[jmoorebeek]

From our first analysis, applying the thrust through the container seems doable; the containers are secured to each-other and the ship via mechanical "twistlocks", which are designed to handle not just ship loads, but also trucking loads (such as a 2g hard braking from a semi). The roll loads are actually the more difficult design challenge.

Regarding kites, we looked at those quite a bit. The challenge with those is that kites tend to be best for when the wind is coming from behind you or crosswind. For a container ship traveling at high speed, the kites would act more as a parachute and slow you down (even if you were extracting energy from them).

[Rorando]

Master Mariner here with bridge experience from sail assisted vessels both conventional and through magnus effect equipment. Also a lifelong sailing competitor.

Have you considered the effect your design has on the drift and drift angle of a vessel yet? Looks like your aiming to benefit from conventional sail assisted lift but there is a thin line between lift and drift. The negative effect of drift induces increased consumption so some kind of trimming needs to be done quite fast to maintain lift effect. To maintain an optimal angle of attack to get the maximum lift requires quite fast adjustments which on sailboats can be done in two ways, either by trimming sails or adjusting course. Adjusting course on large cargo vessels takes quite a while so i don't see that as an option unless the sail is hooked up to a fast acting autopilot.

[macmac]

Do you have plans for how to get the effect of the sail into the loading computer? Would be surprised if any of the current software is capable of handling a dynamic input like that. Seems like an interesting problem, but tough.

[latchkey]

https://www.cargo-partner.com/trendletter/issue-10/sails-and...