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!
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.