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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

I can probably buy that a modern sailing ship could make sense. Automate control of the sails and you're getting "free energy" in an energy intensive industry, with the extra cost just being some hopefully minor maintenance.

I might be able to buy that "actually, wooden ships are a good idea", though it's going to be a hard sell.

This company appears to be trying both at once though, that strikes me as a quite unlikely to be a good business decision - unless there is some synergy between "wooden ship" and "sailing ship" that I'm completely missing.

That said, I know very little about the industry.

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Yep, in the last few years, there's been quite a lot of movement in the shipping industry to add wind-assist devices to existing/new ships. Michelin [1] is basically doing what you suggest. Maersk and Cargill [2] are also working on technologies that harness wind to decrease fossil fuel use. Oceanbird [3] is working on wing-style sails that they claim can basically move a cargo ship along at ~10kts.

1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-i...

2: https://www.cargill.com/the-future-of-shipping-is-sails

3: https://www.theoceanbird.com

How does one even attach a sail to a cargo ship that would move it at 10 knots? I'm not an engineer so it might even be obvious, but it seems like the mast would have to exert an incredible amount of force on the ship.

Then again, I guess the same applies to old sailing ship and they figured it out. It just boggles my mind.

Traditionally I believe the masts were held vertical by ropes, I imagine the force transferred through them (by tension) not the stiffness of the mast. But I'm far from an expert.

> Automate control of the sails and you're getting "free energy"

There have been auto pilots for sailing ships and motorized ships for decades, it's nothing new. Ocean sailing is usually keeping the same course and sails for days.

When I Google for "modern sailing ship", I only see CGI rendered ships. This ship looks like most other older sailing ships, which still have ship yards that can construct and repair them.

They started with buying an older ship from 1909 and improving it. Now building a similar one from scratch. I think these iterations fit the startup mentality of just starting and continuously improving.

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