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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you mean for shipping containers, I think one issue there is that sailboats tend to tilt a lot, which you can't do if you have a lot of containers on your deck. Might be possible to design container ships where all the shipping containers are inside the ship instead.

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This company seems to think they have a solution:

https://www.theoceanbird.com/

Good, but I wonder if there isn't still a moment/torque reaction to cause some tilting, and those towers also preclude packing the deck with containers.

I've seen vaporware like this since I was a kid in the 90s. Talk is cheap, slick renderings are cheap. Is there _any_ mostly-wind-powered vessel in active, revenue-generating, trans-oceanic cargo service? Container or otherwise? Maybe something like the Maltese Falcon / Black Pearl?

Yes, there are also cargo ship kites, but those only work as a small adjunct to a big diesel engine.

There's the French company Grain de Sail: https://graindesail.com/fr/

Whoever wants to work on a project like this should build a scale model IMO. Start with a small remote-controlled thing, then build a small ship that carries just one or a handful of containers or trucks to demonstrate the principle.

what if the sailboat is towing the containership

Maybe that could work. You would lose a bit in terms of aerodynamics I think though. Container ships also don't have very sleek hull designs.

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