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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I love the concept of this, I really do, but I'm struggling with the implementation and economics of it. Surly they should be building ships with more modern materials and technologies - lighter fibre glass, modern sail technology. It feels like a plaything for the team (and investors) to justify building a beautiful sailboat rather than a serious play at at green shipping.

Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.

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I used to be a naval architect, and I completely agree with you. This type of design is extremely inefficient for cargo delivery. I think it is unrealistic to expect to be able to even remotely compete with diesel cargo ships. As another commenter said, the crew are in fact paying passengers (I have not verified this) which means this is actually a cruise ship, which makes a lot more sense. It must be a great experience. In my mind, the only way sailing ships can come back as work boats is if a way is found to make them nearly automatic and space efficient. In my mind this means large steel ships, not dissimilar to regular cargo ships, but with automated kite sails (e.g. https://skysails-marine.com/) as they do not tend to tip the ship over like regular sails do.

Are there Kerbal Space Program like simulation for naval architect wannabe? I have always wanted to learn more about what it takes to design maritime crafts / structure.

Not that I know of, sorry...

Coffee is the perfect product for this because the farmers get paid peanuts and the actual coffee is sold to customers at like 1000x higher price, so there's probably a lot of room to pay a premium for "green logistics" while still making a tidy profit

I think that's a great way to look at it. Like those vertical farms that exclusively targeted luxury/high-margin crops. Incapable of competing with real logistical chains, but efficient enough to focus on capturing the cream of the market.

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For what it’s worth, any sailing vessel beats any diesel container ship in ocean pollution. That, and ballast tank contamination, though that is not unique to any propulsion type, but instead to ship design.

If the crew were on land they'd still be eating three meals a day.

So I don't see how food factors into this. It doesn't really matter if they're eating at another job on shore, or eating while crewing a ship.

Last time I saw something like this they were getting additional revenue by charging people to be crew.

> Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.

Perhaps, but the economics aren't the only side, there's also the total impact. While there might be a profitable business in this idea, is there a real positive climate impact as suggested, or would the effort be put to better use on projects that can scale.

My honest question is does the economics of a larger crew impact the competitivity of the offering? 250 tons is nothing to sneeze at for things like gulf seafood shipping

Edit: this is a huge deal for seafood in my opinion because your total fuel is impacted by the need to maintain a balance between range and what you dedicate to running walk in freezers on the ship for your catch.

I forget the calculations, but there would have to be like hundreds of thousands of these ships at all times with millions of crew to make a dent the cargo carried in container ships.

Aren't you just say "the total addressable market is huge"? That sounds like a good thing for the company trying it.

Sure, given they can compete commercially against containerships. The baseline would be like launching a new containership which is just as good, except it has a couple of thousand crew instead of a dozen.

Uphill battle...

I assume the goal would be to automate the management of the sails so that the crew could still be only a dozen or so large. Replacing crew with computers and electric motors.

Otherwise I would be surprised if you could even make a good faith argument that this will be commercially viable.

Most sailing yachts have this system, and it is generally prone to failure

The size of the market doesn't really matter when your product is not competitive.

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, shipping a 20ft container from Shenzhen to Los Angeles is about $1200 and takes about 14 days. Assuming you can sail at the same speed, and considering this sail ship has a capacity of about 10 containers, that is a revenue of $24000 / month. In reality you'll only be able to sail 100 to 150 miles a day, so crossing those 6500 miles will take you to 43 to 65 days - or a revenue of $5100-$7800 / month.

How are you going to run your ship for that little, considering you need 12 crew (and 12 additional "guest crew")?

Don't forget that included in that $1200 number there is also the rent of the container, which covers well over that 14 days since you need time to stuff and strip the container with cargo on both sides of the ocean leg.

It is something to sneeze at. That’s about 10 shipping containers. Current gen container ships can hold 15-25k twenty foot containers. Even inland barges are typically 10x bigger than this.

hmmm... seems like large container ships hold 18k TEU (~twenty-foot containers) and use 21,000 gallons of fuel per day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship

It seems like ~ 1 gallon of fuel per day per container

shipping across the pacific is 15-30 days, from asia to europe is 30-45 days.

seems pretty efficient, per container.

Probably dwarfed by the costs of getting the container to and from the ship.

Definitely. Commercial pricing for a move of a container from ship to shore and vice versa ranges between 30 and 70 euros here in Europe (Rotterdam/Antwerp).

Even if you compare fuel usage against inland barges, which capacity-wise are much closer, they use something on the order of magnitude of 25 metric tons of fuel every 2 to 3 weeks or so, depending on cruising speed and number of stops of course. Assuming about a 208 TEU capacity, and 1.8 tons of fuel a day, that'd be roughly 2 or 3 gallons of fuel per container per day.

People tend to really underestimate how ridiculously efficient ships are per unit of cargo shipped.

Realistically, if you want to make a difference in emissions right now, figure out a way to move inland shipping (the port-to-actual-destination leg) from trucks onto trains and barges, only doing last-mile trucking. I don't think the barrier to that happening is actually technical, nor is it financial because those modes tend to be cheaper. The economics around these modes of transport are well established. It's primarily that they are slower, so you tie up a lot of cashflow into goods in-transit.

Because the cost of shipping is so low relative to the cost of the goods itself, it typically does not make sense to save pennies on the transport while tying up serious cashflow for longer. I'm honestly surprised there is no financial institution that has made a financial product around financing the cashflow gap created by greener modes of transport: the pay-off is predictable, and the risks are low.

A plaything to some is R&D to others.

I guess the question is how much R&D is actually involved in building schooners modelled on a 1907 design which was itself modelled on hundreds of years of what worked well in long-distance voyages under sail?

It's a great plaything though!

(Sent from my narrowboat)

Tjose tea clippers are amazing ships, the peak of sail boat engineering. And yes, that includes modern foils boats, as clippers are significantly larger. So yes, R&D would be limited. Building a modern version of a clipper so might be expensive. And then, well, those clippers were replaced quite early by steam powered ships tgat can only be called tiney and slow by modern standards. That, and they didn't even carry containers. But hey, maybe there is still some VC money to be grabbed through fancy renderings and pitch decks.

actually, sail boats and steam boats coexisted for many decades. Sail boats were used for grain and coal transport well into the 20th century, though as steam engine technology developed, on fewer and fewer routes. But it's only the internal combustion engine that made sail boats obsolete for shipping.

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