How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? (2021) | Hacker News Reader

How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? (2021)

lowtechmagazine.com

127 pointsweird_user70 comments

These newly built traditional ships are simply insignificant in the face of the volume of goods transported globally. They are passenger vessels for people who want to experience forgotten time while also delivering some feel-good. Definitely a viable business, but it does not replace global logistics.

The EcoClipper in the article is said to take 500 tons of cargo, that is 23 TEUs (Twenty-foot equivalent unit) [1] by weight. Ever Given the ship that got stuck in the Suez canal carries 20 000 TEUs. That is by volume. Not all can be fully loaded by weight, but still. There is a factor of about 1000 between them. Add on the reduced speed for the EcoClipper, and you need ~4 000 sail ships to replace it.

Now we haven't even gotten into cargo handling since the EcoClipper can not easily be unloaded directly by crane.

Simply, it is too low scale.

What is truly interesting is, for example, the Oceanbird program by Wallenius and Alfa Laval [2]. That is making Ro-Ro vessels aided by the wind, ensuring that you get the efficiency gains and hit the slot times in port. The Ro-Ro, Roll-on, Roll-off, part is important since that means you do not clash with unloading requirements coming from cranes.

The shipping industry is also looking into synthetic fuels and hydrogen since the infrastructure is relatively centralized, and they rely on the energetic density of chemical fuels. Where the trips are measured in hours rather than days or weeks batteries are being deployed.

A nice short film from the latter parts of the era of sail is "Around Cape Horn" from 1929, when the narrator worked on one of the large four-masted barques. [3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit

[2]: https://www.theoceanbird.com/blog/orcelle-horizon/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tuTKhqWZso

At the end of the article, after the picture "The mizzen of the 'Grace Harwar'; view aft from the main crosstrees", is the calculation:

The amount of cargo that was traded across the oceans in 2019 equals the freight capacity of 22.4 million EcoClippers. Assuming the EcoClipper500 can make 2-3 trips per year, we would need to build and operate at least 7.5 million ships, with a total crew of at least 90 million people.

Doesn't sound beyond human capability and I would rather work on a EcoClipper than Amazon.

At 2-3 trips per year that means spending 4-6 months at sea per trip. That’s a lot of time away from family.

I would definitely rather work for Amazon and see my family every night.

Sounds like there are plenty of workers for everyone.

Folks who do this sort of thing tend to only work half the year. So you make one of those trips, and spend the other half of the year at home w/ your family full time.

Would you still rather work on a EcoClipper if they pay you less that $11 a day? That's about the starting wage for entry-level seamen on foreign registered merchant ships. Sailing ships would have to pay even less than that in order to be cost competitive. Outside of maybe a few twee luxury goods, shippers aren't willing to pay more for the privilege of having their goods moved by sail.

I think the ramp up between now and when a EcoClipper job becomes available it's really hard to judge the tradeoffs you present.

If one extrapolates that ramp-up and time and applies it to the future quality of a job at Amazon... maybe it will be a job at Amazon.

Good news, 40% of all shipping is fossil fuels, so if we abandon fossil fuels, the shipping problem gets significantly smaller: https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

Much of that isn't fuel but rather chemical feedstock. There is a plausible path to significantly reduce fossil fuel use for transportation and energy. But finding another economically viable way to manufacture fertilizers, asphalt, and plastics is a much harder problem.

I think we can/should greatly reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible. This mostly requires political will / habit changes. Although creating circular systems for e.g. food containers has its challenges, it's not moon shot difficult, we have these systems on small scales and we just need more people to use them.

I agree that fertilizer is a very difficult problem, it's possibly the hardest problem related to fossil fuels. Low-Tech Mag has covered this to some degree, and I'm in awe of the scale of the issue, as well as the dire effects of not figuring it out (people starving). https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-ponds-l... To some degree, I figure we'll just have to accept fertilizer as the last legitimate use of fossil fuels until we completely rebuild our farms / food production and sewage systems to be circular.

>reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible

In favor of what? Paper or bamboo fiber? Europe has no trees, where will they get it from? How do you suppose it will be transported?

How about in favour of people getting their fruit and veg not wrapped in superfluous anything. You're really asking the wrong question here. And yes, most of our copious quantities of fruit and veg comes without wrapping.

There's plenty of natural fibre based alternatives for a significant portion of plastic usage, otherwise reusable glass, ceramic, metal and wooden containers can fill a need, and be locally produced.

Trees can be farmed, and I would like to see pollarding and coppicing used for paper manufacture

Europe has no trees? Are you joking? This is ChatGPT-level hallucination stated with ChatGPT-level confidence. On a side note, a few European firms manufacture single-use plates and cutlery from agricultural waste (wheat bran). Really good products, and even edible and, frankly, quite tasty (not that you'd want to take more than a nibble as they're 100% fibre).

If we had the energy generation capacity it isn't that hard to replace most chemical feed stocks. The problem has always been that fossil fuel as a reagent is significantly cheaper than the equivalent energy cost to synthesize replacement reagents from other sources. Fertilizer for example can be produced from atmospheric air, the problem is fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity production, and not using fossil fuels to do it will increase that energy requirement 10 fold, so 10% of global energy production. Another reason we probably should of invested more heavily in nuclear in the past so we could be in a much better place today.

>if we abandon fossil fuels

In favor of what? Surely shipping demand does not fall by 40%. The resources required for renewable replacements are distributed and processed all over the globe.

So 39.87%? In favor of supplies for renewables that are significantly lower volume & frequency?

The number 39.87 is what you might get replacing coal with wind turbines, based on Googled stats for avg turbine weight (165 tons), avg lifetime (20 years) avg achieved efficiency (42%) avg capacity (1.5MW) coal weight per MW (1100 lbs) ... If my calculations are right this means turbines are 300x more efficient per pound of resources than coal, which directly translates into 300x less shipping for those resources.

> renewables that are significantly lower volume & frequency

What is the volume difference of LNG versus nickel ore or copper ore (which are less than 1% nickel or copper, and are mostly rock), which is extracted with diesel-powered mining equipment before being shipped halfway around the globe to be smelted - at great energy cost, which is only sometimes renewable - and then shipped halfway around the globe again to begin manufacturing?

Energy of smelting, as you point out, can be renewable, if we want, and it increasingly is, which makes it irrelevant here, no?

A quarter of the world’s copper is mined at a mine I can see from my window, and it is concentrated, smelted, and refined on site. I don’t know for certain, but have some doubt about your claim that much rock is being shipped around the world just to get smelted, can you source that? It doesn’t seem like a very cost effective idea.

It seems like you’re trying to suggest we can’t do any better by citing today’s inefficiencies. But we know for a fact we can do better, that there is a lot of room for improvement, so why the resistance? Does mining with Diesel engines today mean we have to keep doing that? If we are shipping rock around, which I doubt, does that mean we have to keep doing it?

You've got a really interesting point here... my son and I got stopped for 15 minutes yesterday by an absolutely monster train. So we started researching on our phones and realized that it was coal headed for the coast, headed for China. I know the Chinese need energy, the train needs the shipping business, and the coal people want a market for their coal, but if the world were able to transition to other forms of energy, it would definitely shift the shipping too

Could be met coal for steelmaking.

EcoClipper500 appears to be 40m long. If 7.5mm are operated the total length is 300,000,000 meters, or 300,000 kilometers. In perspective, the distance from Long Beach to Hawaii is 4,100 km, and Hawaii to Shanghai is 8,000 km. So the number of EcoClipper500s needed would stretch across the Pacific 25 times.

Nobody is claiming that sailing ships will solve the environmental crisis.

But neither will minor improvements to Ro-Ro fuel efficiency.

There is also drag reduction via airbubles blown beneath the ship and keeping them distributed via ultrasound. Its pretty cool.

There's hi tech options here, which also split the large vessels into many smaller vessels.

The benefits include being able to deliver to smaller ports that are close to the final destination and smaller batches for continual delivery and faster end to end time when something is an expedited.

The large size is partly a factor of fuel costs so cheap future fuels might rebalance away from that design aspect.

Automation is another force that works towards smaller vessels.

You are right trade routes could have exchanges at the most efficient waypoints. These vessels could meet smaller vessels for the final destination delivery. These waypoints could be accessible to any form of transportation causing another distortion in the time efficiency of goods delivery.

So, like today?

yes but in the middle of the ocean.

Oh yeah and on the blockchain:)

Thiel's artificial ocean island nation needs to be supplied, right?

Quite a world we live in. I would be happy if he had his own ocean nation and he left the rest of us in the US alone.

We could also get rid of a lot of global logistics by going back to local manufacturing. There's absolutely nothing that dictates that iPhones can be built only in China, or that every grocery store needs to keep strawberries or other agricultural products all year round (which have to be sometimes flown around the world [1]).

The key problem is that CO2 emissions still aren't priced anywhere near to true externality cost, and so no one has incentives for local, low emissions production - instead, everyone goes to the lowest bidder by employment costs (and sometimes, environmental regulations as well).

[1] https://lufthansa-cargo.com/industries-agriculture-food

That's no "going back" to local manufacturing. Most places never had any real manufacturing in the first place, and the notion of replicating manufacturing infrastructure for consumer goods in every area is absurd. That idea is based on a complete lack of understanding over how supply chains work.

The CO2 emissions for transporting an iPhone from Asia are insignificant. The real emissions cost is in the manufacturing, not the transport.

> That idea is based on a complete lack of understanding over how supply chains work.

Before extremely cheap overseas shipping was made possible by the standard shipping container and giant container ships to match, almost all production was local (i.e. actually regional or at least continental) by necessity. Silicon Valley is named after all the semiconductor fabrication ffs, and a ton of that has migrated off to Taiwan. And a lot of regions in Western countries got absolutely wrecked as they couldn't compete with cheap, environmentally destructive manufacturing or mining in China / India any more.

It's high time to reverse that, not just because China is an increasingly hostile dictatorship, Taiwan is under constant threat of a military invasion and India is going off the deep end as well under Modi, but also because we need the jobs back domestically to prevent even more people falling to far-right scapegoat bullshit.

As someone in the maritime industry (ship design), I tend to agree that local manufacturing is an important component. However, there is still the distribution of raw materials - from concentraded locations where materials are mined/recycled, to points of manufacture, then to points of end use.

In an ideal world, we'd have universal star trek 3D printers that can build any imagined product, from food to cars, from some the atom up, that is used and recycled in situ. Until then, I'm afraid there will be a growing need for cargo transport.

That said, I am a proponent of scalable/distributed vice monolithic transport modes. To me, that is where we need to head in terms of ship/rail/etc. systems. This revolution in design is already starting to emerge.

Wasn't there some effort to design sail, or sail-augmented supertanker/freighter/container ships? I vaguely remember seeing renderings w/ hi tech airfoils mounted on the deck of the ship....

There's been a few different efforts along those lines.

Free standing wing sails are surprisingly practical. They can be designed to be self trimming: that is you set a control surface once and then it tracks the wind so long as the ship doesn't make a 180.

But as cool as that technology is, it simply isn't economic vs burning the cheapest oil available.

Because international waters are a no man's land pollution wise, most freighters burn extremely dirty but cheap oil, ie bunker oil. This stuff is so thick it often needs heaters to liquify it to get it into the engine.

So long as that externality is unpriced, sail augmentation simply won't be interesting to ship owners financially.

Just because a fuel is thick doesn't necessarily mean it is dirty. The IMO has required ships in international waters to use low-sulphur fuel or exhaust scrubbers since 2020. Some smaller ships occasionally break the law but the large shipping companies are fairly good about compliance now.

CO2 emissions remain an issue, but large diesel engine merchant ships are still the most energy efficient mode of transportation ever invented.

There are a few large wind-assisted cargo ships in commercial service today. This trend will probably continue as sail technology gets cheaper and fuel gets more expensive. But it only improves efficiency by something like 5-10%.

https://splash247.com/mols-wind-assisted-bulk-carrier-enters...

If you take the people off them, 4000 little self-sailing ships seems actually much better for logistics than one big tub that will clog up Suez if there is one pilot screwup. Send your stuff when it rolls off the line, no need to wait until you have 20,000 of them lined up.

It isn't just caprice that's made ships bigger and bigger and bigger; they're cheaper to operate. The loss of flexibility seems to be well-compensated by the lower cost.

Are they not cheaper to operate because of economies of scale for staff (fewer sailors per ton-mile of cargo) and fuel (one big hull is less drag through the water than tons of little ones)? I assumed those were the main reasons but maybe there is some bigger one that dwarfs these, perhaps construction costs? Docking fees?

Does the author not make the same point at the end of the article?

> Of course, none of this would ever happen.

> We should not be fooled by abstract relative measurements, which only serve to keep the focus on growth and efficiency.

It seems unreasonable to try to fix the myriad issues with global supply chain without adjusting the expectations and consumption habits.

> then the EcoClipper500 would have a carbon footprint of about 2 grammes of CO2 per tonne-kilometre of cargo [...] This is roughly five times less than the carbon footprint of a container ship (10 grammes CO2/tonne-km) and three times less than the carbon footprint of a bulk-carrier (6 grammes CO2/tonne-km).

Sadly, this doesn't seem like a lot, to be honest. Especially, for all the downsides a smaller ship has,

And assumes a 50 year life time. That sounds optimistically long, although I have no idea how long a conventional container ship lasts.

I think 50 years is at the longer side of ship lifetime but not especially an outlier. The big commissioning fleets sell them after a couple decades and replace them with new. The secondhand owner refits for a different purpose or partially overhaul then runs it for another couple decades. Sometimes a third owner gets some use out of it. They normally go at least 35 years before total decommissioning though, usually longer.

It depends on ship type. For example methane carriers are expected to hit 40 years of lifetime while some low-end bulk carriers are scrapped after only 15 years.

One thing they don't seem to have mentioned was hydrofoils.

It would be more for time critical shipments, but hydrofoils can greatly increase the speed of sailing vessels, but would need proper design for the sea state (such as routes to avoid larger waves, different hydrofoil designs less for speed and more for safety/reliability, etc.).

The Olympic windsurf race in 2024 will be the first one with hydrofoils. America's Cup racers with the AC75 class are already on foils, with very high speed (~60mph), sometimes over triple the windspeed. Windsurfers on foils now can triple or quadruple windspeed in light winds.

This tech is much more common now, and has exploded in the last 10 years in various different water sports. It would just need to be adapted to a different need than just racing.

AC-75 racing class: https://youtu.be/OQsXDdGxk3U

IQFoil racing class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAKfbk_kB_4

It is physically impossible to build a hydrofoil sailing vessel that can carry cargo across oceans. Those racing boats are tiny with zero cargo capacity, require relatively large crews for the size, and take huge amounts of maintenance. The designs do not scale, not are they capable of safely handling the same weather conditions as large merchant ships.

Y Combinator portfolio company Boundary Layer Technologies tried to build a diesel powered hydrofoil cargo vessel to target the market niche between air cargo and slow displacement hull cargo ships. The basic technology probably could have worked but they failed due to lack of any real customer demand.

I am not sure regular hydrofoil cargo ships are practical. My understanding is that hydrofoils don't do well in high seas. All the passenger ferries I know about are in coastal waters. It may not be possible to have one that can cross ocean and deal with storms.

The Boundary Layer proposal is pretty small, 200 tons and 20 TEU capacity. It would have the same scaling problems as the sailboat in article.

Is there a market for slightly faster shipping? The hydrofoil is 40 knots which is 6 days from China, container ships are 20 knots and 11 days. If there was a market for faster shipping, would expect to see 30 knot ships. I bet the really urgent needs air and current cargo aircraft are sufficient.

The AC and similar foiling boats are very cool but not even remotely practical as a cargo technology. There's a reason those boats are carbon fiber and insanely expensive.

There is no "routes to avoid larger waves." That simply is not a thing. Even in dead calm there's rogue waves that come along.

Speed is not the constraint for ocean shipping.

> For example, if 60 people on board the ship would take a daily hot shower – which requires on average 2.1 kilowatt-hours of energy and 76.5 litres of water on land – total electricity use per day would be 126 kWh, more than double the energy the ship produces at a speed of 7.5 knots.

I'll note that those figures are for a Hollywood shower, not a Navy shower. A Navy shower uses about 11 liters of water, and I assume energy use is proportional to water use.

Somewhat unrelated, but I adore their ‘solar’ subdomain mirror that runs on solar power alone. It’s fun to see compelling commitment to the ethics espoused by the articles in the very site itself.

There should be a browser extension, similar in principle to the old "https everywhere", that attempts the solar page first, falling back to the coal powered one if the solar one is down.

Off-topic but that first picture circa 1920 of the 4 sailors up on the mast is such a storm is amazing. It commands respect to the work and life of those men.

Many have called the sailing ship era the time of wooden ships and iron men. I'm not sure where this phrase was first used, but this website attributes it to a 1930 poem:

https://www.madisonhistory.org/madisons-iron-men/

I can recommend this film from one of the last commercial sail ships rounding Cape Horn in 1928 during some big storms, narrated by an experienced captain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzBDhilDL0

I'm currently reading a book about US submarine operations in WW2. By 1945 the Japanese had lost so many cargo ships that they started using sailing ships again.

> Two rowing machines could provide roughly 400 watts of power. If they are operated around the clock in shifts, they could supply the ship with an extra 9.6 kWh of energy per day

Rowing 200 watts is not exactly easy. That's like 2:00/- splits, "ramming speed" type power. Half that seems more reasonable.

I do like the idea, though, of a sailing ship with ad hoc erg/rowing power.

I enjoyed watching the Netflix documentary "Untold - The Race of the Century" - but of course it shaped sailing ships in the 20th century: https://www.netflix.com/title/81026435

Oh that was a blast! Thanks for pointing that out.

Besides a great story, it is such a nice icon of the time. What stood out most to me is the "Australia, that little, unknown country" :)

More precisely, how to replicate designs from the 19th century.

A shame, because modern materials should allow more radical designs - for example as used in the Americas's Cup competition nowadays.

Carrying cargo is very, very different. America's Cup racers are very light. It's a mistake to apply that technology in a 1-to-1 fashion for large sailing vessels.

The boat the America's Cup is named after--"America," natch--crossed the Atlantic for her race. The current America's Cup boats are no good for ocean crossing. For one, there's no room. But the real problems are that the materials are so specific, so complicated, any kind of problem and you're stuck. A canvas sail can be repaired at sea. The weird composite stuff used in AC sails are not quite so resilient.

I appreciate the enthusiasm of the modern AC teams (hi Larry!), but these are not good boats. A good boat takes care of her crew. An AC racer will hurt or kill you in a heartbeat if you are not 100% on the ball.

That said, some of the wing sail designs may be adaptable with the right materials.

> I appreciate the enthusiasm of the modern AC teams (hi Larry!), but these are not good boats.

I liked the AC class more when it was designers + crews + conditions fighting it out not just programmers.

The rules-lawyering really hurt the sport. It was always a rich man's playground, but now it's gotten ridiculous.

Watching a bunch of 15-year-olds compete in Optimist dinghies at your local lake or reservoir is way more fun and entertaining than today's AC, IMO. You just can't shake the feeling that whoever spent the most money wins at the AC, which is boring.

The "12 crew and 12 passengers" would, as far as I remember, require one doctor on board. The number of passengers a cargo ship may take without dedicated medical staff was ridiculously low and explains why it is so much harder/expensive to travel on board as a passenger than one would expect. (8 years ago it was $200/day and up)

> How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

Late 21st century? Put wheels on the bottom of it...

I think it’s high time these cargo ships were fully automated. At least as far as the point after which the local pilot comes onboard.

It's weird that this isn't already the case. We do it with airplanes, and surely that's much harder simply by virtue of needing to consider three dimensions. I can't imagine it would be difficult to automate steering a ship across the open ocean. You could build something basic and just make the captain handle all the iffy stuff.

Autopilot has existed for decades now and works really well, but it doesn't replace a crew, be it only for everything unrelated to navigation, crossing the path of other vessels, etc.

> it’s more likely that a switch to sailing ships is accompanied by a decrease in cargo and passenger traffic, and this has everything to do with scale and speed. A lot of freight and passengers would not be travelling if it were not for the high speeds and low costs of today’s airplanes and container ships.

>It would make little sense to transport iPhones parts, Amazon wares, sweatshop clothes, or citytrippers with sailing ships. A sailing ship is more than a technical means of transportation: it implies another view on consumption, production, time, space, leisure, and travel.

Yes, of course they beat around the bush with weasel words like "another view on consumption".

Let's translate this for what it is: "poor people, you can no longer have luxury goods". The "rethinking" is always telling us that the wealth we've enjoyed as a high energy species should go, only to be given to our "betters" - because they can always afford it. But they rarely ever say this out loud because it's an impossible sell, so they use mealy mouthed euphemisms.

Fuck these people, honestly. I don't want to live in a world where, in the name of equality, we take progress from those who have it. Give it to more people.

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