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It looks like a reasonable concept at a reasonable scale, perhaps good enough for a MVP. Here is an earlier short presentation. Their team right now seems too small to make it work, but they are recruiting, and they’re just starting. If they can make it work, or before they can make it work, it’s just a question of if the economics work out, which is of course questionable, but autonomous operation might help with that. No additional propulsion seems ambitious.
The market economics seem bizarre - intra European shipping of micro cargo ships? Cargo ships grew massive for efficiency reasons.
What tech are they actually proposing?
Is that what they do? Really?
Wow, sounds great!
Where is their group-selfie?
How about a route offshore from Somalia?
More NEWS news news news… OF THE FUTURE future future future…
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The efficiency argument is relatively moot now though, if you don’t have to pay for your fuel. Now the more important thing is: how much cargo can we pull with this kite that we have, how expensive is our ship to make and operate, how much harbor time are we taking up maybe and so on, and what does that come to on a per container basis.
Don’t reckon they need a big team to get this proven.
They need to show an actual idea.
There’s an image of a blade somewhere in the sky near a wee boat. …
What is that?
Maybe they’ll only show us this amazing idea if we can prove we’re loaded rich and worthy enough to be potential investors
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The business model and the system around it is the idea, and that would need to be proven. I guess you’d need experts in the shipping industry and ship building, market research and pilot projects to help with that. Physics tells us that kites can pull stuff so that doesn’t need to be proven, how to make it work is the challenge and for that they’d need more people I think.
In a way in a concept like this the difficulties are somewhat reversed: selling electricity is easy, selling cargo shipping is much more difficult; making electricity is difficult, pulling a ship is easier.
Another video, now with an animation: SUMMER OF PURPOSE 2021 SCIENCE GATE
Thanks @Windy_Skies
There was a lot more info there.
Still not sure how it overcomes all of the issues skysails faced in shipping.
But yes, they’ve done some modelling of a solution to the challenge.
I wish them all the best in this.
Hope they can bring more tech operational description to the forum soon…
Only took me a decade to get half good enough at that so far.
Kind of reminds me of self-driving cars. Sounded so good but there are always problems. I always think of a trash bag blowing across the road, and the car thinks it’s a person running thru traffic so it kills its passengers in a crash to avoid hitting the bag. In this case what happens to the hard airplane kite when they get to port? How do they dock? How do they remove the shipping containers? How do they launch the kite? And like Roddy says, how do they sell their services? How do they survive storms at sea? I say, show us one such boat with a predetermined route, then let’s see what we’ve got at that point. So easy to just wave your hands and say you will take over the world.