New super-economy class of cruise ship passenger just dropped.
No money to afford a spot on the climate refugee cruise hyper-ships? Pay your way by turning the screw and paddling! Nutrient cubes included in package, so long as you stay in the tail.
Big difference is a modern sailboat like a ketch or sloop can maintain a straight course as much as 45 degrees into the wind. A Victorian era square rigger is greatly more limited with a range about 60 degrees off either side of downwind. A kite would be even more limited, probably within 45 degrees so it would only be useful when going mostly downwind. Still if it’s cheap and easy to deploy it’s free energy when it can be used. An interesting parallel is the spinnaker sail used on a typical sailboat flies much like a kite and can only be used within a similar downwind range. It’s a very powerful sail when it can be deployed.
The trouble is that it takes decades to create an effective sail captain and crew, and it’s insanely hard dangerous work. Read some accounts of how sails were actually managed back in the day, and it’s terrifying (at least for people without a head for heights, gaaah).
Maybe read the article? It’s talking about a new kind of sail that’s literally a giant kite attached at the end of a line and kept flying hundreds of feet in the air above the ship by computer control. Not a spinnaker or kite sail; something closer to a parafoil.
That’s why this is different and they aren’t talking about going back to fully-rigged sailing ships.
(Actually, who are we kidding? They couldn’t care less how hard and dangerous the work was. The real reason they like this new design because it doesn’t have masts to get in the way of loading cargo.)
Its honestly not a bad idea. When Sails fell out of fashion, canvas was the height of technology, nobody gave a fuck about emisions and tanker fuel was cheap AF.
If the owners of tanker/container fleets can see a $20,000 reduction a year in fuel costs by fitting a modern well designed $10,000 sail that costs $5000 a year to maintain. They will.
If multinational trillion dollar industries can find ways to save money AND go green at the same time. Good.
Yeah but the guy and the guy he talked to haven’t seen it and aren’t gonna see it because they’re not gonna go be out in the middle of the ocean looking at passing cargo ships, so he’s not really wrong
I dunno anything about kites but maybe the wind is always strong enough up there so that it never falls.
I would suspect that a ship with these kites has an alternative method of traversal if the kite needs to dry or whatever. If that’s even a problem at all.
i've no useful comment to add, but for those who don't click
Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal.
“What differentiates it from other wind solutions,” says Bernatets, “is that the wing is not just pulled by the wind and countered by the ship.” Instead, it flies in figure-of-eight loops, which multiply the pulling effect of the airflow to give what he calls “crazy power.”
“Plus, we fetch the wind 300 meters above the sea surface, where it’s 50% more powerful,” adds Bernatets. The combination “explains why the power is tremendous for a system that is very compact, simple on the bow of the ship, and can be retrofitted on any ship, not just new ships,” he says.
Are the kites potentially a next level of efficiency for sail? Not in an overall sense, but as a supplement and in the sense that you can still design boats for maximum hauling.
Gotta wonder how much a kite would add in terms of lowering the fuel usage really though, doesn’t seem like it would make much of dent. Nor are the ships designed to take that weird force angle presumably
Also the kite in the photo would only be able to pull the ship as fast as the wind speed. The idea behind a proper sail is that you can go faster than the wind speed if it comes at you sideways.
This isn’t accurate. The kite is typically moving in the air, generating drag. This can easily surpass wind speed. You see the same effect in kiteboarding (both water and land varieties.)
Ships designs are good for a variety of strains - they’re built to get tossed around in storms after all.
Also about the sails comparison - I think the kites are retractable and redeployable, ending up with a variable, lower ship profile.
Water also has super high drag forces - it sounds efficient to counteract the constant water drag using constant air drag instead of constantly burning fuel.
AA was not racially biased, it was necessary and it still is
“After California banned race-conscious admissions in 1996, the proportions of Black and Latino students at UCLA, one of the most elite school’s in the state’s system, fell drastically. By 2006, a decade later, only 96 Black students enrolled in a freshman class of nearly 5,000. They became known as the Infamous 96.”
Defending that is seriously messed up. Everyone agrees that AA wasn’t perfect, but it was the most effective way of diversifying student bodies. Racist Republicans got what they wanted, it’s as simple as that.
The seller of this shirt got a cease and desist from the sackler family lawyer and went on to make another shirt with that email exchange wherein he asked the lawyer to relay the “kill yourselves” message to his clients 🔥
So unfortunately they are unavailable forever but it looks like there are plenty of copycat sites that will print it, but probably not long sleeve or with the back graphic
cnn.com
Hot