The Neoliner Origin cruises at 11 kts (20Km/h). "Straight line" on Google Earth from Saint-Nazaire to NY is about 5300 Km, so it crosses the Atlantic in 18 days.
The Emma Maersk (which I am aware plies a different route, but just for comparison's sake) cruises at 25kts (46Km/h) and therefore takes about 5 days.
Not so easy. Oftentimes there's no place to store the offloaded containers, and parking spaces are limited too. Probably a ship can also park "on the street" aka in open ocean, if weather agree, but I didn't see that.
Same thing with train carts that arrive to pick up the containers -- there's little place to park them to wait.
Another interesting comparison: the Emma Maersk can carry ~154,000 tons of cargo, vs. this vessel's ~5,800 tons (if i'm juggling my tons and long tonnes and tonnes correctly).
For comparison, I calculated the J/(kgm) for both the Emma Maersk (at the numbers I could find in the Germany Wikipedia article; they seem to be for higher power levels with less efficient hydrodynamics) and a generic battery electric truck like a Mercedes E-Actros ("1kWh/km"; realistic net payload on/in trailer: ~20t):
Emma: 0.0406 J/(kgm)
E-Actros: 0.18 J/(kgm)
If we'd only carry modern LiFePO4 at 150 Wh/kg, their range (at zero remaining payload) would be:
Emma: 13300 km
E-Actros: 3000 km
Thus while a substantial payload mass fraction, the heavy engine could be mostly avoided (the Emma's main engine has a specific power of about 34 W/kg; contemporary power-dense electric motors/generators around even just 1 MW are slightly above 10kW/kg; a factor of 300).
IMO rather look at whether the approach to battery packs of Form Energy allows for this level of specific energy, and if so, how to hook container crane swapped battery packs to the ship's electrics.
If that's too heavy, see how such a ship could be plugged in while in port with 1000 contemporary E-Actros worth of charging power (400 MW instead of 400 kW; gives 1 day recharge after 5 days at sea).
By the time that's solved, batteries have gottwn cheaper. Those 5 days of battery capacity would cost in the high triple digit million USD today; for comparison, the Emma build cost inflation-adjusted around 233 million USD today.
A container train on flat track in Europe seems to be rated to 0.15 J/(kgm) while being grid powered, over twice as fast as the Emma (also faster then the truck), though that consumption is what the traction system needs to be rated to to reliably make the train schedule; fleet efficiency should be much better.
Sadly there's oceans either side of north America unless you want to take a great circle through Alaska and Siberia or through Greenland and Norway.
I wonder what the savings is on fuel cost. I mean there are a lot of things that would be interesting if shipping costs were slashed — two more weeks is not important.
It is when you're shipping perishables. And market trends could fade away during crossing time. The cargo could be worthless before it arrives at port.
Back in the days of Duke Nukem, Quake and Unreal, we connected with no NAT using 1400 baud modems, if we were lucky ;-). Honestly though, I played direct (peer 2 peer) with Duke Nukem and conected over a centralized server for Unreal, but I hardly ever played Quake. I did this, with a 1400 baud modem and a phone-line that I paid for myself, with the earnings I made from a paper route job. It was the 90s and it was something special, for me at least.
FTA: 'Apple engineers were "too ambitious"'. Yeah, right. I'm sure management had nothing to do with pushing unrealistically time-framed specs down to engineering.
> The error resulted in Apple restructuring its graphics processor team and moving some managers away from the project.
Not suggesting this is or isn’t it, but the manager thing cuts both ways. I’ve had managers who push overly ambitious goals, and managers who defer to the overly ambitious engineers because they seem confident enough and the manager has failed to understand the engineer’s capabilities.
I’ve experienced many engineers who are waaaaay too ambitious and really do not comfortably understand the true development cost to everything. They deliver the first 80% on time and the second 80% puts the project six months behind.
It may only be gone in name too, with the people in the grind folded into other security groups or even ending up in "private" security concerns that the regime contracts and doesn't officially monitor closely.
I expect women and others the morality police targeted & abused won't be much safer, if at all, as a result of this change.
The Neoliner Origin cruises at 11 kts (20Km/h). "Straight line" on Google Earth from Saint-Nazaire to NY is about 5300 Km, so it crosses the Atlantic in 18 days.
The Emma Maersk (which I am aware plies a different route, but just for comparison's sake) cruises at 25kts (46Km/h) and therefore takes about 5 days.