do this tbh.
- urig 1y agoBottom line: impressive optics, zero impact for this technology on global warming, it's a distraction.
- lukan 1y agoOr an experiment? Maybe eventually finding its niche, even if it doesn't solve climate change, but why would the impact be zero? If it does not use oil, then this is CO2 not released.
- theultdev 1y agoWell it does use oil. > The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail after the aft sail was damaged in a storm shortly after departure. Used the motor "shortly after departure".
- scuff3d 1y agoYou think they're gonna take a first crack at this and jump straight to the biggest they could go?
- brudgers 1y agohttps://www.ship-technology.com/projects/neoliner-origin-ro-ro-cargo-vessel-turkey/?cf-view https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/neoliner-origin-ro-... Apparently Neoliner Origin capacity is 265 TEU (twenty foot equivalent units). That’s tiny by cargo ship standards and bulk, not weight, is the bulk of bulk shipping costs.
- segmondy 11mo agoThe real question is how much does it cost to transport a ton of cargo compared to the average transoceanic ship?