Hacker News Reader

Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

This is great and points to how solar in some cases already can facilitate continuous operation without the need for refueling of planes, boats, cars, you name it. Expect this to grow as battery and solar cell tech develops further.

My favorites atm are the yachts that are capable of sailing just about anywhere in the world without a drop of fuel. The price is prohibitive, but considering that you might not need a house anymore it is actually getting close to possible for a reasonably senior tech employee.

[full disclosure: no affiliation]

https://www.azura-marine.com/aquanima-45/

https://www.silent-yachts.com/silent60/

View on HN

I've always been kinda fascinated by this solar yacht concept.

I wonder now with post-covid remote working options and starlink if you could actually make it work.

I do wonder though if sailing the ship is basically a full-time job in itself (navigation channels? Docking at foreign countries? Getting food etc?).

I thought starlink didnt work for mobile connections? I.e. that it had to be registered and operated at a fixed address.

That said, unless you are able to drop anchors, I am guessing that you would spend most of your working hours at a dock or with a partner piloting instead.

> I thought starlink didnt work for mobile connections?

It will not work either far away from the shore.

Again I have to believe this is only a temporary restriction.

SpaceX are launching satellites with ("frickin") lasers now. So, if you are in the middle of the ocean, your packets step between satellites on the same orbit, forward or back, until they get in range of a node. First actual use is for polar service.

On certain routes, packets will be artificially delayed so that high-speed traders can pay big bucks to get their packets through first, ahead of fiber. And, maybe pay even bigger bucks to prevent their competitors from getting their packets through as fast. Imagine tiered pricing, where each millisecond ahead of the rest of the pack is ten times the price.

So, for example, orbits inclined near 70 degrees pass near New York and London/Frankfurt. Packets going by satellite laser links can get there many milliseconds ahead of those poking along on subsea fiber. Somebody in London who finds out 10 ms before everyone else about a price change in New York gets to make a killing trading on the exclusive information.

There is a whole world there I do not know and don't really want to. What a strange world we live in.

Yes. You can think of it as automated stealing. Much of the inequity could be eliminated by imposing a per-transaction tax.

Then you get more smart people being pointed at "minimising the tax burden" instead of "doing things faster/better".

Or you can think of it as HTF trading firms subsidizing 20-60ms internet for the common user. The last couple ms probably mean nothing to you but they mean a lot to them. I guess it depends on what your world view is.

Somehow, I foresee SpaceX just pocketing the extra money, not reducing the little peoples' prices. Have you seen any reason to expect different?

The extra money is probably needed to make the whole thing viable. SpaceX probably has a goal price for consumer plans and they are just trying to hit that price.

Regardless I just don't see SpaceX as the company that doesn't evolve with times tbh.

I do not understand that reasoning at all, where there is any.

"Evolve with times" does not seem to mean anything. In markets where Starlink is viable, they have no effective competition, and can charge as much as the market will bear. As long as they have more potential users than bandwidth to sell them, they are under no pressure to reduce prices or give up profit. A goal to subsidize Martian colonization provides a very strong incentive to maximize income. We should expect to see very high gross margins until other constellations begin to compete.

Yea let's not serve an area because their only option could potentially overcharge them! Completely ignoring the fact that you can't define an overcharge without alternative options. Current sat internet is orders of magnitude more expensive for a much worse service. Starlink is literally breaking monopolies and your worry is that it's going to be a monopoly itself.

I suspect this is why starlink has some base station licenses in eastern parts of Newfoundland. It’s the closest you can get to London before swimming from Contiguous North America.

They also need them there for current architecture up and back service to rural Atlantic Canada.

You’d build more central for that though, no? Otherwise you’re just covering a lot of ocean (until inter-sat links are up and running).

You would cover a lot of ocean but you'd also cover all of rural Newfoundland. I believe there's also a site somewhere in Nova Scotia. Dozens of starlink earth stations are now up and running.

Is there any real world test data out for going over the laser interlinks yet? I know there have been Elon Musk tweets on the topic, but he tends to tweet from a spherical cow engineering world when looking at future specs. From very early on the "much lower latency due to the speed of light in a vacuum" posts have been repeated but there is a non negligible number of routing decisions and hops in the starlink mesh and the additional 1100-2200km entry/exit, as well as bandwidth and handover limitations.

London/New York doesn't seem like the distance that there is going to be huge wins for back bone connected entities. But I guess that even if you can land a percentage of packets quicker via starlink, then there is some value in the trading world?

Let's look at numbers. NYC->LDN great-circle distance is 5576 km. At altitude, that is (3959+547)/3959 * 5576 = 6346 km. Idealized path is thus 547 * 2 + 6346 = 7420 km. (Actually a bit less because the path is part of a polygon, not an arc.) Non-ideal path, for satellites not directly overhead, is more like 7900 km, worst case more. Still, transit time, light through vacuum, is <28 ms.

Compare to fiber. Best ping time is 76 ms, or 38 ms one way. So, our budget margin is 10 ms. Suppose, instead of a direct downlink, packets are dumped to a nearby hub and carried via 1000 km of fiber to the destination, with various routing delays, adding 5 ms, leaving a 5 ms lead, 5000 microseconds.

In finance, we say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. That is because in a microsecond we can do >1k multiplications. 5 ms is time for >5M multiplications, many more than needed to evaluate a position and choose a response.

The only routing choices are which satellite to uplink to, and whether to forward or downlink each packet. Whatever choices are made don't need to be re-evaluated more than per second. Packet queuing delay can be negligible; modern switching equipment will start forwarding a packet while the rest is still arriving; this would happen when forwarding via laser link.

The latency advantage for New York/London/Frankfurt <-> Singapore/Tokyo/Hong Kong would be even more compelling.

that crap should be banned... if only rich folk can do these trades it is not fair for everyone else.

Or anyway taxed.

The profit from trading securities is definitely already taxed.

Who ever said it is fair?

There are many things rich people can do, poor cannot. You gotta have money, to make (real) money. Thats the harsh truth and most of us who do not have it, have to struggle hard, to make some wealth and very, very hard and be very lucky and gifted, to get rich by it (without negating all ethics).

Isn't some of the futility if that struggle due to the theft-by-design that central bank led inflation causes, along with their reliance on the government education systems continuing to fail to educate people on his money actually works?

That’s what public companies are for. Lots of not necessarily rich people pool their money to become one very rich entity

I believe this is only temporary and SpaceX has announced plans to roll out different subscription plans (including roaming) in the future.

They've said that the base station will be able to roam at some point in the future and right now it's because they don't schedule the service on an ad-hoc basis so if you're base station isn't in it's expected area it won't get service.

Starlink has to abide by the laws of whatever jurisdiction you are in. There's not many technical reasons why they can't provide roaming service on the seas but there are issues such as if you dock in a country that prohibits Starlink service, they're going to want some system in place to reject your packets. That shouldn't be too difficult but resources must be allocated to making it happen. They probably have other things on their plate now that are a higher priority.

I have a 38' steel sloop with 400w of solar + a wind generator on-board.

I'm not a full-time liveaboard, but I have been on-board for the last couple of months and you can definitely make it work.

Sailing is labor intensive, but not in the ways you imagine. Navigation, docking and provisioning are all straightforward.

Where it can sometimes feel like a full-time job is maintenance. Everything on a boat wants to break all the time. Doesn't matter if the vessel is brand new or 40 years old; finding a balance between maintenance and life is difficult.

I learned a few years ago about barnacles, which by virtue of being unaerodynamic and super heavy if you let them form huge colonies on the bottom of your ship, can decrease fuel efficiency severely. I saw how much work maintanence was, I said 'nope!' I guess a house is similar in some ways. Shingles don't last forever, pipes get corroded. The salty sea though, it's a bit more unkind to things, aye?

At least with a house the timeline is long and it's easy to hire someone to do it for you. Even galvanized pipes last 40-50 years without much problem, and newer pex pipes may last indefinitely. Roofs are 25+ years.

Not soaking your house in salt water really helps with longevity I've found

For sure. Even then, the techniques used by builders at the beach seem to allow houses to endure a long time.

You’ve gotta replace some stuff yearly on those houses by ocean spray, it’s actually a bigger problem than it might seem

Absolutely. I once looked at an apartment on IJmuiden beach, it was only a few years old and it looked as if it was 50 years old (and had not been maintained in those 50 years).

If you use anti-fouling bottom paint and either a) live in a region where it's pleasant to dive and scrub your hull, or b) can pay a service to do it for you, either way it's only a once a month thing, and a haul out ever couple of years. Although I can't speak to steel hulls, with fiberglass water can get into the fiberglass causing blisters that have to be ground out and epoxied in, which is precisely as annoying and expensive as it sounds.

Compared to a house an ocean going (so salt water) sailboat disintegrates while you're looking at it. A sweet water boat a bit less fast but still quite fast. GP has it right: the maintenance is where the work and the money goes. The proverb is "a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money in".

I don't get why US houses are still built with shingles, they don't seem to last at all. Our houses are generally built with roof tiles (not mine, I've got a flat roof which will need to be redone every 25-30 odd years :/ ) which last for decades and generally only need a few replaced after heavy storms, maybe cleaned up if they look grimy.

Pipes are made from plastic and last decades, but they're generally not too hard to replace though.

I'd argue the biggest maintenance jobs to a house is keeping everything clean, basically the same as a boat. The other one would be painting every couple of years, and of course garden maintenance.

Boats also have critical systems such as engines that need maintenance and despite that break often. Esp. on a sailboat, there's nothing more important than the engine and these are usually cooled by salt water.

When I lived in southern California, roof tiles were very common but in the eastern US, it's mostly shingles. I hate to think of what a hailstorm would do to a roof full of tiles. Hail can cause significant damage to a shingled roof but it's much less expensive to replace.

Yachts don't rely on solar. Sometimes they have solar but only as a small auxilary system. They primarily rely on propeller regen where the prop flips into drag mode stealing a fraction of a knot from the sail-driven ship. I've seen some yacht owners try to install a small wind turbine but it's not worth the trouble because of the noise it creates. They also tend to have at least one gas generator as an emergency backup.

> I do wonder though if sailing the ship is basically a full-time job in itself

Someone should always be on watch if possible. It doesnt always happen as people do solo voyages. Open ocean most vessels would have transponders but if you're anywhere coastal you couldn't take the chance as smaller vessels don't always have and you can't rely on radar either.

I do think you could make it work though. Similar to van living. Plan your legs based on availability. You down time will be part maintainance etc.

Why wouldn't you use the wind energy also? It's a lot of fun, readily available and a lot cheaper…

From the images on the site it looks like it deploys a sailing kite in addition to the solar powered engines.

Oh hi jjcim. Another cool research project from where I used to work. [0] Back in the day, the development building had a great view of the runway during the Farnborough air show and my pals on the Zephyr project would give me a shout if anything interesting was taking off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr

Sails have several major downsides, most notably they take up a lot of deck space and cause a boat to tilt to the side. If you’re regularly sailing long distances it’s much faster but top speed isn’t that big of a deal when your living on the boat full time.

Other options like kites and wind turbines can work well but they all all significant upfront costs as well as ongoing maintenance issues. Spending that same money on a bigger boat gets you much more space, and of course a generator can give you redundancy or higher top speeds.

>top speed isn’t that big of a deal when your living on the boat full time.//

If you're living on your boat 365 then I imagine avoiding severe weather becomes more important?

This is the reason Weather reports and forecast are so important for people on boats.

Most people living in boats actually live on ports and don't get very far from the coast most of the time.

You are right but it depends on the skillset and general lifestyle needs of the person. I've watched (a little) some of the sail around the world channels on YouTube and one couple moved to a performance trimaran, the guys reasoning was that he wanted to have speed to get out of the way if the weather changed.

For those that do not really stray far from the shore or who are willing to take more risk for more comfort, they use a slower boat.

On average liveaboards are sailing around 10% of the time. Most of the time if bad weather is approaching they will just stay in a safe location.

…cause a boat to tilt to the side…

This is a net positive. The alternative is to roll back and forth with the waves. It’s much nicer with the sail up and ata bit of a heel.

Also, just to throw this in, one of the world cruising sailing couples which wrote for the magazines switched to a diesel powered boat as they aged and found that they spent less of fuel than they had on new sails. Sails are consumables if you care about performance.

The alternative is a catamaran.

Your point on the diesels still stands. Properly designed cats are unsinkable and don't readily capsize, but not weathering a storm is worth every penny invested in diesels. Besides one needs them in marinas anyway.

Electrical engines are more and more becoming a thing, especially for sail boats, where they server more for harbor and anchoring than covering distances.

Interesting last point...curious why is that? Do they get battered from weather and physically tear, or do they just stretch/thin over time?

They lose their ability to hold their "shape" and become less efficient. This is primarily a concern for people that want to go as fast as possible. I've been perfectly happy with sails after 20 years of light use. I mean, I can see that they don't really have the best shape, but I'm still sailing so all is good.

Racers use very thin, light, and stiff sails made from mylar or similar materials. They are typically very expensive and want to be changed as often as possible, at least once every racing season. Modern small pleasure yacht cruising sails "canvas" is laminated polyester, aka dacron, which is far thicker, more durable, springier, and more common than mylar.

It's an interesting question, where does the wear come from. But sails are a very active part of the boat; every tack is going to drag the sail across the deck of the boat, rub against fittings. When a sail luffs, head-to-wind it's whipping around with the weight of the sheets (control lines), and then when you're taking the sail down it's getting folded (best case) or stuffed into a bag (worst case) [EDIT: some sail materials like being shoved in a bag!]. And of course even when a sail is just sitting there powering the boat it's under a tremendous amount of force, which stretches it over time.

Sails do fail, and yes often by ripping in half. I've personally never heard of a sail failing at the control points (e.g. the tack of a jib), probably because those areas are heavily reinforced.

https://www.northsails.com/sailing/en/sails/materials

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sail

Thanks. As someone who has never and doesn't ever plan to sail, this taught me lot.

This is all spot on. Sails fail due to wear of the fabric itself, because a seam failed, from rubbing, repeated stretching and releasing (you can tell an older sail because it will bulge more as a result of this) or because it got over-stressed. Salt water obviously also doesn't help with sail fabric longevity, as does UV influence all of which will age a sail (check the color difference on spare sails that have been bagged vs the ones in use or, check the first strip of a roll-up sail to see how much that can affect the fabric).

Those areas where the sail needs to be strongest is where they are re-inforced doubling up the layers (and not just 'two', a corner can easily be 10 ply or more thick), on older boats further re-inforced with leather or heavier grades of fabric. The panels are carefully laid out so that the highest stress aligns with the warps. A large sail can be made up from many 10's of panels, which are joined in a variety of manners (glue (typically for very fast boats or as re-inforcement of stitching), stitching, sometimes ultrasonic welding for special applications). On the very high end there are even laminated custom laid out fibre pattern sails (for instance: a sandwich of Kevlar wire between two layers of bonded fabric or plastic).

At one time I worked for a competitor of North Sails, who by the way were pioneers in the digitization of sail manufacturing.

It really depends on the type of sails you buy.

The cheapest ones last the longest but offer the worst performance.

> Sails have several major downsides[..]

Yes, but it makes less noise.

Also less disturbing to the ecosystem below than a prop.

a sail (especially when luffing) is really f**ing loud

The second link of the parent comment describes a optional automatic parasail tug.

Most sea going sailboats, and many others, are perfectly capable of sailing around the world, without any fuel. Solar panels are only needed to charge batteries, that are only needed if you want the extras: GPS, radio, other communications. 2 panels and 2 batteries are good enough for most boats, for 1 to 4 persons, traveling for anywhere around 1-2 months across the seas. The limitations are water, and food storage. The solar and batteries are good for years, easily up to 5 years. Humans need other things though. It's not the boats or the technology its the price that limits. (You can buy an ocean cruising bust for 20k USD, easy.) But, it is a life style commitment!

Food can be stored longer by refrigeration, which requires power. Similarly water can be desalinated, which again requires power. Solar & batteries can help with both of these.

On a typical sailboat space is very much at a premium, even de-hydrated foods occupy quite a bit of room.

That's the entry fee. And then the real cost starts to roll in. There is a reason so many Youtube channels and Patreon accounts are being used to fund otherwise unviable life-styles of people sailing full time.

Wow, the "Silent Yachts" one has a "fully automated towing kite"! That's not something I've ever encountered before, very clever. Removes the need for an annoyingly tall mast and probably saves a lot of weight as well.

A mast provides a predictable center of lift in the boat on two axes, easy to control, handles high winds elegantly. Kite? Not so much. Also, try sailing in to the wind with a kite. May be possible, but very, very slow going. Traditional sail plans strike a balance between functionality at all points of sail, ease of handling and safety. They also have downwind sail options.

One advantage of a kite sail is you have more surface area for solar panels and those panels are not going to shaded by the sail while underway.

I find it quite strange that on the Azura landing page they don't have even one photo of a yacht. Just renderings.

They also have a price, which was nice.

It looks like shit though. The other yacht looks much nicer.

These guys spent the night on the Silent-Yachts one a ~month ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIte4FNI0U0

anyone else think it would be super damn fun building solar floating homes like this?

I'd be down haha - When do we start?

If sea levels keep rising a lot of coasting could be like this.

In the netherlands they have flaoting houses in the canals, but stationary AFAIK

There's a couple living on a cheap ass floating tent/home (it literally uses barrels to float) in Sweden I think. Pretty cool. Also narrow boats in England are cheap and rather nice. Could start there.

https://youtu.be/jljkK9HMa44

You definitely want to try an English narrowboat before you start. I know people that have done this; it's romantic, but at its least romantic you're living in a not very well insulated damp trailer.

I'm on board mine now! I guess the theoretical benefit of the seagoing version is your roof space isn't constrained by the size of English locks so you might actually be able to fit enough solar to power the vessel. That and find good weather...

A local company does this, but they are intended to be mostly stationary.

https://www.waterlilyboats.com

I’m waiting for the floating cities. Sounds incredibly fun.

You know, sailing catamarans are a thing, right?

Wind is more consistent than sunshine.

Sure, I know sailing catamarans well (via Youtube vids mostly admittedly). But I switched drooling focus when these things started appearing- I suspect they will eventually displace many if not most other boat types (albeit not in my lifetime), possibly using hydrogen (not battery packs) as energy storage. Sunshine is not required if I understand it correctly. No wear and tear on the sails, not dependent on winds to go from point a to b, more like driving than sailing, except no pollution, no noise.

Solar yatchs are cool!

Considering loitering is a very important goal for military drones, I expect them to be using solar power extensively too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com