this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Per person, cruise ships are probably a couple of order of magnitude better than mega yacht… but yeah both are good.
I’d love to see cruise sail ships.
Cruise ships aren't all that much worse than long haul flights (specifics gonna depend on the ship and the plane but my first google results ended up with a 14 day cruise being roughly equivalent to four transatlantic flights) purely in terms of co2, just bc there are so many people on board. Though flights also need to cut emissions by a lot really, so that's still not great. And cruise ships tend to use fuel that releases other harmful chemicals beyond just greenhouse gases.
Still, to particularly focus on them rather than just one of many things that need to be reduced and also made more efficient feels a bit misplaced to me. Though I'd imagine that if sail container ships actually prove viable, sail cruise ships might follow.
They are already experimenting with adding sails back to cruise ships, the potential cost savings should be enough to get the companies to change on their own.
I say this as an avid sailing but the downside of sails is that you cannot rely on them to get you where you need to go on an exact day, which is kind of the point for modern cruise ships. However if they can use them for the long haul passages then that at least will get away from the heavy oil that they tend to burn away from shore, although some still burn it close to shore even though they are not meant to.
I cannot see them getting away from having to use motive power of some description to drive props but electric drive does look promising for cruise ships, lots of ways to charge batteries for that.
The other problem with cruise ships is the local environmental impact of dropping that number of tourists at once on a single location, but cutting back mass tourism is a much trickier problem to deal with.
Sailing is hard work on a two-person vessel; World fare be a nominal fee plus n hours of labor? Sign me up!
Why do you say two-person vessel specifically? Are there no automated sail boats on the small scale?
Small scale you don’t really benefit from automation, it’s just more that can go wrong.
I mean, in theory you could equip all the winches with electric motors, but for me it would just take part of the fun away
I don’t know, but would they be cleaner and greener? I specified two-person because that’s the last boat on which I sailed. It was a long time ago.
I just asked because you said it was hard work on a 2 person vessel. I don’t sail so I was just wondering why that would be. Is it labor intensive with moving the sails, or more mentally fatiguing to constantly calculate where to position sails? I’ve not so seriously considered crossing the Altantic (which I heard requires a year of preparation). So to the question as to whether an automated sailboat for two would be greener, I would say /yes/ to the extent that it might encourage more people to sail.
To me, the mental part is easy, but I suppose it would depend on how familiar one is with the winds and tides. It is extremely labor intensive.