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Comment by kebman | Hacker News Reader

I'm just thinking out loud. Some things don't need fast shipping. Instead it needs a steady and even supply. And if a ship doesn't use any fuel, it could even serves as a kind of movable storage house. Thus I'm really looking forward for the developement of autonomous sailing ships. I really believe there's a market for them, or at least a niche within shipping.

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Although reducing speed and fuel usage reduces fuel costs, it increases fixed costs (you need more ships for the same throughput) as well as operating costs like crew. It might turn out to still be more expensive in the end. Then there's the problem of less certainty about price changes if you have to wait longer for the product to be delivered which leads to inefficiency (over/under-supply if mispredicted). There's also the opportunity cost of money being tied up for longer in the delay between production and consumption.

Would they not be sitting ducks for pirates?

Kidnapping and ransom seems to be the most profitable part of piracy. Insurance costs would likely go down for unmanned vessels. You could spend money on arms and mercenaries and RPG launchers and machine guns and escorts and drone squadrons through danger zones, but it is cheaper to just pay insurance. If insurance stops working, the next cheapest would be to pay pirates protection money to keep other pirates in check.

https://www.forbes.com/2010/04/15/pirates-somalia-shipping-i...

On the open ocean? No. That's very unlikely.

Along contested shores? Yes. That's where you'd employ the coast guard or naval forces to protect the vessels.

Perhaps you could even bring aboard an armed crew as needed, or employ various defences, beginning by making it harder to breach the containers, up to just about any fully automated defence system you can imagine.

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