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Comment by mattas | Hacker News Reader

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."

Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

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This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.

Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.

Those ports have the rest of the infrastructure though and so it makes other logistics worse

I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations.

The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days.

You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which is relatively cheap but might take weeks. If you can cut out vessel loading/unloading you save at least a week.

I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't lose any time you gain in loading/unloading to transit time inconsistency when you have to rely on wind. This is not even to mention the fact that these ships cannot make good use of big modern ports with cranes and the best logistical connections and that it would take 100+ of them with hundreds of crew to move as much as a single container ship can with 20 people. I could see them being useful in niche scenarios like cabotage within island/archipelago nations or shipping small loads on irregular schedules, but for anything else it is very hard to beat a container ship.

This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.

Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

They do it on Vancouver Island in B.C.

It doesn't appear to be in normal operation, but it has been tested:

https://harbourair.com/going-electric

As I understand it, Hawaii had environmental concerns with ferries (requiring a review that was never completed), specifically whale/ship strikes and the risk of car-carrying ferries transporting invasive species between the islands. [1] I'm unsure if other islands would have similar concerns about cargo ships or not or if the environmental review would have been satisfactory if they'd just done it on time.

I'd expect ferries and/or small cargo ships to be an attractive option if allowed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry

The super ferry was incredible. Being able to drive your car on a different island was such a game changer vs buying flights for the fam and then having to rent a car. I miss it!

This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

Your crew isn't emitting hundreds of tons of CO2 burning the dirtiest fuel available on earth, though.

You might not need much crew for a vessel that small. Automation can take care of most of it, and with the right equipment the ship can basically sail itself. Then you just need a captain and maybe some maintenance crew to keep the automation running.

Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.

> Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

Because journalism is plagued by innumeracy. Same reason the author is talking about the length of cargo ships instead of the volume.

Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry

the way the american administration is pushing for de-globalization... this might be the perfect future market.

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