The first sailing transport ship set sail recently…? Can we define “recent” lol
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Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 10 months agoThis is also being tried. The first such ship set sail recently.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah, um. The first modern …
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 10 months ago
I’ve only heard of big kites being used to help reduce fuel consumption on cargo ships. If you have a link to an example of a cargo ship that uses the wind as its primary power source, please share it.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
trendydigests.com/…/wind-powered-cargo-ship-sets-…
Keep in mind that “primary” power source isn’t going to happen. You’re not moving modern cargo loads on wind power alone. But it can provide supplementary power, reducing fuel usage.
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 10 months ago
Is there a hard theoretical limit to the capacity of a primarily wind powered ship?
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
My understanding is that like most things you start running into issues with a) how mass scales (so at a certain point you start adding more mass of sails to push the mass of sails you added to push the mass of…) and b) structural integrity (ie, you can’t just make a sky scraper taller by doubling all the dimensions; at some point steel just isn’t strong enough).
There’s also the issue of speed; no matter how many sails you add, the wind only goes so fast, and it doesn’t go reliably. Modern shipping has deadlines and no one is going to settle for “We got becalmed” or “We lost two months because we were tacking into headwinds the whole time”.
I’m not an expert, this is just my limited understanding.