this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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They actually still work as airfoils, ideally. The best way to extract the most energy from the wind is the angled sail working as an airfoil. This, of course limits how far apart the sails can be. I imagine it also places some limits on overall size based on the balance of more sails vs bigger sails. The height will be limited by the righting moment of the ship, so you can't just make them crazy tall without also needing to make the ship so wide it can't fit into port, though I guess you could play games with outriggers to push that boundary.
24-34kts is what I worked with. I'm not sure exactly how the energy would be combined, but this is essentially what they're doing with these sail kite ships. It only saves a few percent of fuel, but that is nothing to sneeze at. I've seen various articles about the project with the kite since 2007 all claiming various savings, but it's supposed to pay for itself in a year or two, I've heard. It certainly feels worth adding, to me, but I don't manage a shipping line.
Heavy fuel oil makes diesel seem squeaky clean by comparison, but it makes up for it by being even cheaper and containing more energy. The energy is so great, that all the fuel and engine space take up a relatively small amount of volume compared to the cargo. And you can cram that fuel into all the strangely shaped parts of the hull that would otherwise just contain ballast water. They actually do put work into cleaning up the exhaust, at least in reputable shipping firms. There are exhaust scrubbers that pull NOx, SOx, and particulates out at the same time as they recover waste heat. The output is still pretty foul, but the scrubbers take a big chunk out without much negative impact.
Just the speed and overall size. Like, worst case you could always build a wind energy storage system to capture power from wind turbines, save it in power cells of some kind, then release it in bursts.
I don't see why you couldn't get traditional speeds doing square rigs on a repurposed container ship, but maneuvering would be hard. I don't know much about tall ship design, but I think they have to be able to turn very well to really tack with the wind.
If you wanna go real apocalypse mode to though, just cobble together a crude nuclear reactor in the boilers of a steam ship and steal some fuel. You'll probably die from cholera before the radiation gets you, anyway!
I still really want us to go in for nuclear cargo ships though. The NS Savannah is so cool. I've gotten to tour her a couple times in Baltimore. They want to turn her into a public museum ship with a reactor mock-up you can walk into, but need a few million in funding to properly decommission the real one.
Yeah, turning would be a massive challenge, and forget trying to sail upwind. But, the size of the ship would make them really stable, so they might be able to get sails up into winds that are more predictable and steady. On the other hand, they would require a massive keel, and that would limit them to really deep waters. Maybe in a sail-punk scenario you'd see trans-continental sailing ships being offloaded at offshore platforms, and smaller ships would then shuttle the goods to the mainland.
Yeah, I understand the reluctance to have a nuclear reactor on a ship -- on anything that moves really. But, when you need megawatts of power to move something, you really have to think about the safety of the reactor vs. the fact that pollution from petroleum-based ships actually does kill people too, just in a much less accountable way. The Russians have a nuclear-powered icebreaker, I think. If ships are going to keep getting bigger and bigger, it makes sense to me that eventually more than just military ships will have reactors. Maybe we'll have to wait for the climate catastrophe to get worse, or for reactors to be less feared.