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Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Green idea: One could skip the bow and replace it with CCTV HD cameras and keep the crew in ground level on the middle of the ship where it will be least rocky. Shouldnt that reduce air drag even more?

Something similar with CCTV has been done for remote air traffic control towers. http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a20075/saab-remote-ai...

Also add superhydrophobic coating and or supercavitation to reduce the water drag. That should be able to reduct fuel consumption even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation http://www.gizmag.com/ghost-super-cavitating-military-boat/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhydrophobic_coating https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/superhydrophobic-metals...

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Presumably as this is a container ship the height of the ship when it's fully loaded will be much higher than in the picture. The bow essentially acts as an aerodynamic nose cone to the container stack.

Reliability and fail-safe are important considerations at sea. Glass windows still work when electrical power is lost. Warships take the concept further, placing the navigation bridge where it's most effective but having a completely redundant alternate control centre deep inside the ship where it's best protected.

Go a step further, make the ship autonomous, run them in flotillas and have an engineer or two between the whole lot for any mechanical issues. they could have luxurious staterooms, given that you'd need only a few crew for a dozen ships.

Rolls-Royce is really pushing the fully automated ships http://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/yr-2016/pr-2...

This screams of PR vaporware.

That is a PR release but it is far from vaporware. They have been working on the systems, procedures, and logistics for years. You might want to look into their progress and the industry coverage.

pirates

If the ship is completely controlled by remote, and the goods on board are essentially immobile (are they going to be able to get cars off the ship on the high-seas), what can a pirate do? They can hop a lift to the nearest port.

Also, being 'remote' doesn't have to mean 'unprotected'.

Destroy the uplink to the CNC node for the ship?

The Pirates ransom the crew they can't do anything to the ship or the cargo they have no where to offload it.

I suspect there would be enough of value that could be stripped off the ship and removed to make it worth the pirate's time. Bear in mind that it doesn't matter to pirates if they cause millions of dollars of damage to extract a small fraction of that for themselves.

Cripple a hugely valuable ship and destroy much of its equipment and cargo to extract a few hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff that you can take with you? Sounds like a reasonable deal for a group of pirates. Hell, they might as well try and sink the ship once they are done with it to make it hard to gather evidence and determine exactly what was stolen.

It would take some time for people to do the math to determine what components of ships and common cargo have the highest value Vs their portability but someone would figure it out eventually.

Sink it with what? they attack it with fishing boats and AK47's you'll need a literal ton of explosives to sink on of those ships. They can't offload the containers and other than the money in the captain's vault there is nothing of value other than the propane tanks in the galley (that and the med bay is the only thing they raid).

5kg of plastic explosive will be more than enough to sink a ship.

No it won't, have you ever handled explosives?

Wedge the watertight doors open, disable the salvage eductors and you can sink a ship by cracking a single sea water intake pipe open.

I'm on mobile so I can't provide a link, but look up the Argentinian Type 42 sunk in harbour or HMS Endurance for examples.

I said "try to sink it" not that they would necessarily succeed. That said if they are on board and have unlimited access to the entire ship it may be possible to sink it without any explosives. Not all ships even require explosives to be scuttled.

>They can't offload the containers

I never suggested that they would. Rather I suggested that they would ransack the ship and cargo looking for valuable components or equipment that is transportable.

piracy didn't die out with rum and parrots. It's an ongoing problem especially around failed states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Soma...

basically whole towns/villages live symbiotically with pirates which makes it difficult to do anything about it. They just commandeer the ship, steer it to their home port, and await the payout.

No one claims that piracy has died, we are all aware of the pirates in Africa, the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific. But there is no homeport that can harbor not to mention offload any of those ships, they ransom the crew every time (often not even the entire crew). Those ships hull on average about 4000 containers you need a modern port to offload them, a fishing village in Somalia won't cut it, the ship won't even be able to dock. The only ports in Somalia which are capable of harboring a cargo vessel are in Mogadishu, Berbera, Bosaso and Kismayo the Pirates simply cannot operate from those areas as the Somali government controls those ports pretty tightly.

Majority are down to a dozen crew members. Organised into 2-3 watches over a 24 hour period. And the kitchen (galley) crew who feed the crew.

And at sea things are literally breaking all the time. Ships require ongoing maintenance, as in someone walking around tightening, checking for rust, repairing.

Finally, SOLAS rules requires someone to be on watch and manning the radio. Though this I'm pretty sure is ignored by some. I've hailed a few cargo ships and never got a response.

CCTV is a 2D image of a 3D environment. You'd miss out on the depth perception, not to mention reflective and transparent effects of the water's surface. And probably other things I am missing. This is a ship many hundreds of feet long carrying up to billions of dollars in goods. As a pilot I would not want to not have a real view of where I was going.

AUGMENT my real view with radar screens, depthfinder etc and now we are talking.

Another alternative could be a movable bridge that somehow retracts when the ship is cruising but moves back into position when coming into port.

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