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Comment by harrylepotter | Hacker News Reader

From a practical sense though, wouldn’t the staffing costs pale in significance to the other costs of running a large vessel?

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If we’re talking practical, you’d always need people on board to deal with mechanical breakdown or emergencies. And you’d need all the support systems and supplies need for them. After factoring that in, how large is the bridge crew on a container ship?

Also, pirates would become a problem because taking over a ship without a crew would easier and way less risk.

The argument for easier piracy assumes that a self-driving ship would have a standard "people accessible" format. There's no reason for packaging of the vessel to remain the same.

Consider patrol drones. They look nothing like something an individual can get into.

This was already addressed. Most of it would still have to be human accessible for maintenance/emergency purposes. If you're going to have to potentially service the thing underway, there is no point redoing the packaging.

Besides which, an automated ship is about a trio of tugs, a computer replacement, and a buncha fuel away from anywhere.

In terms of maintenance you can put the access below the cargo which significantly increases what it takes to hijack a ship. However for hijacking’s the simplest approach is to simply scuttle the ship remotely. If they get nothing then it’s rather hard to get people to hijack the next ship.

> scuttle the ship

You mean deliberately sink a $10 million ship, causing a massive environmental disaster. Not to mention being a hazard to other shipping if the water is shallow enough or the ship breaks apart.

Do you blow up a grocery store because someone attempts to steal a jar of pickles?

Ships sink all the time, unless it’s an oil tanker they really aren’t an environmental disaster. As to cost, if someone’s hijacking a ship you already lost the ship now it’s just an insurance question.

The question for an insurance company isn’t just about this ship, but the cost of paying out future hijackings. On top of this there is the rather more interesting option of refloating the ship.

...so you just hand out an instant logistical DDoS button to any sufficiently motivated group? What also makes you think insurance is going to pay out for you sinking your own ship. Moral hazard much?

Every rocket launch a range safety officer (RSO) keeps track of the trajectory and is ready to hit the self destruct button if needed. Insurance pays out if you hit it as that’s been agreed to ahead of time, the same would apply here or you wouldn’t sink the ship.

As to DDoS, sinking isn’t any more of a risk than someone taking over control of your self driving boat and aiming it at the coastline. From a pure safety standpoint you need some method of remotely disabling the ship.

A rocket launch is generally done much less frequently, premiums to insure would be through the roof due to the smaller risk pool, and don't involve cargo lots measured in the thousands of TEU.

The value of a single rockets cargo can easily be worth more than a container ships cargo. The average TEU at Port of Los Angeles is worth ~43k USD and the words largest container ship is only 24k TEU, that’s up to 1 Billion in 2021 USD and plenty of satellites have been worth more than that.

The ships can be worth quite a bit when new, but their also depreciating assets with only a few percent of that in scrap value. Only using the least valuable ships in areas that can be pirates seems like an obvious optimization.

You have the absolute oddest set of risk management practices I've tried to wrap my head around, but to each their own I guess. I don't see the sense in trusting a global supply chain that's built on JIT principles to a paradigm where your first reaction is "welp, scuttle it". Those TEU's may not be the most glorious things, but they are the inputs that keep modern civilization going. To do otherwise... Well... It just rings foolhardy to me. Might look good on the ledgers, but doesn't make good sense or shake out in the real world.

Piracy is an extremely rare event, and keeping it that way is important for ensuring the global supply chain works.

At the same time actively preventing piracy is expensive. Having a significant armed security force on a boat is effective, but paying for them when 99.999% of the time when their not needed isn’t cost effective. Making it clear that attacking a ship is pointless on the other hand is a great way to avoid getting attacked in the first place, but you need to be willing to carry through.

>Having a significant armed security force on a boat is effective, but paying for them when 99.999% of the time when their not needed isn’t cost effective.

Who cares? You seem to be assuming that security force does nothing else but sit around in case of piracy. In reality, we call these people "mariners", they are trained specialists at maintaining the hardware with which they ply their trade, they know the customs and rules to follow in diverse ports of call, and they are there to provide boots on the ground and hands on tools if something goes sideways.

There is a huge difference between bodies on the boat, and no body on the boat. You cross that line, and leave no bodies on the boat to look after things, and you now have a floating puzzle full of other people's stuff, owner's of which are not necessarily going to be happy that you decided to drop their load to the bottom of the ocean to "prove a point" where you can't even guarantee that the entire point wasn't the pirates making sure some shipment didn't show up in the first place.

Hell, if it wasn't you, the shipper, making the scuttle decision, and was actually the local Navy on justification of "no negotiation", fine. Though that really just punts the issue to international waters.

No one will blame you or foster ill-will for doing everything you could and failing anyway. People will have hard feelings if you come up and say, we blew up all your stuff because those damn dirty pirates. They paid you to get their stuff from A to B, you decided C was better.

All of this "let's go unmanned" just really seems to me to be a solution looking for a problem, and not being shy about creating a few more while we're at it.

You need to improve reliability and have a mobile crew you can dispatch on an emergency. Most mechanical engines do not need a maintenance crew on-site all the time, including the much larger and more complex electricity generators and the disaster-prone airplanes.

About pirates, no, they work will become much harder if you don't have anybody they can point a gun to and tell to stop the ship.

It depends. For last-mile delivery and public transport with small vessels, that may not be the case.

The city of Ghent was eyeing autonomous small crafts as "water taxis", and a big shipping provider wanted to do last-mile(s) delivery for shops, restaurants, and small parcel pickup points along a river. For the latter case, the vessel would still be manned, but instead of having to navigate, that person could sort and prepare parcels for delivery.

I don't think it is the costs necessarily but the availability of people with the right skills. Even with the money, you can't just magic up qualified mariners.

Also, a significant amount of money is spent providing 24 hour cover of navigation in the bridge so I guess you could save something by automating a lot of it.

You are probably right that in the extreme, it would be better to have some humans to make sure your containers make it to their destination!

Economics of scale are the whole point of large vessels so yeah, there's much less money to be saved eliminating crew on ships vs semi truck drivers (or even shipyard equipment operators).

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