Green idea: One could skip the bow and replace it with CCTV HD cameras and keep the crew in ground level on the middle of the ship where it will be least rocky. Shouldnt that reduce air drag even more?
Presumably as this is a container ship the height of the ship when it's fully loaded will be much higher than in the picture. The bow essentially acts as an aerodynamic nose cone to the container stack.
Reliability and fail-safe are important considerations at sea. Glass windows still work when electrical power is lost. Warships take the concept further, placing the navigation bridge where it's most effective but having a completely redundant alternate control centre deep inside the ship where it's best protected.
Go a step further, make the ship autonomous, run them in flotillas and have an engineer or two between the whole lot for any mechanical issues. they could have luxurious staterooms, given that you'd need only a few crew for a dozen ships.
Majority are down to a dozen crew members. Organised into 2-3 watches over a 24 hour period. And the kitchen (galley) crew who feed the crew.
And at sea things are literally breaking all the time. Ships require ongoing maintenance, as in someone walking around tightening, checking for rust, repairing.
Finally, SOLAS rules requires someone to be on watch and manning the radio. Though this I'm pretty sure is ignored by some. I've hailed a few cargo ships and never got a response.
CCTV is a 2D image of a 3D environment. You'd miss out on the depth perception, not to mention reflective and transparent effects of the water's surface. And probably other things I am missing. This is a ship many hundreds of feet long carrying up to billions of dollars in goods. As a pilot I would not want to not have a real view of where I was going.
AUGMENT my real view with radar screens, depthfinder etc and now we are talking.
Another alternative could be a movable bridge that somehow retracts when the ship is cruising but moves back into position when coming into port.
Definitely an interesting design. In my eyes it looks like it should be unstable - I guess we're naturally inclined to think of curved parts of ships as being the underwater parts.
That might be, but it might also be just how car carriers look like. If you do an image search for "roro ship" (roro=roll on/roll off, the official name for them) then you can see that all have huge freeboard. To me they all look unsteady. A particularly nice example is the MV Cougar Ace lying on its side. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Cougar_Ace#/media/File:Coug... )
Boat hulls and decks have specific laws which make them patentable.
In 1988 Florida tried to make a law protecting boat hull designs and was shot down by the US Supreme Court. Legislators got involved and so part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes protection of hull designs.
The rationale is: As a boat maker you have experts do a lot of very expensive work with thinking, simulation, real world modeling, building and testing full sized prototypes sweating all the little fiddly details. You finally stumble upon a good hull for some market. Then you spend dump truck loads of marketing money to convince people that it is a good hull for their boating needs. Success! So some clown then borrows one of the boats, makes a mold, and starts selling them cheaper with no R&D expenses and customers flock to him because they can tell its "just like" your boat.
Fun legal/programmer note: The law had to be fixed in 2009 because some of aforesaid clowns figured out that "hull" was defined to be the hull and the deck, so they were making molds, copying the hull and changing an irrelevant detail on the deck and counting as a different design. The 2009 law splits hull and deck, fixes a bunch of AND and OR logic, and closes that bug report on the law.
It doesn't cease to amaze me how stupid IP laws can get. Better said, how much power money can buy you. As the parent is saying, this is nothing new. See here [1] how F1 cars have adapted to reduce drag. I simply cannot see how this is patentable given the prior art.
So that piques my curiosity, why don't car manufacturers go the same route?
Apparently in some parts of the world some new car MFGs copy the look and feel of more expensive cars and other than complain a bit, the other manufacturers don't seem to enter into litigation with each other over design much --given the very similar designs some models have.
Normally it is not patentable if it's obvious to a person skilled in the topic, if there is prior art, or if there is no business application. I would say this fails two out of three.
The last line of the article was quite interesting: President Katsuhiko Ochi continues to inspire employees to make new designs and hull forms that cannot be copied by other companies.
I've often wondered why so much of our transportation infrastructure appears to utterly discount things like aerodynamics. Planes and (some) passenger cars pay attention, but trucks, tractor-trailers, trains, and buses are basically moving bricks, slamming into the air in front of them, and dragging a partial vacuum behind them. Awfully fuel-inefficient, that.
The side skirts you see hanging from 53' trailers on the freeway are a cheap example.
Some of these hardware improvements will pay for themselves quite quickly if the gain is 0.5 mpg over many hundreds of thousands of km, at normal diesel prices in the US and Canada.
Trucking is such a thin margin business that anything which gives a competitive edge in operational costs and $ per km will be adopted quickly.
> trucks, tractor-trailers, trains, and buses are basically moving bricks, slamming into the air in front of them, and dragging a partial vacuum behind them.
There are lots of aero studies for these (aerodynamic efficiency is why tractor trailer often convoy on highways, it's also why some trailers are skirted), but aerodynamic efficiency is not the only concern, and the speed at which they go means the actual effect is relatively low (just look at trains, serious locomotive profiling starts at system going twice the standard speed of a semi or more, trains going at roughly semi- or car-speed like freight trains tend to be even boxier than semi tractors)
Ships, out of all modes of transportation, could use the wind to really reduce the fuel consumption. Giant kites that are fully automatic should be able to drag even the largest ships.
I actually posted another comment, previously in this story's discussion, mentioning high-altitude kite propelled container ships. You'd probably still need to burn something (or somehow otherwise) turn screws for maneuvering and propulsion in coastal waters, but that's a small fraction of the fuel burned each crossing.
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Something similar with CCTV has been done for remote air traffic control towers. http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a20075/saab-remote-ai...
Also add superhydrophobic coating and or supercavitation to reduce the water drag. That should be able to reduct fuel consumption even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitationhttp://www.gizmag.com/ghost-super-cavitating-military-boat/2...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhydrophobic_coatinghttps://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/superhydrophobic-metals...
And at sea things are literally breaking all the time. Ships require ongoing maintenance, as in someone walking around tightening, checking for rust, repairing.
Finally, SOLAS rules requires someone to be on watch and manning the radio. Though this I'm pretty sure is ignored by some. I've hailed a few cargo ships and never got a response.
AUGMENT my real view with radar screens, depthfinder etc and now we are talking.
Another alternative could be a movable bridge that somehow retracts when the ship is cruising but moves back into position when coming into port.
Definitely an interesting design. In my eyes it looks like it should be unstable - I guess we're naturally inclined to think of curved parts of ships as being the underwater parts.
In 1988 Florida tried to make a law protecting boat hull designs and was shot down by the US Supreme Court. Legislators got involved and so part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes protection of hull designs.
The rationale is: As a boat maker you have experts do a lot of very expensive work with thinking, simulation, real world modeling, building and testing full sized prototypes sweating all the little fiddly details. You finally stumble upon a good hull for some market. Then you spend dump truck loads of marketing money to convince people that it is a good hull for their boating needs. Success! So some clown then borrows one of the boats, makes a mold, and starts selling them cheaper with no R&D expenses and customers flock to him because they can tell its "just like" your boat.
Fun legal/programmer note: The law had to be fixed in 2009 because some of aforesaid clowns figured out that "hull" was defined to be the hull and the deck, so they were making molds, copying the hull and changing an irrelevant detail on the deck and counting as a different design. The 2009 law splits hull and deck, fixes a bunch of AND and OR logic, and closes that bug report on the law.
[1]http://www.caranddriverthef1.com/formula1/blogs/angelesf1/ae... (ES, but look at the pictures)
Apparently in some parts of the world some new car MFGs copy the look and feel of more expensive cars and other than complain a bit, the other manufacturers don't seem to enter into litigation with each other over design much --given the very similar designs some models have.
Deleted Comment
http://www.stemco.com/product/trailertail/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/automobiles/stretching-tru...
The side skirts you see hanging from 53' trailers on the freeway are a cheap example.
Some of these hardware improvements will pay for themselves quite quickly if the gain is 0.5 mpg over many hundreds of thousands of km, at normal diesel prices in the US and Canada.
Trucking is such a thin margin business that anything which gives a competitive edge in operational costs and $ per km will be adopted quickly.
There are lots of aero studies for these (aerodynamic efficiency is why tractor trailer often convoy on highways, it's also why some trailers are skirted), but aerodynamic efficiency is not the only concern, and the speed at which they go means the actual effect is relatively low (just look at trains, serious locomotive profiling starts at system going twice the standard speed of a semi or more, trains going at roughly semi- or car-speed like freight trains tend to be even boxier than semi tractors)
I believe that, in Europe at least, these restrictions are due to be relaxed, so we'll start seeing more aerodynamic trucks in the coming years.
Don't you mean "precedes"? You can't license something you don't have the rights to.
Though I imagine the fuel costs are a primary consideration and the environmental aspect is mostly there to push press opportunities.
This is the ship currently afloat with the SSS bow