Does anyone know how well this scales? I assume it just doesn’t make sense to actually make one of that size when they are testing out the concept.
Basically the sail area grows with length squared, but ship mass and resistance grows roughly with length cubed. So propulsion gets weaker with size.
To move a full sized freighter, you would need a mast the size of a skyscraper and we don’t currently have materials that can support that.
If we did have a material that supported sails that large, it would still be a problem because you are functionally making the ship top heavy (when wind is applied) increasing how likely it is that the freighter rolls over.