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Solarpunk @slrpnk.net JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net

What would you like to see in solarpunk art of ships/boats/coasts?

I recently started making solarpunk postcards again, and I had a lot of fun with a quick scene of a solarpunk cargo ship (a steel-hulled, four-masted barque) in a storm. I'd like to do more but don't yet have any strong points to make or designs I'm excited to feature.

So what would you like to see? What scene is missing from solarpunk art of humans interacting with oceans, rivers, lakes, canals? What weird idea, or old, practical design should make a comeback?

I can't promise that I'll make everything but I really do try to include as many suggestions as possible.

So far suggestions from reddit and discord have included:

  • Showing more of the mooring ropes and foundations festooned with underwater life (perhaps in another storm or low tide?)
  • Boats or ships with soft wing sails which are apparently good (in theory) when it comes to performance as they maintain their shape regardless of wind conditions.
  • edit to add: a clipper ship

I'll state up front that I'm not a nautical kinda guy. I like to pick up terminology and learn but I've never sailed anything larger than a sunfish and I see the ocean maybe once every five years. So feel free to spell out practical considerations and realism stuff because I probably won't think of it.

And thanks!

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  • Some kind of solar powered boats with kite-sails could be interesting, but I doubt that would really scale to cargo transport. Although kite-sails for cargo ships do exist and apparently reduce fuel consumption by a low double digit percentage.

    I also once read that submarines could have amazing fuel efficiency (similar to whales), so maybe some sort of fully automated slowly moving electric submarine could be feasible? In general the water drag grows in exponent with the speed, so slower moving cargo ships should be in theory a lot more fuel efficient and an automated submarine wouldn't have to worry about adverse weather etc.

    • @poVoq
      There are some companies trying to do cargo sail boats: https://www.sailcargo.inc/
      @JacobCoffinWrites

      • I've seen the clipper ship Grain de Sail II, and I'll definitely check these ones out too! I really like seeing some proof that modernized sail (with fairly traditional-looking rigging) is viable, and especially seeing which cargoes and routes make it viable. I think that might be a good look at what makes for worthwhile shipping in a solarpunk setting (high value goods, ingredients that only grow effectively in certain areas, humanitarian aid, etc). I think some takes on adding sails are perhaps too unwilling to compromise on the massive container ship design, grasping for how to keep that format running rather than examining if we should.

        I wrote about this on the photobash I mentioned, but I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things. I'm not sure if there's a green stand-in for that kind of dirt-cheap bulk shipping.

        The Passat, the steel-hulled barque I borrowed parts from to make my last image (and its sibling ships) hauled nitrate, grain, concrete, and other stuff using a pretty traditional-looking hull (and loading it was apparently an important process which could and did lead to issues if done poorly. Like I said, most of the designs I've seen for container ships look a lot like regular ones with masts added on where they won't get too in the way. I'd like to find or work out a design that starts with a viable sail ship and tweaks it towards modern features, like a way to somehow still load cargo in shipping containers, without messing up its form/function.

        So thanks for the link (and for reading my rant)!

    • The solar powered, electric drive ships are cool! I might include something like this homemade one in a scene sometime.

      I'd never heard about the submarine efficiency, but it makes sense.

      I'm thinking about types of ships etc, and I suppose a solarpunk setting might have less of a range of purposes in addition to less shipping overall? Like, fishing, lobstering, crab fishing, etc are the first industries that spring to mind for me but even if someone is opposed to solarpunk being vegan, I don't think it's controversial to say the populations of those species need time and space to recover. Plus a lot of ocean waste is from the fishing industry. (I know lots of cultures are basically built around fishing but I'm not exactly qualified to depict them anyways.)

      But what does that leave? Cargo, transportation, research, ships involved in building offshore wind or tidal power?

13 comments