Largest electric autonomous container ship begins commercial service

ktpsns•about 2 hours ago

Title is misleading. The vessel has "autonomous navigation", I guess this is some autopilot function which is probably widespread these days.

I thought of "autonomous" as in "no crew onboard". That would be good for piracy (there is nobody to kidnap and no hostage which could die). For everything else I think the few humans and their facilities onboard don't make a big difference in payload or so. Having a human onboard is still an asset in many situations.

comrade1234•about 2 hours ago

Not many pirates on the Chinese coast these days since the Zheng Yi Sao in the beginning of the 1800s. She had a fleet of 400 ships and 50,000 pirates.

this ship just takes a short route back and forth between two cities.

tialaramex•about 1 hour ago

> Title is misleading. The vessel has "autonomous navigation", I guess this is some autopilot function which is probably widespread these days.

AIUI not really for basically the reason you describe, that if we're moving 100_000 + DWT a handful of humans are inconsequential so you might as well. The radio gear on a big cargo ship will be generations better than on the New York to Paris jet you flew on but the navigation is much less sophisticated.

The Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) mandates Digital Selective Calling, which is 1980s digital radio technology. You could do much better if you started from scratch with today's technology, but the technology on that jetliner is 100+ year old AM VHF analogue radio. DSC can manage the "Dawn Treader" wants to talk to "Happy Fishing", the "Happy Fishing" wants to talk to all six other "Fishing" vessels including "Grumpy Fishing" and "Doc Fishing", and Exxon Champion has an emergency so it needs to tell everybody it's on fire and come help -- without a problem while air radio needs everybody to be patient and just shut up so that one person can talk at a time.

On the other hand the jetliner can hold altitude, plan approaches, and even complete a landing unassisted if absolutely necessary whereas the boat needs a human at the controls, all day and all night, 24/7 while at sea. This is tedious work but it isn't automated and the result is that humans routinely fall asleep and cause serious problems.

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

> I guess this is some autopilot function which is probably widespread these days.

Hopefully it's better than FSD

puelocesar•about 2 hours ago

That’s a nice development. But the article fails to mention which kind of battery the vessel will use, which I thought was the main reason we didn’t have these kinds of ships yet.

algo_trader•about 1 hour ago

Standard LFP cells - with higher QA and optimized for safety over performance

The pack/container is (over?) designed for fire suppression and humidity control

CATL and also CALB have specific marine-grade product lines

At sea - even at full power - the packs discharge relatively slow

moralestapia•about 1 hour ago

This is really nice, and it’s good to be pushing the boundary of what’s possible with electric-only propulsion.

However, whether people like it or not, the most ecological alternative, all things considered, is still heavy fuel oil.

Other fuel sources might look cleaner at first, but after you do the whole analysis (how much cargo is moved, how long the engine lasts, how much energy it takes to create the components, how much is involved in their disposal, ...) it might end up being the opposite.

Teever•about 1 hour ago

It's very important for people to understand that China has something like 260x the ship building capacity of the US and about 60% of the global total[0] while Japan and South Korea make bulk of the rest with the rest of the world working out to be a rounding error.[1] Domestic ship production capacity in America has gotten so bad that the US Navy is looking at outsourcing naval ship production to SK and Japan.[2]

With the United States having just expended a significant portion of their missile stockpiles[3] in the recent conflict against Iran and China apparently resupplying Iran with air defenses[4] it isn't certain how America will be able to ensure the safety of this outsourced naval ship production.

New developments like this electric ship show that China is just so far ahead of the game from anyone else in ship building and that it won't be possible for them to catch up.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-china-became-the-...

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...

[2] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/could-us-navy-build-n...

[3] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...

[4] https://thehill.com/policy/international/5827443-china-prepa...

Largest electric autonomous container ship begins commercial service

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