Largest Cargo Sailboat Completes First Atlantic Crossing

If you get the chance, the Pommern is a beautifully preserved ship from that era in Mariehamn's excellent maritime museum.

Maybe it wasn't just the land they were getting away from.

Back when engines first replaced sailing fuel was nearly free, and sailboats were incredibly slow, dangerous, unreliable, and didn’t sail upwind well, and all that has changed- time to take another look.

The even better news is that the technology is becoming available to the general population and also commercially viable for projects like this.

You mention container ships. I haven't seen anything explicit on these, and I think the reason is probably that they cruise much faster than bulkers and tankers, which means the potential savings from sail is smaller. I would have thought 20% optimistic even for a new-build.

It seems quite mad that we even need to debate this. Wind is free power and we have at least 2000 years of engineering to draw on how to use it.

Any propulsion unit needs to be effectively attached to a ship. Screws are attached longitudinally, low down and push. Sails are a bit more tricksy. A triangular sail mounted along the long axis will generally work best because it can handle more wind angles but a square sail mounted across the long axis will provide more power on a "reach" to a "run" (the wind is mostly from behind, so pushing).

The cutting edge of sailing ships that carried stuff are the tea clippers. Think "Cutty Sark" which is now a visitor attraction in London, Greenwich. Note the stay sails - the triangular sails at the front. Then note the three masts. Each mast has several main sails that are huge rectangles for "reaches" and additional extensions. There are even more triangular infill sails above the main sails.

It's quite hard to explain how wind and sails work but you need to understand that a sailing ship can sail "into the wind". Those triangles are better at it than those rectangles but those rectangles can get more power by being bigger. Even better, you can use the front triangular sails (stay sails) to moderate the wind to feed the other sails with less turbulent wind.

Wind is free power and it is so well understood. How on earth is this news?

> I’m Joseph, and along with Arpan and Bailey we are the founders of OutSail Shipping. We’re building a sail the size of a 747 that rolls up into a shipping container.

But are you sure they are bankrupt? The Internet claims "The company says the purpose of the acquisition, for which the price was not reported, is to strengthen the development and commercialization of “Seawing,” the automated kite system". That might be bs of course.

There also seems to be anther company trying it out, https://cargokite.com/

Circumnavigation is a longer voyage than those craft would travel in one go, and the stops would increase their transit time. Even without that it would be a close competition with the latest class of racing sailboats that are able able to maintain very similar speeds, and the next generation will be decidedly faster.

Things have changed.

If it isn’t cheaper it isn’t on the board for the next decade or two outside niche routes. The hard part is in making it economically viable. We already know sailboats work.

We need more container ships polluting or the post 2020 global warming rate could double!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3

> There's a reason everyone switched from sail to steam.

One reason was, they thought the climate impact cost zero. Also, technology was much different then.

We've crossed some of the busier shipping lanes of the world, and have had to call the bridge of a freighter on radio just a couple of times. And usually the watchstander immediately confirmed seeing us and clarified their intentions.

That's how the rules of the road work. See: COLREGs.

We also travel by a small sailboat, and it is always reassuring to see huge tankers make small course changes tens of nautical miles away. That way everybody stays safe and nobody is majorly inconvenienced.

Especially in a prototype, proving something can go wrong and you can still complete the mission is valuable data.

You wouldn't prototype something like this at full scale.

Basically the sail area grows with length squared, but ship mass and resistance grows roughly with length cubed. So propulsion gets weaker with size.

To move a full sized freighter, you would need a mast the size of a skyscraper and we don’t currently have materials that can support that.

If we did have a material that supported sails that large, it would still be a problem because you are functionally making the ship top heavy (when wind is applied) increasing how likely it is that the freighter rolls over.

Next, these ships can be downright dangerous for other, smaller ships. It has happened before that large cargo ships have killed people on sailboats when they didn't keep an adequate lookout. I wouldn't trust an autonomous system to have enough accuracy to avoid running over other boats.