innovation capitalism
innovation capitalism
Honestly if they've improved the efficiency of sails then that's great, but this marketting text is still silly enough to go here.
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i was reading about this stuff when we had a thread about hare-brained eco-schemes, what's significantly different about this technology is it's "self rigging" and computer controlled. it's a sailing ship with low enough labor costs to maybe be feasible for commercial use.
it's also intended to be retrofitted onto existing cargo ships to drastically reduce fuel consumption and emissions, but they're still in the design/concept stage and have only recently announced that they're building the first full-scale prototype sail.
it's pretty neat and good within the acknowledged confines of the economics, tbh. still think it'd be more fun to employ 80 people rigging but c'est la vie
And sing shanties while we're at it
the world needs more singing civilian sailors i swear
We'll heave him up an away we'll go
'Way, me Susiana!
Young men yearn to die at the hands of the Atlantic currents
dash mine drown-ed corpse against the rocks and feed me bloodied bits to the mako
The masculine urge to drown in a squall
It would fix unemployment
Though experiments at upgrading sails are century old, first rotor ship was constructed in 1924 and this looks like next iteration of turbosail, tech from 1980's.
Self rigging has been around for years though, plenty of yachts have it.
i don't think lateen yacht rigging is that transferrable to cargo, maybe someone's trying to up-scale it that way too... but looking at old clippers it seems very challenging
Oh no I meant like square riggers with fully automatic sails. Got a tour on a brig with that stuff. They don't allow the machine to trim the sails though, they're afraud it'd break.
P-liners would probably be our best idea of what a modern cargo sail ship would be.
damn, that sounds cool. it might be more expensive or not automated enough wrt trimming (surely they could figure this out) & that's why the op sort of thing are getting more hype
or the op type is gadgetbahn snakeoil and actual sail-powered cargo will eventually be mostly automatic clippers
It was very cool to see! Though also kinda sad, because the only reason they have made those advances in sail technology are because it allows them to cut down on labour costs. Like it's all just done to make it so they have to pay less people money. There's nothing better about the sails themselves, the ship is as fast as it ever was, it's just more money for the owners.