Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption

As the maintainer of a cargo ship tracker [1] and as somebody whose sailing career started and ended with sinking [2] a J/22 sailboat [3], I can only salute you. This is clever, bold, and ambitious. How do we keep track of your progress? I looked for a blog or mailing list, but I didn't see one.

[1] now at https://sfba.social/@sfships; formerly at https://twitter.com/sfships

[2] They said it was unsinkable, but as a software developer clearly I'm more talented than the norm.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/22

What happened? Long knock down and a hatch glass failure? Or a failure to secure the hatch glass entirely?

It was a rental, so I'm not totally sure. I think they told me that there was a compartment that wasn't properly sealed?

Once you took sailing classes at the place, you could take one out. My first time out on my own I backwinded the jib, which knocked it down. Then my non-sailor friends grabbed for the top rail, turtling the boat. Eventually we got it back up and started bailing, but it kept getting lower in the water, so we all jumped out again. The back then pretty rapidly sank, leaving a foot of the mast and a foot of the bow above the water. That left us treading water two miles offshore on a quiet Wednesday afternoon.

As you might imagine, I haven't done a lot of sailing since.

Nightmare fuel for me. I can't imagine how this would have gone where I sail in Puget Sound. The water is cold all year round (max is about 57F in August), and a single COB is a pretty big deal due to body temp issues.

Are you sure it wasn't a j/24?

j/24 had lockable lazerettes in the cockpit, and the issue was that when they flipped, the lazerettes could flip open (hinged on the seats), they would fill with water and would sink the boat. This was a well documented issue, and the "solution" was to lock the lazerettes to prevent the ingress of water. I suspect this was eventually fixed, but it's honestly embarassing how long it took

It's fascinating to me that a charter company did not lock them on the entire fleet and throw away the keys.

This was 20-odd years ago, so I can't swear to anything. But the way it was explained to me, the boat had air pockets fore and aft to make it unsinkable, which is why they chose them for their student boats. But that in this one, the rear one hadn't been sealed properly, so water leaked in as we were trying to get back to shore. They were certainly embarrassed about it. But so was I, so we just called it even.

Digging around, this was the place: https://www.yelp.com/biz/chicago-sailing-chicago-2?rr=3

The history described there matches my memory of it being a J/22.

This is the kind of story that is amazing to read and even more amazing to hear in person. Since you're telling it today, I assume that even though it was probably a pretty stressful event when it occurred, you now have the perspective to enjoy telling the story and see everyone's face when you tell it.

Thank you for the laughter.

Yeah, told in person it's one of my everybody-get-a-fresh-beer stories. It all turned out fine, so we all laugh about it now.

Awesome to see this on Hacker News, I love whenever we get sailors on here. I have tons of questions.

Why steel? Durability I assume? Have you modeled using a textile?

Do you have load sensors throughout the wing? Anemometors?

How active is the trimming? Is it just a single axis of rotation or do you have the ability to adjust the leech and luff shape? If so do you have the ability to adjust both the leeward and windward skins? Or just the windward? 2mm steel seems like it has a decent amount of play at that scale? Have you built any bigger scale models with steel? Feels to me like iteration time would take a significant hit playing with steel instead of cloth?

As consistent as these ships are with their speed under motor, the apparent wind will be all over the place. Could see apparent from 50+ on the nose to 5 knots from dead astern. Do you intend to have a fixed set of optimal wind velocities and trim settings? Or want to make something that is usable and automatic in anything but the most violent of breezes?

How much of the bill-of-materials is custom and how much is off-the-shelf type components and structural bits? Any custom composite parts or fairly off the shelf steel tubing, bar, and such?

Also are you hiring?

We're looking at steel partly for durability, but also if we're going to be rolling up the sails a lot then fatigue limits become a lot more important. Cost is key too - I'd love to make this from CF, but price goes way up.

For load sensors, we're thinking strain gauges and pressure sensors to measure wing surface pressure and use that for live feedback. Anemometers might be mounted on the top of the wing, but more likely we'll use a master anemometer at the bridge to send info to the entire array.

For the wing shape, we're currently looking at a symmetric airfoil with fixed ribs inside for strength, so not able to actively change the camber, but we are looking at the ability to do wing warping to change the overall shape of the wing. We are still working to get our first data from on the water, so no good answers on the trim other than we want to make this as automatic and turnkey for the ship master as possible. We're quite early in the design still, though, so don't yet know where the limits of the technology are. Likewise, no answers on BOM and sourcing for you. However, we do plan to start hiring after our seed raise, so feel free to contact us through our website!

> We're looking at steel partly for durability

> For load sensors, we're thinking strain gauges and pressure sensors

"We're looking"? "We're thinking"? Considering your demo video was a guy showing off folded printer paper secured with duct tape, and a gauzy fabric built around an off-the-shelf tape measure....

How far along are you? Sounds like you're nowhere even near a prototype, let alone a beta design. I know every company has gone through a design phase and a (sometimes lengthy) build up... but you don't usually see them start the PR hype train before they've even got a CGI demo or a model that isn't made out of scrap. What is it that makes you a real company, and not just some guy who got real excited about an idea he had last week?

They obviously have nothing except the idea. However, you are being wholly unfair to them expecting a prototype. Even with the entire YC funding they won't be able to build more than a scale model, no chance for a working prototype.

This is a very cool, very hard idea to execute - i shudder to think at the kind of testing, reliability and certification you need to ensure a foldable ten-storey building is safe around human crew in gale force winds. It's a moon shot, and sometimes these take you on the Moon.

I'd guess that YC advised them to launch now, maybe to get the idea in front of any people (employees, advisers, customers, etc) who could accelerate the concept.

And YC would be betting that their experience counts for something beyond just a random person with a weekly idea:

"We are hardware engineers with over two decades of experience between us, working at Tesla, SpaceX, JPL, Relativity, and some startups."

Personally, and I know that is outside the SV bubble of experience, I would have expected at least one founder with a solid background as a naval architect and another one with an equally solid background in container shipping.

The experience you listed read more like name-dropping PR to sell this whole thing to other investors down the line.

+1 to seeing sailing on here :)

I'd imagine the last 1-2 generations of America's Cup boats would have a lot to glean in terms of wing sail camber changes and how they operate. Pretty neat to watch how they use flaps vertically, but there's a lot of hydraulics and carbon at play there as well.

Maybe the competition is these guys? (Inflatable sails) https://www.michelin.com/en/press-releases/michelin-continue...

And something a bit more conventional off the bow when winds are favorable? https://skysails-marine.com/

The most recent completed America's Cup uses a boomless dual skinned mainsail held up by a fairly traditional mast. The Cats and Tris between the IACC and the AC75 (2010, 2013, 2017) are more something to take inspiration from I'd think with their more complex internal construction. SailGP's wings, have proven to be quite versatile and durable, albeit with significant maintenance. I'd assume a cargo wingsail would be a bit beefier than a foiling raceboat's.

Despite the switch from wings back to "normal sails" In my view, this latest generation of America's Cup is especially awesome from a follower's perspective for two distinct reasons.

1. The rule is similar to last gen, a foiling 75 foot monohull. A number of the initial engineering work and sorta figuring out how to design and build the various systems has already been done, a team wanting to join in on the fun doesn't have to reinvent the wheel with everything unless they believe they can have an edge by doing so. There are old boats for sale as well as a 40-foot model for training the athletes on their controls.

2. There's a centralized repository for reconnaissance. Meaning, every team, and some of the media have access to sailing, launching, and training footage of every team. What has for over a century required each team employ their own multi-national team of spies to surveil each competitor. It was unnecessarily costly and the fans get the added benefit of being to watch much more of each team's boats as their systems morph throughout the design process. I have a friend on the recon team and as well have been exposed through a yt channel, "Mozzy Sails"[1], who does a great assessment on the various teams systems developments.

If you're a fan of F1 for the engineering bits, you'll likely feel right at home following some of the America's Cup coverage. Even the technical documents like the Class Rule and super interesting to me. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK0h2Yj6jcyeXGeITonYnOA [2] https://www.americascup.com/files/m5498_AC75-Class-Rule-v20....

Small world! I head up the IT systems at Alinghi Red Bull Racing. Agree with your final paragraph that it is extremely close to F1 in terms of engineering bits. Good fun!

Didn't Newey get his America Cup fix as part of his contract at Red Bull ?

Skysails seems like it would just be too much for boats to manage. I can't imagine the amount of time you can run that is a large percentage of the trip.

Why can’t you ? Kites and sail usually can operate on the same wind angles, the only limitation I can think for kites are bridges which are not encountered in the large percentage of the trip.

On top of that, higher altitudes wind Jane more power potential than the ones used by sails, ask kytesurfers !

Don't like the potential of the kite going under the boat and getting wrapped up / destroyed in the prop.

Look at basalt fiber, similar properties to carbon fiber but much cheaper.

I love literally everything about this idea and origin story. I care about climate change, I've lived on sailboats, I'm a software engineer, I've worked for and with startups for over 20 years... and somehow this line:

"What brought the three of us together was actually a Dungeons & Dragons game"

is the best part.

Feel free to hit me up (contact info in my profile) if you need a pep talk or intros to different circle of potential investors or friendly advice about web performance. Otherwise I'll be following your story and cheering you on from the sidelines.

I know zero about how containers are tied down but the gust forces on the sails that I saw in the video are going to be enormous. Have there been some simple checks on the righting moments on the container and how it transmitted to the containers below and finally to the deck? One benefit of the design is that you can "reef" in bad conditions (hopefully really, really quickly) and perhaps still get some benefit.

Have you done any weather routing calcs to see what the angle of attack for the big ship lanes? Perhaps an integrated trip cost-benefit?

Also, you might not want to use the WASP acronym and stick with just "wind-assisted propulsion". The wind industry will immediately think of the WAsP software [0].

[0] https://www.wasp.dk/

Appreciate the acronym check! That's a great point.

Our design evolved out of a routing/performance analysis software that we run on historical weather data. Angle of attack and trip cost-benefit varies per lane. In general transpacific and transatlantic have amazing winds, with other routes performing well but not at well.

We've done the excel-level analyses on container loads and wing buckling forces. It all checks out. There is a combined-load case at 15deg of roll with heavy containers and heavy winds that's zero-margin, but as you said we can reef when required. Reefing will likely be single-digit minutes, but we can also feather (0 angle of attack) much more quickly.

Though it may not matter much, "WASZP" is also the naming of a popular foiling dinghy sailboat.

I agree, the roll moments are a huge design challenge! We're looking at multiple avenues to bring those loads down to the deck: - The double wide container already has a longer lever arm to provide righting moment - We plan to incorporate load spreaders (similar to a crane) which can further extend the footprint to the adjacent container stacks - We are designing in tethers which automatically drop down to the deck level and get lashed down by a deckhand during installation, which provide additional tension support.

Bailey has written a routing software which we use to send virtual ships on crossings (for instance Trans Pacific), incorporating historical weather data. Even with no change in route or vessel speed, we can see benefits.

> The double wide container

Yikes. Containers are stacked as high as they can be to not crush the containers below. Applying additional downward force is going to cause cascading failures.

You've also just limited your deployment to routes that have double-stack container cranes, which AFAIK aren't that widely deployed.

Have you guys actually talked to anyone in the shipping industry or visited a cargo shipyard yet?

Yes, this is what I thought too. It feels very back of a napkin without much industry experience. I'd love it to work obviously but the thought that installation will be drop a double container onboard and it can be lashed onto most ships and still provide the amount of force needed seems fanciful. It certainly cannot go on top of other containers if that is what they are thinking!

Stability of the container stack is a much bigger issue than the pure weight of the containers. On board a container ship, everything must be lashed down tightly anyways.

Also, sails apply lift, so upwards pull. I know nothing about sail physics, but this claim is in the OP.

Since port stays are very costly, you won't deploy this for anything shorter than a transatlantic voyage anyways. So the double-wide setup seems less of an issue.

If you go with WAP you can hire Cardi B as your celebrity spokesperson!

I would be cautious about the twisting loads on containers. The side forces will be huge, especially in a swell. Then add mechanical parts that must work in an incredibly hostile environment, and lastly, add on the north Atlantic in the winter, and you are in for a bad time. Ships losing containers due to stacks collapsing happens very frequently, without any extra forces.

https://alsum.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Perdida-de-conte...

Look at a purpose-built sailship from the age of sail in a north Atlantic storm. It is a rough ride.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7RABaByP_8

Another attempt in a similar fashion is the Oceanbird concept by Wallenius Wilhelmsen, but that means building the vessel from the ground to handle the forces and that over-head loading and unloading is not possible, thus the aim at RO-RO ships.

https://www.theoceanbird.com/

With one vessel already ordered:

https://www.walleniuswilhelmsen.com/news-and-insights/highli...

Personally, as a commercial sailor and software engineer, this container approach screams of VCs throwing money at commercial shipping without understanding the industry. Profit margins are non-existent and are already hugely optimized with possibilities for specialized solutions. This wing sail will have to compete with synthetic fuels without increasing the cost due to crewing requirements.

Yep, supporting the moment from the wing via containers is the biggest structural concern. The containers are strong enough in most sea states, with reefing/feathering required in heavier winds and seas. We will stow the sail long before it encounters conditions like the ones shown in your video.

Oceanbird is awesome! The trouble is that overhauling the entire industry with new-built ships would take too long to make a meaningful climate impact, and be extremely expensive (not to mention that their approach only works for ro-ros).

Synthetic fuels will compete with aviation for the green hydrogen supply (needed to make methanol/ammonia/green hydrocarbons) and are expected to cost 2-3x what current fuels cost. This net makes our fuel cost savings case even stronger.

Industry insiders generally already know that there's really no good cost-saving decarbonization solution, and that decarbonizing fast is a hair-on-fire problem for owner/operators. The barriers standing in the way of most wind-assist devices are: poor ROI, shipyard availability for retrofits, risk to shipwoner (capital upfront), and that they don't package on containerships. We solve all these problems by using a large, efficient wing and depending on the container load path. There are technical problems to solve, but the fundamental physics works.

Every "I'm going to start with a shipping container" solution eventually runs into the same problem: shipping containers are effectively empty soda cans. They are only strong when loaded exactly as expected.

Have you actually talked to anyone in the cargo ship industry about your idea?

"soda cans" is very pessimistic. The structural integrity of containers is very high. Specially the end walls.

The typical problem with containers is non-standard or unsecured cargo pressing against the side walls, which are indeed very weak.

> Have you actually talked to anyone in the cargo ship industry about your idea?

I worked in the container shipping industry. It doesn't sound like this person ever talked to anyone in the industry. It's not like "add a sail" hasn't been thought off loads of times before. I've seen a few times where people spend 6 months to run a project where they never talked to a person with experience. Then that project would eventually fail. Circumstances and restrictions sometimes change over time, so trying to solve the same thing every few years is a good thing. But "sail in a container", ehh..

Ultimately they don't need to use an actual standard shipping container but just a container that's the same shape on the outside.

It's not their container that's the issue. It's the containers below it.

Is the sail-container sufficiently heavy to stay in place, or does it need pull on something that's holding it down?

If the sail is pulling, the container below would see a remaining uneven load from above. Is there a limit to this? Loading/unloading an unbalaned container sounds like a problem, but is it, while sitting on the ship?

What is the order of magnitude of the wind load generated on one single wing?

This is clearly intended to supplement, not replace, the ship's existing power source.

You would fold these down rather than trying to ride out a swell with them up. They go out of they way to clarify how easily these can be furled and unfurled.

Im no engineer but this is what i thought too. Just automatically fold the sails when gusts reach above a certain threshold. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

This may be more challenging than you think; depending on how you 'fold' the sails, you may end up with enough 'windage' 'aloft' to over-stress the connections anyway. They'll likely be forced to bring the wing down completely, which will either make the wings small or expensive.

I believe the design is to roll them up like a measuring tape.

Everyone's forgetting that this is just like a jetliner wing. Huge forces, harsh environments, long lifespan... this is how commercial airplanes are designed, and one of the founders is a professional aerospace engineer who worked at Tesla.

> Everyone's forgetting that this is just like a jetliner wing.

Just like a jetliner wing that can be folded up. On the plus side, jetliners regularly hit speeds relative to the air that are ten times as fast

> professional aerospace engineer who worked at Tesla.

Being fair, this is really broad and doesn't mean much at all.

It's never gonna work for a multitude of reasons like you said. Usually I'm not pessimistic but this really seems like: we have an idea, make a video, post it on a site, ask questions later.

It probably won't succeed, because most startups don't succeed.

It won't succeed because of physics/math.

They claim a save of 400kW per sail, with a boat cruising at 22kts. Let's do some math:

- 400kW is 400e6 J/s, or 400e6 N.m/s

- 22kts is 11.31m/s

So the forward force must be 400e6/11.31 = 3.5e7N, so around 3500 metric tons of force for a single sail. And with a relative wind coming from the front usually, this means the side force will be much bigger than that.

I am calling this BS

Well, you don't have to run it in those conditions.

Most of the popular shipping lanes traverse hostile conditions for at least one season of the year.

Agreed on all counts. "Mirage" is the perfect name for this product.

I'm sure it's implied the container itself will be fixed to the hull to meet those requirements

That video shows that they have no clue about containers or the container shipping industry.

This looks amazing! Wind power is totally underutilized in the shipping industry, I've been waiting for something like this for ages.

I used to be part of a team back in university making autonomous sailboats [1] and one of the things that I was surprised by when working on this was that there are a TON of hurricanes out in the middle of the ocean (we were working to build it to cross the Atlantic). We built a system to take in weather prediction data to try to avoid hurricanes, but we were building a relatively tiny boat—do large shipping vessels do this as well? I'd assume they can sail through pretty bad weather. If so, do you have ways to lower the sails easily to protect them?

Additionally, do you have any software to help inform the vessel operators how to best sail into the wind or are the net savings not worth it considering most of the propulsion is still coming from fuel-based sources?

Overall, this is super exciting and best of luck!

[1] Now at (https://www.ubcsailbot.org/)

Lowering the sails will be critical to safe operation in bad weather. The deployment process will be easily reversible, so that within a few minutes you can go from full sail to fully stowed (or any place in between), likely with emergency settings to bring the sail down faster. We don't want to limit the weather a ship would sail in without diversion, but instead just make use of reasonable winds when they are present. We certainly will want to make future software for route planning assistance, but our first step will not require the ship to change course or speed to see benefits of the sails. It's certainly worth it over all to follow the wind, but for ease of adoption that can come later.

Large cargo vessels do try to avoid bad weather, even though they can sail through most of it. It's a crew happiness, risk, and loss avoidance concern (knowing these companies, probably mostly the latter two!).

I was on a cargo ship in the pacific which diverted into the Bering Sea to avoid some weather instead of skirting just south of the Aleutian Islands as planned. The captain gots orders via satellite from a land crew that's crunching the numbers of risk vs extra fuel costs at all times for the fleet. The first mate was frustrated by how this all works. He said (English not being his first language): "This is terrible! We never get to decide anything for ourselves. We are like Muppets!". I think he meant "puppets"...

> Wind power is totally underutilized in the shipping industry

The shipping industry was 100% wind powered, with very mature technology developed and tried during centuries, and thousands upon thousands of experts in the area. Why do you think the whole industry switched to engines?

Did you work with Greg Wong?! I worked with him after he graduated and heard quite a bit from him. Awesome project. :)

This is amazing and a great panacea for the pain caused by the ai copycat products I have been seeing flooding YC.

New breakthroughs in transportation is the need of the hour.

One of the reasons the world is teetering on a recession right now is there has been not a lot of physical changes to the world around us to create new worlds which software can then eat again.

Projects like this then, give me a lot of hope.

I have no sailing or nautical or any relevant experience, so apologies if this is obvious, but what keeps the sail from getting blown off the ship?

My understanding is that the container is lifted and placed on top of a typical container vessel. And containers do fall off ships from time to time. Adding a very large sail to the container makes it easier to blow off. Is whatever the standard mechanism is for securing containers to ships sufficient here?

> Is whatever the standard mechanism is for securing containers to ships sufficient here?

Not in the slightest. Containers are secured by lashing them. But that's just the one level, mostly. Then after that it is twist locks. There are enough pictures of containers being ripped apart by the sea. Or stacks entirely damaged. Containers are made from steel, loads of people tend to assume they're indestructible. Or that they can hold way more weight than they can (scrapped metal people).

I love ideas like this. I used to sail a bit in school vacations when I was young and feeling the raw power of the wind in your hands really drives home how practical it is to use wind. For thousands of years this is how people traveled the world. Most of the modern world was mapped and discovered long before steam power was invented. Using sail boats almost exclusively.

Of course steam power and later combustion engines replaced wind in the last 150 years or so. However a few things have changed since then that makes concepts like this viable again and worth exploring.

1) Material science has progressed, a lot. A modern wind foil compared to a canvas sail from a few centuries ago is not a fair comparison. Modern sail boats vastly out perform anything that was common before steam boats showed up. Lighter, faster, cheaper, etc.

2) Sail boats used to require a lot of people to operate them. Modern sail boats can be operated by a lot less people and solutions like this could feasibly be used on autonomous ships even. Automation and fine control assisted by lots of sensors and actuators are a game changer.

3) Before steam boats, navigation was primitive and we had no reliable way to predict weather. Ships would just drift out on the open ocean for weeks and journeys could take months. These days we have satellites. We know weather patterns and navigation is a solved problem. Also we've mapped ocean currents. This makes sailing a lot more predictable than it used to be.

I would love to see a simulation of the forces involved here because I just can't see it adding up. A 60m tall sail introduces some really significant torque which may well be handled by the double container but how does that force get transferred from the sail to the container?

The design requires a lot of moving parts and the reliability of the system appears to be safety critical. If the sail can't be reefed in high winds then it risks serious damage to the ship. And if it can't be reefed when entering port then you can't dock the ship. Until the technology has been proven to be extremely reliable I can't see any operator risking installing it.

With the relative wind angle mostly being dead ahead because of the engines, this means that the vessel will effectively be sailing a close hauled course. When sails are trimmed for this heading, most of the force generated by the sail is perpendicular to the direction of the vessel. In normal sailing vessels this perpendicular force is converted into forward velocity with a keel. Without a keel your sailing ship will just drift sideways when attempting to sail a close hauled course. I'm assuming that giant shipping container ships don't have a keel, so how will these sails generate effective forward velocity for the ship and not just drag the ship horizontally off course?

While a container ship doesn't have a keel per-se, it does have about 200m of flat plate length sticking into the water. At small angles, that flat plate can actually have a decent lift to drag ratio. Historic sailing vessels also made do without a modern wing-keel, so our current plan is that the container ship can crab into the wind by less than a degree to produce all of the side force required to maintain a steady course.

Yeah a classic keel is not needed for bigger vessels as long as GM is low enough. One big difference between sail ships and modern ones is the increased air draft which effects the lift to drag ratio. Looking at your answers so far, I assume you've considered this already.

Yes, I can't say that we have absolutely everything figured out so far, but we have a decently complete model. Windage, changes to draught, and GM are already factored into our models at the root level, and while we may need to still tweak things we aren't waiting to be surprised by their effects.

Cool demo, but I think containers are not bolted down and they regularly fall off the side of the boat. Obviously these will have quite a lot of force going through them to be able to move a ship to any degree, so what is the plan to be able to bolt them down? How will they cope in weather like this? https://youtu.be/diOdeVaAfDU Of course you'll say the crew will remember to pull the sail down in time every time they come into bad weather but I think you'd be surprised how quickly things can change at sea (generally satellite info is not granular enough to predict/catch everything). Maybe some automatic weather detection is needed.

I think the idea might be more difficult to implement in reality but would love to be proven wrong. I wish you more than luck.

F** yeah, YC startups doing things in the real world. loving this trend, i know nothing about your field but you inspire me. lets go green and make green.

I picture you dancing on stage with Ballmer.

except instead of developers^5 i'm chanting containers

My favorite green energy miracle fantasy these days it's wind-powered autonomous ships, cruising cross-wind wherever the weather is best suited, going nowhere as far as they can. With an appropriately sized underwater fan driving a generator which drives a hydrolyzer, and when the hydrogen storage that fills the bulk of its hull is approaching maximum capacity it sets home to the homeport (or wherever prices are favorable for selling the harvest and buying maintenance?). That would solve both mooring and transmission for true offshore wind harvesting, and if someone found a way to build that thing cheap enough for making a profit from the hydrogen, that miracle of market economy which so often causes tragic outcomes would cause more to be built until whatever demand for hydrogen we might create is saturated.

(Buy I'd expect the winning designs to be kite-based, and according to jmoorebeek's dismissals of kites for transport they should do well for this use case of mostly stationary criss-crossing. Hulls could be of the semi-submersible type, for stability, where only a narrow tower for sensors/comms/sails protrudes to the surface, because no cranes would be involved in operation)

Did you check https://farwind-energy.com/fr/ ? That's exactly what they are trying to do !

I would really like to see numbers; as elegant as it appears, I don't really think it can be very efficient.

Oh, nice! I'm really surprised that they go the flettner way, but I'm sure they did more calculations than me (i.e. > 0).

This entire approach is really just a matter of sufficiently cheap implementation I think. (and perhaps a bit of judicial modernization when it comes to unmanned units on international waters?)

When you can build a unit cheap enough to recoup manufacture and maintenance from the fuel harvested, it would be no less meaningful than crossing the break-even in fusion. I guess unattended hydrolyzation would be the main open todo?

Norsepower (https://www.norsepower.com/) is a Finnish competitor that already has run some pilots and there are ships being built with their technology. I hope the competition helps both thrive!

I wonder how navigation changes if your ship has a set of these.

You've got one movement source - sails - whose power is based on the relative wind speed and direction and has near-zero variable cost. You have a second movement source - your engine - with fewer limitations but a higher variable cost (fuel cost + CO2 emission costs). You have a whole ocean with at least a week of predicted wind speeds and directions.

You've got a schedule to keep, but maybe not one that requires you to be there as quick as possible- after all, ships are slow-steaming now, right?

All together, a straight line often won't be the most economical route anymore. Tacking a little bit to get better wind could make the investment in these sails pay off faster.

I totally agree that route optimization takes on a whole different dimension now! For our early models and numbers, we're just benchmarking no change in route of speed, to really highlight the baseline benefits of sails. However, there are tremendous knock-on effects that would give you an advantage to follow the wind. We can make use of not only improved forecasting, but better satellite weather data and connectivity to ships to provide updates in real time. Altogether, there will be a lot of performance on the table that ships can take advantage of in the future.

Very cool product. Routes are indeed a fascinating topic. I wonder what a fully re-worked routing would do for this technology. Obviously not a 0 to 1 problem, but might be worthy demonstrating what a re-worked route plan could do. For hundreds of years, trade by sea was dictated by wind patterns. Today, it no longer is - but imagine what would be possible if routes took advantage of trade winds using this technology.

This is super cool. I hope it pans out this time. I've seen a number of attempts to add sails to cargo ships in the past, and generally they have not been a success because it involves adding a skilled person to the crew to manage the sails and cargo companies are allergic to paying extra salaries, even if they manage to make more than their salary back in fuel costs.

This is definitely a place where we think we can leverage modern automation processes. No need to add additional crew to manage the rigging, and the system should be able to manage itself safely.

This is neat, but I wonder about applying thrust through the container?

I also was kind of expecting a kite TBH. I wonder if the extra work of a kite is a good trade off, I feel like the tying off the thrust issue is easier with a kite than a mast.

Edit: I see wingsail in the title and I think it’s slightly ambiguous. I want to say this is “mast” based? Not a tech issue but

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).

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.

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.

Yeah, I'd say that kites would be far more practical considering that automatic piloting should be easily solved (trivial compared to e.g. driving cars or landing rockets) and structural changes to the ship would be so much smaller.

But https://skysails.com have completely given up on ships (full focus on stationary electricity generation), and they had already been at the point of operating an installation on a real life freighter. But at least it's not clear that their goodbye to ships was due to technological challenges: it might be because of unrelated business events, e.g. the shipping company they partnered with was already on the course to failure (chances are from their perspective the kite project has been a desperate hail mary from the start), and are some point the not-electricity part had mostly pivoted to shopping management software and that part was eventually completely separated from anything kite related.

SkySails which is the company knew tried kites seems to have given up ships and changed focus to land-based power:

> SkySails is the pioneer of wind-assisted ship propulsion systems based on kites. The technology was successfully proven on board of sea-going vessels between 2004 and 2012. However, in order to make the biggest possible impact on the ongoing energy transition, SkySails decided to focus on the dynamic energy sector with its SkySails airborne wind energy systems for power production for the time being.

> The SkySails propulsion system for vessels is therefore currently not marketed anymore.

https://skysails-marine.com/ | https://skysails-power.com

Back in the days they even had some commercial orders: https://www.surfertoday.com/kiteboarding/norwegian-ship-orde...

Not sure I buy their reasoning of discontinuing the shipping angle. Seems likely it was a hard sell.

I always though it seems like a cool idea, given that the automatic controls were robust enough. Hope airseas have more luck.

Lots of questions about whether the container tie-downs can withstand that type of load, and apparently they can, but I'm curious what you'll do about the fact that you're relying on 3rd party containers underneath you being in spec. Do you have a mitigation plan for damaged container connections below you in the stack? This seems like a variable that could be outside your control.

Containers being out of ISO 668 and weak was a risk that worried me for some time, but it turns out this is a risk for existing owner-operators too! Containers are inspected pretty regularly to make sure they're OK, or so our customers keep assuring me.

With that said, I'd really like to have some sort of load path-sensing autonomy onboard, like strain gauges in the corner posts of our sail which detect an incorrectly fastened or out-of-spec container before the other corners fail. Should be pretty detectably nonlinear if one twistlock isn't installed right and one corner post isn't transmitting any load.

While the idea of a sail module in a container sounds really smart, won't the sail need more anchoring than the underlying containers can provide? That is, shouldn't it be bolted down to the ship itself?

Neat! I love seeing this type of technology, offloading/optimizing using a fairly simple idea; though I doubt it's realization was easy!

Nitpick: you seem to have a typo under "Safe": it says "safely and secularly" which I'm fairly sure should be "securely".

Godspeed!

Hahaha, thank you - just fixed! Our website was drafted up quickly to show off our marketing video - can you tell?!

I seem to remember this was being tried already a while ago.

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/kite-powered-fr/

I don't know about the outcome of that particular experiment, maybe you do ?

What competetion do you have at the moment and where do you differ ?

Anyways, I hope this takes off and we hear more from it.

Questions for the maritime folks in the group: What would it take to re-start the shipbuilding industry in the U.S.? In a world of potentially more contested waters, is there a need for smaller more nimble cargo ships or will the unit economics of large ones always outcompete them? Any innovations you're surprised don't exist in the industry yet?

Yes, I am fishing for ideas!

My feeling is that would need to get rid of the Jones Act. The protection of shipbuilding and shipping industry have captured both of them and turned them into shadows. Without protection, they would have to compete. They might be destroyed or might survive, but better than limbo.

For example, there is market for shipping containers along the West Coast. Most of the inter-US shipping goes by rail but sea would make sense for some of it. Small container ships would be perfect and locally built would make sense.

A large Great Lakes cargo vessel was recently completed by Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Mark_W._Barker). Great Lakes vessels need to be built in the US due to the Jones Act, but they also tend to last a very long time in the fresh water in which they operate, so this is the first lake freighter built in many decades.

Ships for the US Navy (including the Military Sealift Command) are also built in the US. So, shipbuilding hasn't stopped, but the US's comparative advantage is not really in shipbuilding.

Cool! Fair enough RE competitive advantages but it does seem like having the manufacturing base to rapidly build a huge amount of shipping capacity (whether for trade or military use) could be critical for the U.S. in case of something like a conflict with China. But maybe that just means that we end up needing a 'Chips Act' for shipbuilding or something to incentivize local development.

The ship building industry is alive and well here in the PNW. I think the biggest threat is the work force. Many people are retiring and we're not doing enough to back fill what we're losing. Add that the Jones Act keeps international companies from being part of the process and we're going to run into a wall very soon.

Innovation is coming, but the labor unions are apprehensive. We have literally heard them say that they don't fear automation and innovation, but "put a steering wheel on it." That's such a short sided perspective and if it doesn't change soon, we're going to see a very crippled industry being outsourced by international companies.

Interesting, definitely hear a lot about the Jones Act and I've heard horror stories RE labor unions (including on the port side of things with a lot of hesitation to bring in new tech that could streamline/automate processes)

Still awesome, I've thought about this actually, especially for transporting high value goods inland from difficult environments to ports (I'm thinking deep in the DRC or in West Africa during the rainy season when the roads are basically unusable) but hadn't considered the overall replacement of cargo ships with them.

I thought this was a fun article: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships

A practical collapsible container still has not been made. If you could stack 3 collapsed containers in one slot, that could be a game changer for repositioning.

> A practical collapsible container still has not been made.

That's yet another idea that people often think of when people wonder about improvements for container shipping. The container shipping company I worked for studied it every few years. There's various reason why it hasn't been done. It's not just the container or the container vessel. It would be good to reach out to the right people and see what the problems were that prevented this from being used. It wasn't about making a container collapsible, it was stuff surrounding that.

There are sometimes some really nice cost saving projects that were pretty innovative. Plus maybe also easy if someone thought of it. But often it required a bit more knowledge to think of than "add sails" or "collapsible container".

One fun thing what a few shipping companies many years ago is to take existing vessels and make them bigger. So really cutting various parts of the steel and adding more (e.g. height). An random Google example (use retrofit as search term): https://gcaptain.com/upgrades-to-famous-maersk-e-class-to-bo...

Really cool to see this.

Has anyone done any quick models/math on foil assisted container ships? I have no opinions, someone mentioned it and it got me wondering how the math fairs.

> imagine a tape measure. In a tape measure a thin, flexible strip of metal is wound into a spiral

What kind of failure modes are you factoring for when a giant high tensile spring might fail/ lose containment? There is an enormous amount of energy being stored in this concept?

I like wingsail. I learnt a lot about it when i do some digging about catamaran few years back. There's some of them equipped with combination of wingsail and solar-battery which is neat. Really hope it becomes big in shipping industry. Have smooth journey you guys!

As someone who runs an accelerator focused on the maritime industry (maritimeblue.org) this is awesome! I've seen some of this technology being tried in the nordic countries and it's nice to see it being built here in the US.

If I can be of help, please let me know. My email is [email protected].

Please get a mic for any/all future videos. The mic on the camera is way too far away from your mouth for us to hear what you are saying clearly. Audio is more important than video content in a promotional video.

A traditional mast isn't just standing on the deck. Won't this style of mounting just rip the container from the ship?

This seems extremely cool. Howeever, I'm not sure I believe the attachment to the container beneath the sail is structurally sound enough to hold the wing, especially with wind blowing. Do you know that this will work? (I'm just curious; I know very little about shipping containers.)

How the two parts of sheet metal are joined together? How are the reinforced inside?

Make me think of a design like a zipper, but I don’t know at that scale what would work, magnets?

Maybe there is a way to transfer the loads to more than two container without making it too complicated. Anyway you can always start to operate in the best wind conditions and scale up from there.

Love the idea, the simplicity and integration with the current system is genius! Wish you great success.

My old boss invested in Kiteship. The Oracle Americas Cup team deployed one for a day -- but, not during competition. I suspect it messed with the competition's head for a brief moment. He did mention container ships. Feel free to reach out and I'll introduce.

If the relative wind is mostly coming at you from the direction you're traveling, then the component of the relative wind in the direction of the ship is negative. So I'm having trouble figuring out how this actually works to convert that into a force going in the ship's direction. Do you have a quick primer for how the physics of it works? Like a small explainer of this claim: "standard sails can still produce forward thrust as long as the wind is at least 20 degrees off from directly in front of the vessel"

It's the same way racing yachts can move significantly faster than the wind.

Think of it from the boats point of view. If the wind has a mass of 1 unit and is moving at 1unit/s 20 degrees from headwind in the boat's frame, then it has an x component of 0.34 units/s and a y component of 0.93 units/s. Redirecting it purely in the y direction moves it at 1 unit/s giving a momentum to the boat of 0.07 units. The 0.34 units in the x direction gets resisted by the water.

The theoretical perfect boat with perfect sails and no slip and no drag will always accelerate in its own frame as long as there is some cross wind (at an ever decreasing rate) as it is always accelerating air backwards by removing the x component and keeping energy constant.

Are these even meant to go upwind?

There's no keel, and I didn't see anything about a daggerboard in the design

Not directly upwind. Sails can't do that without tacking.

But any airfoil will point beyond a reach. A ship has some lateral resistance even without having a separate part you specifically call a keel. The exact angle doesn't seem to be stated.

Really interesting concept, will follow your success on LI, very excited to see this grow.

I think innovative solutions like these for pre-existing industries are fantastic. Really stoked someone is focused on this topic, even though 5 minutes ago I was uninformed.

There have been, and continue to be many companies focused on harnessing wind power for reducing cargo ship emissions. OutSail's (proposed) innovation is putting the sail into a standard inter-modal container form-factor.

but like what other form factors exist for container ships? nobody thought to put the sails into containers on a container ship before these guys?

I think one of our main innovations is how to make a very tall and rigid sail without a rigid mast. But you're right, once we figured out how we can roll up a 60m sail into a small package it was obvious to put it in a cargo container.

I'm not sure what other options have been considered (by would-be market entrants), but OutSail appears to be the first company that is attempting to package a sail into a 'box'. Some other companies have made devices like kites which were relatively vessel-type agnostic.

I have been learning more about this industry and the need for efficiency since I had to do research for an article on Heidmar (https://www.spacvest.com/heidmar-shipping) since a part of what they do is help shippers understand and optimize their projected energy consumptions. I guess it will also spur an upgrade of the fleet to more efficient units. Installing units like these could be one of the value added services they might get into. I'd like to see more figures and backup on the website about the cost and potential savings. It's hard to get people to do something new unless the economics are very compelling.

Or you could just build a nuclear powered cargo ship. No refuelling, no pollution, constant power.

The one form of transport where a nuclear engine is both viable and already proven. Why are you messing about with sails?

Nuclear powered cargo ships are generally not viable outside of a few niche roles. Trained operators are too expensive and in limited supply. Many nations won't allow such vessels into port due to concerns over security and accidents. There is an obvious risk of terrorist attacks to steal nuclear material or just cause a radiological incident. And several large merchant ships sink every year; no one wants a sunken reactor contaminating their coastal waters.

Even navies make very little use of nuclear power. It is mostly only for aircraft carriers and submarines. Experiments with nuclear powered surface combatants were mostly failures.

A more viable approach would be to locate the nuclear reactors on land where they can be operated more safely and economically. Then use the generated heat and power to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic fuels to power ships.

i mean what are you going to do with the 55,000 existing cargo ships out there? throw them all out to build your 500 nuclear ones? this is a legacy business

I'm guessing the economics of nuclear are not as good as wind.

Plus they'd be a target for pirates. Imagine the score a nuclear-powered wessel would fetch.

did you put your prototype on a small boat and test it out in the water?

Not yet. Our first prototype is a bench model without the necessary structure to handle full loads. We're working on the detailed design to get on the water now.

To calculate roll effects of your equipment while under pressure, I would try to make the bench model a digital twin in a stability software like NAPA.

This is an awesome idea! Whilst I know nothing about containers, I find myself wondering if the connections between containers would be able to support the massive moments of force from these sails. Also, would you have to ensure that all the wings are based at the same height on deck for stability or can that be effectively managed through extending and contracting individual wings? Finally, suppose you need the sail containers to be as close to the deck as possible (anticipating one response to my previous thoughts), how much shipping volume would be sacrificed by being unable to place any containers directly above?

Relevant Context: Shipping contributes about 3% of anthropogenic carbon emissions:

https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/Pages/Fourth-IMO-...

"The share of shipping emissions in global anthropogenic emissions has increased from 2.76% in 2012 to 2.89% in 2018."

This seems really awesome. Just out of curiosity, why not take advantage of the stacking nature of containers to make the wing sheath 1xN? It seems like having a deeper sheath you could get more flexibility in wing construction just by virtue of more room. Also, to echo @roter: how does the stack below the sail container handle the extra force from the sail? Are there extra stays from the bottom of the sail container to the deck/gunwales to keep it from toppling the stack?

I like the deeper sheath idea, but we moved away from that early on for a few reasons. A major one is cargo-handling, because you rapidly hit limits on how high the cranes can lift containers away from the deck. They can't start moving sideways until the entire container is free and clear, and if your container is too tall you may not even clear the stack before the crane reaches its upper limit. From a load management perspective, if you have the choice to go taller or wider, it's generally better to go wider. This also plays into the idea of using tape-spring rollers to store the sail material - it lends itself to being wider, rather than narrower. You can look in a few of our other comments below for more of a description, but yes, we plan to have load spreaders to reduce the compression load on any one stack, and tethers deployed to the main deck to provide additional tension restraints.

So what's the timeline for launching the Kickstarter campaign?

Hi, we made an autonomous sailboat in 2008 and have been making autonomous boats ever since. Want to collab?

Does this have any impact on the stability of the ship in rolling seas? Is this an issue that is countered with ballasts or would there need to be thought into a more traditional sailing keel?

Also, what is the maintenance like on these? When I was in the Navy we had huge crews to conduct routine maintenance but on cargo ships, there tend to be small numbers.

Love this - what a cool idea!

From our early investigations, many cargo ships already maintain sufficient moveable ballast (ie: water tanks) in order to handle dock operations, that they can also handle the roll moment from the sails. Maintenance is on our mind too. The possibility with a containerized solution is as easy as "ship it back to the manufacturer by putting a shipping label on it" for maintenance, and we can make sure to have spares dockside for our customers while their main device is being serviced.

Using ballast in port operations is significantly different then using ballast while sailing especially for offsetting a non static moment.

Container vessels are designed to sail at a very specific draught. The bulbous bows on most container vessels are fine tuned hydrodynamic shapes that impact ths wave patterns that ships generate. Sailing at a different draught because you're adding ballast will greatly decrease fuel efficiency. Additionally any added draught also increases the amount of water you have to displace, so again decreasing fuel efficiency.

Further more, I highly doubt regulations would permiss this. I'd have to dive in IMO statues to verify, but imagine because of any event the rolling moment from the sails decreases in a short amount of time. Now the vessel has the same instability that you initially tried to offset, just caused by your own ballast.

I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on these issues. Non the less, very interesting ideas

This is neat, have lots of questions about how sturdy the connections are between TEUs. Also How difficult is it for the captains and crew to pilot a ship like this? How much cargo capacity has to be forsaken for these to be installed? 20 TEUs?

This feels like something that the govt should be subsidizing through grants.

I have a simple question: how did you make the video on your webpage? Did you contract with an outside firm? Also, who made the music?

Awesome idea. Would the potential savings in fuel not warrant this as part of a more permanent fixture onboard rather than from shipping containers?

(Assuming a fuel price of $550 per metric ton, the cost of fuel for a trip from China to USA would be around $1,485,000 (2,700 metric tons * $550))

We agree that a permanent installation would be awesome, but we came across some difficulties with that idea in customer conversations. First is the number of containers you permanently displace might mean you never recover your investment. Having a removable solution allows you to access the containers under the sail without any difficulty at the port. A permanent solution also requires time in a shipyard to install the foundations and mechanisms. There are thousands of ships out there which will need retrofits, and shipyards are already struggling with capacity, so a solution which you can build inland, then ship to and rapidly install at a dock makes sense to us.

Definitely very excited by this, sails, boats, trade winds, hardware. Cool project!

Why is a retracting mast preferable to a freestanding rig with, e.g. a roller furling main or a nonsuch style wishbone boom? Is there a physics reason or is this a pragmatic trade-off to fit under bridges and stay out of the way during loading?

Typically attempts to fit sails on moderns ships (like the rotor sails that have been installed on some ships in recent years) are targeted at ferries or tankers, exactly because of the loading/unloading topic. Putting large structures on a container ship will interfere with the cranes. And the SC Connector launched in 2021 can tilt the rotor to fit under bridges, with sails half as high as what OutSail tries to do [1]

1: https://www.rivieramm.com/news-content-hub/sea-cargo-ro-ro-w...

Retraction is pragmatic: Air draft and loading/unloading concerns. Wings because they perform much better than traditional sails when installed on ships that are already powering forward at speed.

Few things, Maybe get some actual riggers or yacht builders as consultants.

Who do you plan to sell to ? Foreign flagged vessels ? Foreign ports? This will have a big impact on the crew running the ship.

Who is going to run maintenance on your sail/ device ? Do you expect the ships engineers to be trained on your systems and run routine maintenance?

Finally, I think you need to learn a tremendous amount about stevedores and expectations on your container being placed in the correct place everytime.

> The idea for OutSail came from

Proposals for adding sails to cargo ships goes back decades. While I wish you guys success, it's going to be tough sailing.

Do you have a full-size working prototype? Have you tried this on a real shipping container ship? And can't Maersk just copy this concept?

Our current prototype is a 1/50 bench model using off-the-shelf tape measures. We're working on rapidly scaling that up to test on our Lido-14. I'm sure others will try to copy the concept, but as the comments have shown there will be quite a few engineering difficulties getting this from a bench prototype to production. As a startup rather than a legacy company, we are well situated to take on that difficult engineering task, whereas a larger company may shy away from it. We'd of course be happy to work with them to get this on a ship and de-risk the rest of the operations!

Can existing cranes lift double-width containers?

Cranes can lift double wides, the bigger limitation is the maximum weight a crane can carry. Luckily, a Panama sized crane can lift 40 – 50 tons and our current weight estimate is fairly below that.

Great idea! The world needs this - if it works.

Just like some strong pressure will bend a tape measure - will a strong wind gust damage your sails?

Of course, there will be limits on the wind speed the structure can handle. Flexing of the structure will be designed in, similar to how a 787 wing flexes by design under load. For stronger gusts, aside from design margin, we are also looking at technologies that can help us see gusts coming, for instance LIDAR systems which are already used on ships which can detect windspeeds for kilometers around the vessel. We can then reef or feather the sails when we see a gust coming and remain within structural limits.

Thanks @jmoorebeek. I wish you tremendous success.

You probably need to commission a sea shanty to sell this product.

Joking aside, it looks interesting and cool.

OP, unironically, please do this, as someone who works in marketing this will be a hit

I'm practicing my fiddle skills, maybe by Series A I'll be ready for my soundcloud debut.

You should be advertising on your wings. That's too much space to leave blank. Good luck!

Yeah for a sec I wasn't sure those were the actual product. I thought those were support pylons that would connect the sails, turns out those are the sails. I'm guessing they're just like high aspect ratio wings, long and skinny to minimize drags.

why do we need to plaster every available surface with ads when their purpose is mostly to increase consum even more?

Advertising your company on your product is a great way for others to notice your brand. I'm sure the manufacturer of your laptop and phone have done the same.

questions:

1) what size container ship are you targeting?

2) how many container sails are needed in an array to achieve 20% fuel cost reduction?

3) what scale of retrofitting is required to install this onto existing fleets?

4) what sort of training is required for existing staff to properly trim the sails / will this impact headcount requirements per ship?

1.We are talking to ship owners with Panamax vessels (3000 – 4500 TEU). Therefore, many of our estimates are based on a vessel of that size. Nevertheless, our product will work with any sized container ship.

2.We will need 15 sails to save 20% fuel on a 4000 TEU vessel travelling transpacific or transatlantic.

3.We will install an override panel on the bridge of the ship, a lidar system to sense wind gusts and some extra lashings will be tied from the sail’s container to the containers below it – that’s it! None of those additions will require permanent changes to the ship.

4.No extra staff will be needed, our sails will be controlled autonomously. However, the captain will be given controls in the bridge if they ever want to force the sails to retract.

This seems like a really good idea on the face of it, yet sails have obviously been around since the first cargo ships were built. What are the drawbacks and why is this not more common already?

Most sail concepts don't work with today's open deck cargo ships, that problem is solved by the OutSail concept.. but it still faces many more problems: - Is the connection enough to transmit the sail forces? - How will a ship with no sailing keel behave? - How will it affect balance and righting moment? - How will it behave after years of poor maintenance? - What happens if the wind picks up and the sails are not retracted early enough? ( The wind forces acting on a sail will at some point prevent you from hauling it in, but with traditional sails an axe can solve the problem )

How are the Mirage containers powered and controlled? You have a very interesting product and I wish y'all the best of luck!

Also, there's something about the animations in your demo video that reminds me of a Dahir Insaat video.

The Mirage will be controlled autonomously and the Captain will have an override panel in the bridge. It will be powered with batteries, which will be recharged with solar panels or a wind turbine.

Also, hahaha, just looked up Dahir Insaat, thank you I guess?!

New rules more stringent rules have been in effect since 2020. Now the limit is 0.5% sulfur globally, with harder restrictions in many places around North America and Europe.

https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/03-1...

I would assume the same way reefer containers are, hooked up to the ships onboard power distribution. Electrically rigged sail of this magnitude does not impose any significant loads on the grid onboard

We actually plan to go a step further, and power these containers from an internal battery pack. We can then recharge the pack passively when deployed (small wind turbine or solar). Of course we can optionally hook up to ship power if it's available, but we're planning for the case where it is not. As you say, the power to operate these devices should not impose a large electrical load.

Sounds like step further indeed. Considering all the equipment and ideas raised so far, would be amazing to have a look at how you would arrange all this inside the oversized container. Must be quite an intricate puzzle inside.

As a pilot, I would like to recommend to ANYone interested in anything involving air as a fluid, the absolutely amazingly written (the man has absolutely beautiful analogies at every paragraph of the book) 'Stick and Rudder' by Wolfgang Langewiesche

just my 3.5 (inflated) cents

how is this better than the computer guided kite?

Kites are incredible for sailing downwind; however, they don’t produce sufficient thrust when sailing upwind. The vast majority of container ships travel faster than 15 knots causing most of the wind they experience to be upwind.

The promo video claims a 60m Mirage sail can provide 400kW of power.

Accounting for weather, berthing, and efficiency, let's assume the sail can provide that power for 4 hours of every 24 hour period - that's 1,460 hours/year .

Each Mirage sail might therefore provide 584,000 kWh per year of useable power.

A gallon of bunker fuel is worth 11.0 kWh/kg [1]

So, a Mirage sail can compensate 53,090 kg of bunker fuel per year.

Bunker fuel is priced around $600 USD / metric ton. [2]

Therefore - the expected value of each Mirage sail may approach $31,850 per year. Assume a 10 year service life. Each Mirage must have an installed cost of $318,500.

If you triple the assumption of 4 hrs/day to 12 hrs/day efficiency, the value scales linearly to $955,500.

[1] http://www.cmar.hk/contoil_flow_rate.pdf [2] https://shipandbunker.com/prices

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Edit: Outsail's website lists the fuel offest to be 2,000 metric tons per year. Let's assume fuel is converted at 50% efficiency, we can say that they're looking for the sail to return 11,000,000 kWh per year. That's 27,500 hours of sailing per year. There are only 8,760 hours per year... oops.

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Perhaps, let's look at it another way.

24 hours x 400 kW x 365 = 3,504,000 kWh

2,000 ton x 1,000 kg/t = 2,000,000 kg

3,504,000 kWh / 2,000,000 kg = 1.752 kWh/kg assumed fuel value

Oops again...

We couldn't fully explain that 400kW number in the video, but our video says "average power" and it was based on a standard transpacific route. The 400kW already takes into account the times the Mirage is not being used, both for bad weather and time at port. Depending on the wind speed and direction we can provide a lot more than 400kW. Using 24 hrs/day we get an maximum install cost of 1.9 million!

Thanks for the reply :)

Wish you luck!

So if 400kW average, on 21 day journey, we get 201,600 kWh which is 18,300 kg of bunker fuel, which costs approx. $11,000

If you are directly offsetting fuel consumption and helping shippers meet their efficiency goals, you have a break even at approximately $11,000 per Mirage per journey, or $523 per day.

Assuming 100% bookings, each Mirage has an annual revenue floor of $190,895

Sounds like you're in business!

> use a vessel’s Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) to grade ships

Oh criminy. We have fuel economy regulations, carbon offsets, carbon footprint mandates, ICE regulations, natural gas bans, all sorts of daft proposals to avoid doing the simple, obvious, easy, efficient, and effective obvious:

Tax the carbon atoms in the fuels.

A general shift in mentality and therefore law has started and needs to be pushed through in the next years:

Price externalized costs.

The world was treates like an infinite resource that it isnt. Emit carbon? It has its price to emit that that someone needs to pay. Same should go with noise etc. Reving that Car at midnight waking up hundrets of people? That does an economic health damage of thousands of dollars too.

There are thousands of quite intelligent people studying this and they are writing studies and reports which can be googled. CO2 for example should probably cost in the high double/low three figures, depending on your assumptions on economic growth, the time frame, etc.: https://www.cen.uni-hamburg.de/en/about-cen/news/09-news-202...

Aka no one currently knows, let alone has any sort of defensible formula right now?

The problem is that none of those intelligent people factor in the positive externalities.

As an externality, the price of emitting 1kg of carbon should be a little greater than the cost of capturing and storing 1kg of carbon.

That's too expensive a target to be realistic right now, so the real question is what's a level of taxation that won't cause social unrest, but that will change behaviour?

For CO2 at least the average price that it costs to pump the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Are you going to discount it up against externalized benefits? Cause if that's how we want to think about it, you need to make an actual P&L analysis not just take one side. (And no the positive externalities are not priced in or they wouldn't be externalities)

Interesting aspect I wasnt aware of. What could a positive externality of e.g. co2 emission be? What of "fun" hobby noise? Do you have other examples?

It wouldnt work to make a net calculation with its costs?

First of all CO2 is plant feed and the world is 14% greener today. But even if we were to say CO2 was purely bad that's missing the point.

Burning Fossile fuel isn't just producing CO2 it's also allowing us to create fertilizers that keep 3B people alive, it's allowing us to produce cement, steel and plastic all of them the foundation of modern civilisation. Many of us wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for that.

On top of that it's what allow us to have machine do heavy work instead of humans, freeing more people up to do other things than working in the fields, which among other things gave us the internet which we are currently using, or many types of medicine, hell you can can't even do wind and solar without using fossil fuels.

So if we want to start counting externalities lets do that. But let do it fairly and it should be pretty clear that the positive externalities far outweigh the negative ones, which is why it's 80% of our energy consumption to this day.

Taxation may help in reducing the attractiveness of carbon fuels, but essentially we need to stop carbon atoms getting into the atmosphere (as CO2). It doesn't matter how much tax is collected, there is not (currently) much that can be done about the CO2 released.

Simplest solution is to leave it in the ground. Just reduce the amount of oil/coal/gas dug up and burnt - we (or the corporations) know exactly how much is being dug up, so stop the digging.

Increasing the cost of burning carbon will, in a market economy, drive less use of burning carbon without need of regulation, bans, mandates, etc.

since the oceans are mostly empty and in international waters, i.e. lots of available area, why don't ships pull enormous solar arrays behind them for energy?

Only a guess, but drag would probably be a concern and could very likely undo the effects of the solar arrays.

I have a better idea. Bring some manufacturing back to the US. Container ships are already 2x as efficient as trains. You're going to get a lot of green-blinded yes-men in here so I'll chime in to say I don't believe in this. Really, something with the footprint of a container is going to move a container ship? This is a joke. Are we supposed to be dazzled that you worked on satellites? I worked on satellites - that doesn't mean you automatically know about everything especially after 10 years of experience. The maritime industry isn't filled with a bunch of idiots that don't care about efficiency and haven't heard of a sail boat before. If it was practical they would have sails already. We have sail boats. It's already a thing. They're not on 1000+ ton vessles for a reason. You are wasting your time and money. I'm only trying to help.

Although I don't necessarily share your tone, I share some of your ideas.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sail... is worth reading. Basically container ships are incredibly energy efficient. If we want to go back to sailing ships for cargo, then we need to massively scale down global exchanges.

Now on a positive note, if we find some devices, easy to operate, low cost and that can save few percent of fuel (being fossile or green), then that could still be useful.

Masts have rigging for a reason. You can't just fold one up in a box; the physics doesn't work, mast will be torn off by the first big gust.

There are many designs of unstayed masts throughout history including modern designs with aluminum and carbon fiber: https://www.google.com/?q=unstayed+mast&tbm=isch

America’s Cup AC55 yachts come to mind with an unstayed carbon fiber wing. As do friendship sloop two masters.

Freestanding rigs do exist, but as you're likely aware, they transfer all their loading and stresses through their mast step - most often being stepped through the deck so you essentially have the full hull height worth of support. Not sure which AC class you're referring to either - all the wing based boats absolutely have standing rigging, they just don't have spreaders since they're rotating masts.

Even if this proposed mast is stepped through the entire container, the forces on it will be plenty to cause issues since the containers are only held down by neighbouring containers and the 4 anchoring twistlocks. This proposed design will 100% require standing rigging to support it - the claim that the rig will only experience 10s of kn of loading is almost certainly incorrect as well - 30ft racing sailboats will experience loads exceeding that at the chainplates regularly. The moments about a mast are huge, even on relatively small rigs.

Sails can be deployed without conventional rigging. I have experience of these so called free standing rigs myself. Dynaspar rigs is one real life example.

What technology do we have access to now, that wasn't available at the close of the Age of Sail and the dawn of the Age of Steam, that will make us succeed where others have failed?

Obviously, slapping a sail on a diesel powered ship straight up doesn't work. We would have done it. We need something more.

WE have microprocessors, textiles, steels, servo motors, FEA. We are up against the tyranny of 200 years of incremental efficiency gains, fluid mechanics, and essentially thermodynamics.

Not that excited about the shipping container or even the sail. That is an arbitrary gut feel design constraint that may have gotten you into YC, but we can feel free to toss all of it by the wayside now that we are getting serious, no?

Engineers need a good gut feel for torque, impact, and dynamics, and the big picture. We have to think about more than just static forces and how to make our pet square peg ideas fit into real world corkscrew holes.

We should try to make a servo operated kite that pulls straight upwards and sometimes forwards or a little sideways, (much more than it pulls backwards), that we put on a very slow ship, in very windy conditions.

Why do all of this work? We should just develop some sort of golf ball coating or fairing and coat or cover the tops and sides of some containers and do some wind tunnel studies, patent it and sell it for $$$, and call it a day. It might even be an actual efficiency improvement.

>Obviously, slapping a sail on a diesel powered ship straight up doesn't work. They would have done it. You need something more.

Who is they? The early days of steamships indeed had both sails and engines on the same ship.

Mostly shipmakers haven't put sails on oil-powered cargo ships because there hasn't been a strong need for it. Fuel isn't expensive enough to warrant the extra effort. But the desire to reduce CO2 emissions starts to tip the scales.

Its about the market, not just technology. There is appetite to reduce emissions now that didn't exist even 10 years ago.

If they can reduce fuel consumption 20%, maybe it's not a unicorn but it'll (hopefully) make some money. Also it gets creative people with novel motivations some real experience in the space, maybe they learn something and maybe they iterate.