French startup claims its state-of-the-art sail will cut shipping emissions by 20 percent...

[axiomatic13]

This is a ridiculous idea. What are the odds the wind is blowing in the exact direction you're traveling and faster than you're already going? This is like attaching a horse in front of your SUV to reduce emissions.

TACK
verb
gerund or present participle: tacking
1. fasten or fix in place with tacks.
"he used the tool to tack down sheets of fiberboard"

2. SAILING <-This one Kashim!!!
change course by turning a boat's head into and through the wind.
"their boat was now downwind and they had to tack"

 

[ferrellsl]

Mmmm, don't sail much do you? You don't need the wind to blow in the same direction you're going to make effective use of a sail. People have been sailing for hundreds of years and there's a good chance they know a hell of a lot more about that than some random internet commenter.

Yes, I do sail and the method you're describing is called tacking and it increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees.

 

[ferrellsl]

TACK
verb
gerund or present participle: tacking
1. fasten or fix in place with tacks.
"he used the tool to tack down sheets of fiberboard"

2. SAILING <-This one Kashim!!!
change course by turning a boat's head into and through the wind.
"their boat was now downwind and they had to tack"

Tacking increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees.

 

[ferrellsl]

No, it isn't, but the general ideas of how it works are pretty commonly found, and it's often mentioned in history classes or textbooks about how sails were invented that could allow one to travel against the wind. I don't expect the average person to be an expert at it, but I do expect average person should know that you don't need the wind to go in the exact same direction you are traveling to get there. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity.

I sail and the method you're describing is called tacking and it increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees. Adding sails to today's cargo vessels is ludicrous.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Yes, I do sail and the method you're describing is called tacking and it increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees.

I said nothing about shipments so thanks for explaining the obvious. Three times.

You know you can quote all 3 and reply just once about shipping to 3 different responses that were instead talking about tacking. But not shipping.

 

[loki1944]

I'll file that under IDGAF.

 

[human7]

I sail and the method you're describing is called tacking and it increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees. Adding sails to today's cargo vessels is ludicrous.

There will probably have to be compromises across many industries to protect the environment. Not sure if this will be one of them, but with perishable goods being the exception, there's no reason that cargo has to travel as quickly as it does across the oceans today, other than in the name of making money.

 

[mrvco]

If the winds are right.. could make a lot of sense.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Hmm, I'd be more impressed if ships were moving to using the Magnus effect. It's old tech that was used once and then forgotten. It would be a big improvement. The two in combination would be well worth seeing a test results.

 

[yRaz]

I sail and the method you're describing is called tacking and it increases the distance and time traveled by a factor of at least two, so all your shipments are going to be late, your crew will spend twice as much time at sea and they don't work for free and you'll have to eat the late delivery fees. Adding sails to today's cargo vessels is ludicrous.

Then you would know that most of the shipping ships used are "registered" in countries with no minimum wage so they have to pay the crews basically nothing. The entire reason we ship products around the world using bunker fuel is because of how cheap slave labor is. The irony being that, aside from the captain and main engineer, most of the "crew" are being paid slave wages aswell.

Fun fact for you. when fuel prices were REALLY high in the early 2010's, many cargo ships slowed their pace because they could cut fuel costs in half and it would only make them slightly slower. So the shipping industry as a whole has already increased labor costs to reduce fuel costs because the net cost is lower.

 

[Wye43]

Pirates of the Caribbean 6: shipping iPhones using the Black Pearl.

 

[Gastec]

Hmm, I'd be more impressed if ships were moving to using the Magnus effect. It's old tech that was used once and then forgotten. It would be a big improvement. The two in combination would be well worth seeing a test results.

That concept looks to me like using an ICE(Internal Compustion Engine) to burn gasoline to power an electric motor to move a car forward.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Saddest deflection ever. You should've just accepted that you lost the argument badly and moved on.

Saddest meatshield ever, wading into other people's convos.

'lost'? LOL, lost what? He's blathering on about shipping times when I was responding to someone who said you can't sail in a different direction than the wind.

You lost your way in the thread.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

That concept looks to me like using an ICE(Internal Compustion Engine) to burn gasoline to power an electric motor to move a car forward.

LOL so you actually know less than nothing about the Magnus effect or fluid dynamics I see.

 

[Jack77]

Actually, a lot of companies are looking into kites and some kind of sails for trans-ocean cargo vessels. For years, perhaps even a decade. If the idea was totally bogus, it probably would have been abandoned already. This article is a 'fashionably' late. But it's nice to read the comments.

 

[EdmondRC]

Airplanes can take advantage of strong tailwinds and save both time and fuel. It's not impossible that a ship could get a little fuel savings (I doubt time), by taking advantage of the wind (again), but let's be real, these tankers would see very minimal advantage. Not to mention the cost of maintaining the sails and rigging and staff to operate the sails. Likely this is a no go.

 

[mbk34]

Trying to pull a very heavy object with a kite when the object is already most likely traveling faster than the wind you're trying to use.

These type of kites don't generate their "pull" like a large sheet. They have a wing shape that generates lift, or forward pull in this case, by the speed at which they fly through the air. I had a kite a little bit like this to fly in my local park - if the wing is kept stationary in the wind then it would have the sort of pull you're expecting but as you fly the wing back and forth through the wind window the power vastly increases.

 

[mbk34]

Pirates of the Caribbean 6: shipping iPhones using the Black Pearl.

There was a rather stunning 100m yacht built in 2016 with modern computerised sails. It even generated it's own electricity as it went along. It's actually called the Black Pearl.

 

[p51d007]

Oddly enough, the larger the vessel the more efficient it is. Sails would be most effective on smaller vessels. A consequence of this is that would become more efficient to use many, smaller vessels with sails instead of "a few" large ships that don't have them.

Or we could just have nuclear powered vessels that emit zero carbon but that'll never happen. Ever since Japan had the genius idea of putting a nuclear reactor on a fault line in a tsunami zone the world seems to be anti-nuclear. Meanwhile, I believe it's the guys who looked at the proposal and said, "oh, yeah, looks good, bud!" should be blamed.

Although, one reason "bunker fuel" is used in this massive ships is that it's essentially a waste product of petroleum distillation and we have nothing to use it for aside from pave our roads in the form of asphalt or just burn it so we can ship products across the planet. Just think of how cheap that means bunker fuel is, it's cheaper to manufacture things on other continents with slave labor and ship it here using bunker fuel than it is to actually pay someone a decent wage to make it.

Yep, every time nuclear starts to take off, there is a stupid movie, or goof somewhere that cancels it again.
TMI and the one in Japan, showed that even with stupidity, the safety systems prevent a complete meltdown.
In the case of Chernobyl, that was just a poor design with not much backup in case of a stupid thing like pulling
the rods out too far.

 

[p51d007]

No, it isn't, but the general ideas of how it works are pretty commonly found, and it's often mentioned in history classes or textbooks about how sails were invented that could allow one to travel against the wind. I don't expect the average person to be an expert at it, but I do expect average person should know that you don't need the wind to go in the exact same direction you are traveling to get there. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity.

I've never looked, but I would guess a sail works something like the wing of an airplane, creating high pressure on one side and lower pressure on the other side. The difference is what propels it.

 

[Sir Sparkles]

A sail on a ship, what will they think of next?