Well the reason I gave the example of ‘The Maltese Falcon’, is that it’s computer driven system mitigates a lot of the problems you described. Certainly it requires a lot of sail, but if I am not mistaken that sail is contained completely in the masts. The ship can be sailed by a single crewman as well, so that sort of design seems to have a lot of potential.
You mean like a sailing ship on a treadmill?
Go to your room.
You beat me to it. I didn’t realize how it worked until today. I thought it funneled air into vertical turbines but it’s actually a powered wing.
We had a pretty good sized hold on my ship (Cite). That’s where we kept all our food, but there was plenty of room left. If the hatch was bigger and you had a crane, you could probably stack a few cars down there.
It depends on how fast you want to go, and probably a million other things, too. I think one of the benefits of schooners is they can take a better angle into the wind when tacking. If you’re willing to go a few hundred miles out of your way to catch the trade winds, a square rigger seems to work pretty well. (With no rigging to deal with, I’d be very curious what the operating envelope of that Maltese Falcon is.)
There’s hull design to think of, too. I’m sure modern ships bob around a bit, but for the most part they seem to ride pretty level. How much would we have to adapt our current cargo handling for a ship that spends prolonged time heeled over in the wind?
If someone who knew what he was doing really put the effort into designing something like this, even if it was just an exercise, I’d love to see what they come up with.
I couldn’t resist using that for a cite.
Yea, but its nothing compared to a modern container ship. To be commercially successful, I think we’d need to find a technology that scales up to power (or at least, partially power) something of that size.
Plus it looks cool!
That depends. The way we ship will change as oil becomes more expensive as it contributes to cost all the way through the process, from the manufacture of polymer components to the shipping trucks to the support vehicles in the factories. It is possible that at a certain point it may be cheaper to operate three or four sailing ships than a big super-tanker.
Also, as the economy balances, the price imbalance that contributes to world trade will diminish trade. Manufacturing will likely revive in the US when it is no longer cheaper to have it done in China.
Remember how they had to destroy all those cars that spent how many weeks in that ship that almost sank and had a bad list? And they didn’t know if it would have affected the cars, so they had to destroy them rather than risk the fact that they had a shipload of lemons on their hands?
I thought that was due more to the cars having been exposed to actual water up to a certain height rather than just from being tipped.
-Joe
I think that the turbosail is just about as far as it’ll likely go.
Sailing major vessels is no mean undertaking. Read any old Age of Sail books, and you get an idea of just how difficult it was, and how dependent the sailors were on wind and tide to get anywhere.
They frequently got becalmed, and 14 knots was a CRAZY rate of speed, while today’s container ships tend to sail between 9 and 25 knots, with the larger ones tending toward the faster speeds. That’s sailing, not maximum speed. A sailing ship generally sailed at 5-10 knots generally, which would probably double most voyages, assuming all else is equal, which it assuredly wouldn’t be.
I’m looking for a cite, but I know they had to destroy so many cars that they had to study the best way to do it, and I know I read that it was because there was no way to know what the effects of being tipped like that were.
Found it! From the Wall Street Journal:
“The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal – but no one knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars at such a steep angle for so long. Might corrosive fluids seep into chambers where they don’t belong? Was the Cougar Ace now full of lemons?”
Here’s the story , which is really more about figuring out how to destroy the cars.
I don’t understand why they don’t just sell them as used cars without a warrantee. People would jump at the chance to get a cheaper new car that might be water damaged.
What about rotor ships? With modern materials, computer design and control we could make them much more effective than they were 80 years ago.
I think it is possible to design a wind-powered vehicle that could drive directly into the wind solely under the wind power - or at least, I can see how to do it with a land-based vehicle - the drive just needs to be geared down so that it crawls upwind.
With a vessel on water, it might be a lot more difficult, because you don’t have the advantage of traction - so the drive is not only less efficient, but the vehicle itself can slip bacwards under wind pressure, but the boat at the bottom of this page can supposedly do it.
A turbine is effectively moving at 90 degrees to the direction of the wind, so there’s no violation of physics or anything.
That’s the drawback of course - it tends to be a one-shot proposition. I don’t think it’s even been tried for, oh, forty-eight years or so.
Lots of people wanted to buy the cars, but then when they shit out, the people aren’t going to think, “Oh, damn, my car must have been water damaged.” They’re going to think, “Damn, Mazda makes a shitty product.” It was cheaper for Mazda to make an insurance claim (and the insurance company mandated that they were destroyed) than for them to have thousands of people with shitty Mazdas.