this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Believe it or not, "proportionality" is a thing. You make the ship bigger, you make the sails bigger to match. Simple! Granted, previously, making sails bigger was limited by the weight of the things when hoisted by men operating manual winches, but now we've got motors now to solve that, and higher strength-to-weight ratio materials, too.
Point is: I maintain that, in principle, you could make a post-Panamax sailing ship -- even a traditional fully-rigged one -- if you really wanted to, and it would be capable of sailing at hull speed on wind power alone. It's just that they don't want to for reasons unrelated to technical feasibility.
You're assuming everything scales linearly, which is not necessarily accurate. The square-cube law rains on many people's parades.
I can see how you'd think that, but I'm really just asserting that these specific things scale well enough to still work at post-Panamax size.
A bigger challenge would be sourcing enough shantymen to be feasible. I'm not sure that the world has sufficient production capacity to provide the necessary rum for more than a handful of ships.
I have it on good authority that the Wellerman will handle this issue, along with any concerns with tea and sugar supply
Not really. Drag grows with area and so does force from a sail. The larger ships will be faster per unit volume if anything.
Sailing cargo ship is a thing. There's a record breaker recently in fact.
It would be really interesting to see a fully rigged ship with dozens of sails where the rigging was pulled by motors and controlled by computers rather than humans. It would also be interesting to see what they could do with modern materials. Nylon sails, carbon fibre masts, steel lines, etc.
Having said that, I would bet that a real modern cargo ship would probably use fancy solid wing-style sails.