3 ms·
Unpredictability. The sails do reduce costs/fuel but they do so in a rather unpredictable manner. Cargo hauling is all about rigid scheduals and precalculated c
by sandworm101 14d ago
Unpredictability. The sails do reduce costs/fuel but they do so in a rather unpredictable manner. Cargo hauling is all about rigid scheduals and precalculated costs: contracts to deliver at an exact time and load an exact amount of fuel. Unpredictable elements, even if on average mostly good, do not mesh with that culture.
- darksaints 14d agoDelivery at an exact time is of course a constraint, but I’ve never seen any sort of constraint on the exact fuel usage. This isn’t anything like aviation where excess fuel has to be dumped in order to land safely. If you don’t use the fuel for your voyage, you just fill up less for your next voyage. Weight effects are countered via water ballast, as they always have been. And sails for power augmentation do not complicate timelines at all. If there’s not enough wind, you use more fuel. Nobody has meaningfully proposed relying 100% on wind propulsion.
- dofm 14d agoIt's not about schedules. These things don't change when you arrive; they change how much it costs to arrive and how heavy you arrive. So the only logical explanation is that they don't do that by enough to be worth installing and maintaining, or for fuel market systems to adapt to an amount of oversupply. The industry clearly adapts to an amount of undersupply; ships are fairly often going to burn more fuel than the route might ordinarily need due to being held up or weather or the need to reroute, are they not? So it doesn't seem implausible that the market would adapt to this; it's going to average out quite quickly. It is presumably therefore about the juice not being worth the squeeze. This doesn't rule out illogical explanations. (Belated edit for clarity)