HN Books @HNBooksMonth

For the Space Shuttle part of the space program specifically, Rowland White's Into the Black is a great recounting of how that program got started and came to fruition with the first flight: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Black-Extraordinary-Columbia-Ast...

Haven't read my copy yet, but for the origins of the (extremely important) container shipping industry, Marc Levinson's The Box comes highly recommended: https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...

Another one high on my to-read list; the story of the 19th century telegraph system and its impact (figure this is early enough to fall outside the traditional tech category): https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

Some years ago I read The Box by Marc Levinson, a history of containerized shipping. Highly recommend it. If you live in SF and have wondered about the numerous barely used piers, this book explains their history as well - and why the major container terminal ended up in Oakland instead.

One of the painful early lessons for the industry was the discovery that minimizing operational costs (particularly fuel and maintenance) trumps every other value. A pioneering containerized shipping company went bankrupt pursuing a high-speed shipping strategy that cost marginally more than low-speed competition.

Edit: Oh, there is a second edition! Updated link.

Edit: replaced unhelpful snark.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691170819/

⬐ jessewmc

Ignorant question: if operational costs trump all, especially fuel (Maersk says in the article 60% of operational cost) why not pure sail power? Is there some other maintenance cost or infeasability there? Or is there another hidden variable that is not satisfied?

⬐ jseutter

This is a good question, and almost pure sail power may become a thing in the future. It looks like Maersk is trying to get ahead of the switch to cleaner fuel coming in 2020, which will increase their fuel costs by about 60%. This idea of putting sails on a large ship was at best only marginally cost-effective before now.

Some practical considerations come into play - while saving money is good, being able to reach your destination when you say you will is also worth something. With pure wind you lose that control. Deck size is not infinite, so there is a limit to how many sail towers are useful. Tower height also has practical limits before it destabilizes the ship. Handling bad weather is much easier with the on-demand power that comes from engines.

⬐ jotm

Why not use electrical propulsion and charge batteries from wind and solar? At first, as a fuel saving measure in optimal conditions (rely on internal combustion engines most of the time). Seems better than pure sail power, even though that is more efficient (due to direct wind to motion conversion).

⬐ gambiting

Re:solar - there was an experiment where they covered a whole tanker with solar panels. During the day, they provided 10% of power....needed to run the lights on the ship.

Solar is just nowhere near good enough compared to the needs of a massive ship like this.

Wind would maybe work, but then remember that a turbine would effectively slow you down as you'd be pushing against the air.

⬐ mapt

At perhaps 100 watts per square meter, a Maersk triple E ("An arbitrary large ship") at approximately 400 meters * 60 meters would generate 2.4 megawatts peak, or perhaps 400 kilowatts averaged.

This is not nothing. It's roughly as much power as a redlined sports car engine. It might be sufficient to fight the worst ocean currents, since propulsion power scales so frighteningly faster than speed.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/the-future-ult...

It would also make sense, with larger ships, to just implement the nuclear tech we already have.

⬐ paulcole

> This is not nothing. It's roughly as much power as a redlined sports car engine.

And a sports car is what, 3,000 pounds? A container ship is something like 200,000 tons. I guess they can power a redlining sports car engine when out to sea but not a whole lot else.

⬐ mapt

It doesn't take an enormous amount of power to move a big ship very very slowly; Froude's law, the first approximation of the relationship, scales power requirements with velocity squared.

A Maersk Triple E has two up-to-30MW-each engines and a design speed of 19 knots. You'd scale down speed by a factor of 12 to achieve 1.6 knots (0.8m/s), and out of that you would get to scale down power by a factor of 144 to meet your ~400kw solar power endowment.

The question is whether you can cross the most powerful currents, and at 1.6 knots you would certainly need to be cognizant of them to stand a chance, but you could ford them in the manner of fording a river: Get pushed downstream a bit, but cross the highest velocity area perpendicular.

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/gdp/images/climatology.jpg

The Maersk Triple E and huge bulk carriers are practically worst-case-scenarios for solar, because there's so much ship to displace water under every square meter of solar. A smaller lighter catamaran is likely to find itself with dramatically higher speeds, albeit not linearly higher with hull depth, since a longer waterline is more efficient.

I'm not suggesting this is practical. I think massive nuclear powered cargo ships capable of high speed is a hell of a lot more practical in a post-carbon world. But again: it's not nothing.

⬐ solatic

> nuclear ships

IANA(nuclear scientist) but I imagine that it has to do with the lack of nuclear engines available for the commercial market, which is due to nuclear technology being restricted by export controls and the like. Keeping nuclear engines and fuel out of the hands of others is much simpler when they're only on military ships with armories and soldiers, basically impossible on unarmed, undefended commerical shipping vessels.

Do correct me if I'm wrong ...

⬐ sandworm101

Wind is also extreemly limited. As a ship scales up there is proportionaly much less wind energy to work with. Cargo ships move as fast as windsurfers (25+mph). Think of a windsurfer's sail to hull ratio. And the ship isnt on a plane, but pushes through the water. I see 1000' tall mast(s), with sails the size of small towns.

A big cargo ship's engine can be 25000kw. The biggest wind turbines (750') generate about 8000kw. So.. three of them? The ship would need to be 1500 feet long just to make room. But the wind isnt constant. Five turbines? Bridges might be an issue.

⬐ woodandsteel

>As a ship scales up there is proportionaly much less wind energy to work with.

It's the square-cube law in operation. It also applies to solar. The only application of solar mounted on a transportation vehicle that makes any sense is those ultra-light unmanned planes that cruise above 60,000 feet.

⬐ sandworm101

Solar panels on cars make sense. They may not provide much actual charging, but they can prevent discharge over time.

⬐ woodandsteel

I meant in the sense of providing the power for the motor.

⬐ walrus01

The solar doesn't necessarily have to be ON the ship. If photovoltaics continue their process of price drop in STC $/W ratio, or if at some point very high efficiency low cost nuclear becomes economical, it will be possible to crack hydrogen from sea water at a shore based facility and compress it into tanks. Then use that to power massive fuel cells on ships with fully electric azipod drives.

If your $ per kWh is something ridiculously low like $0.002 you can economically electrolyze h2o to pure hydrogen.

The surface area of the ship, don't care about that. A 20x20km area of the Mojave desert covered in super low cost PV can provide the power needed.

This is the same economy of scale thing as a solar powered car. If you were to theoretically cover every square cm of a Tesla model S in high efficiency PV, and let it sit in the sun all day, it might take a week or more to collect the 95kWh needed to charge it fully. But if the PV is somewhere else on rooftops or otherwise-useless arid land, connected to the grid, you can plug your car in to a 240V 30A socket in your garage and charge it every day.

⬐ mabbo

I've long imagined some fun possibilities for this.

I picture a small-ish shipping ship, say something moving 20 or 30 containers only, fully autonomous (100% crewless) with sails and solar only powering it. Solar electric motors handling the near-land operations and "not enough wind" conditions, sails otherwise. If you had autonomous loading and unloading, you would have zero variable/operational cost.

I am certain there are very good reasons this would never work, but I still love the idea.

⬐ fasteddie

The reason autonomous/crewless isn't really feasible or worth investing in is that most container ships only have a crew of about a dozen, and they are generally from low-wage countries so that their salary costs are far out-weighted by the fuel.

⬐ travisjungroth

I think this is a good example where automation doesn’t mean getting rid of all jobs, just 99% (which has nearly the same effect). I mean, we still have blacksmiths hand forging swords ffs.

⬐ tajen

> from low-wage countries

I was surprised we still made shipmates (?) in Canada and other western countries. BTW I learnt that from the youtuber JeffHK who makes both relaxing and informative videos about what it’s like to work in the commercial ship industry: https://youtu.be/tdMYEKwxTyo

⬐ acrooks

Maybe a little bit picky, but the average size of a crew on a, say, 9000 TEU container ship is actually closer to two dozen. 20-24 most of the time.

The number can rise further with more complex cargo.

⬐ flyinglizard

Funny, I had this idea around my head for a while tagged under the "world changing startups I'd like to try someday" :)

I think it will do to shipping what two engine, midsized passenger jets (A350/787) are doing to air travel: connect directly between small ports anywhere, instead of using very large ports as hubs. FedEx/UPS could have sea terminals anywhere, possibly automated.

Global shipping will only grow and I don't see a driver for air freight prices to drop enough so that things are truly international (e.g. buy a fridge from AliExpress).

I think it needs to happen, and will happen.

⬐ cwmoore

Another fun possibility: a train of such ships connected by cables, which wind and unwind generators as the distances between them change, to power propulsion.

As for very good reasons why this would never work, sometimes that is beside the point. I am not in the running to redesign trade and power on my own terms, but sometimes I can flush out assumptions that don't need to be held.

⬐ alonmower

No hostages for pirates to take either (though I guess they could help themselves to all of the goods on the ship)

⬐ Maybestring

And the ships. Drop an anchor and demand ransom to cut it free.

⬐ lozaning

Even easier, just spoof the GPS signals with your own higher powered broadcast and make the ship think it's sailing around while it's actually stationary. Cant find the link but, some university actually demoed this working in real life with an actual container ship.

Im imagining an LED throwie type big magnetic thing with gps RX and TX, and a satellite uplink. Cruise by the autonomous ship on a jetski near a port, thrown the magnet thing on, jetski away, disrupt from afar once the boat is out at sea.

⬐ dzhiurgis

Ye old compass and lag wont get fooled by such mischievous act.

⬐ toomuchtodo

Electromagnet.

⬐ sandworm101

Unless someone has spent time at sea they cannot appreciate all the maintenance a large ship requires. Crewless ships are pipe dream. But captainless ships, ships operated without officers to navigate them, are a real option. You keep the tiny crew for fixing things but the operation of the ship is handled from afar.

Crews are cheap. Ships' masters are not.

⬐ mabbo

Alternatively, the repair crew don't stay on the ship. Have a mobile team on a faster boat going ship to ship rescuing and repairing ones that can't make it to port again.

⬐ sandworm101

Maintenance is not repairs. The work needed to prevent repairs has to happen ever day. A crew at sea doesnt sit around waiting for an alarm. They are tending to equipment, verifying sensors ... even touching up paint is an essential daily task.

⬐ lsllc

If you've ever been on a cruise, you'll notice the "crew" (not the staff) constantly painting and maintaining -- even on a brand new ship. If you ask, they'll tell you that they have to constantly work on the upkeep because of the size of the ship (kind of like painting the golden gate bridge, once you're done it's time to start over again).

⬐ mabbo

Interesting perspective. I hadn't considered that.

Part of me starts to wonder now about building boats that are more resilient, but then I remember that salt water is terrible and surely by now someone would have if it were possible, since we spend so much money on humans doing that maintenance!

⬐ johnnyletrois

If man can build it, the sea will destroy it.

⬐ toomuchtodo

Spoken like a true sailor :)

⬐ nickbauman

When the Cutty Sark was the state of the art in merchant shipping, the steam ship was becoming a thing. The steam ship was much slower than the Cutty Sark and needed its own fuel to operate. It's a good example how the numbers alone don't necessarily add up for new technology.

⬐ juhanima

Fun trivia: when windjammers were going out of style, some businessmen still bought them for the low cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson

For a while in 1930's small Åland had the largest sailing fleet in the world.

⬐ ars

Slow is OK, but it must be exactly predictable. Don't be early, don't be late.

So you can use sails to help, but if you rely on them you might be late.

⬐ picsao

Wouldn't then be on demand engines- tugdroneships along searoutes be ideal? Non of the weight sailing - all the speed on need.

⬐ vladd

You can keep the timetable no matter what -- use sails just to save fuel consumption when weather is favorable.

⬐ baddox

I read an article about the potential of drone ships that claimed one reason ships don't go even slower is the logistics around having a crew on the ship for the entire voyage.

⬐ ThrustVectoring

Capital expenditures are also pretty important. If the ships cost twice as much to build, you're paying twice as much in interest (or more). At the same amount of investment, you're shipping fewer things more profitably, and that only really makes sense if you can get attractive debt terms under pretty intense price pressure.

⬐ wenc

I wonder: do sails alone generate enough power to move today's massive container ships? Or would the ships need to be smaller?

⬐ dscpls

There's no question sails can move today's cargo volume. But the shape of the ships doesn't lend itself to sail power. I think these sails are specific to supporting other power. And the shape of today's ships is very much towards fitting more cargo. I think you'd need at least slightly bigger ships that are efficient for sail power alone, and able to carry similar cargo volume or mass.

⬐ dzhiurgis

I think such rotating sails could be almost called 'solid state' - basically zero hassle compared to a traditional canvas where there is always person on lookout, trim before wind picked up, make sure rigging is maintained, etc. That said these probably produce way less power.

⬐ jhayward

Rotating sails and wind turbines have historically been extremely high maintenance due to the forces the long moment arm puts on the rotational coupling at the base.

⬐ empath75

unpredictability of wind, i'd imagine.

⬐ ams6110

That and storms. You need engines to ride out or (better) avoid storms at sea.

⬐ rainbowmverse

Is a ship that big bothered by anything less than a hurricane?

⬐ Someone

I would think so, certainly of you add masts and sails that can propel that big a ship.

Example without sails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli:

”during European windstorm Kyrill, severe gale-force winds and huge waves caused serious damage to Napoli's hull, including a crack in one side and a flooded engine room

[…]

the earlier grounding in 2001 did not contribute to the loss”

That ship was 62,000 tons. That’s not huge by today’s standards, but not small either.

⬐ abtinf

I'm not an expert in this topic - I've just read a few books and shipping was covered in a few of my upper division classes.

They are the most important factors in the context of reliably shipping goods from port to port. If there was a sail technology that allowed reliable transit, predictable speeds and times (really slow is OK, a little late is not), and didn't cause an increase in other costs (say, insurance or maintenance), and could move the tonnage involved (up to 40 tons per container multiplied by thousands of containers, or enormous dry goods loads), I suspect it would capture a sizable portion of the market.

Edit: it occurs to me that significantly reducing fuel costs would allow entirely new kinds of loads to be transported and potentially radically alter the world economy. I once saw a chart where the Y axis was price per unit and the X axis was unit density. There was a line on the chart, above which it is economical to ship a good, below which it is not. The top right of the chart had things like electronics - which have been shipped since the dawn of the industry. The bottom left had things unprocessed ore, which have never made sense to ship.

⬐ markdown

> The bottom left had things unprocessed ore, which have never made sense to ship.

China mines and ships bauxite from Fiji to China.

https://aluminiuminsider.com/bound-chinese-shores-fiji-ships...

⬐ BurningFrog

Without knowing much of anything: Bauxite is a bit special in that aluminum processing is extremely energy intensive, and I think the ore is often shipped to places with low electricity prices.

It is one of the bigger industries in Iceland: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/us/politics/american-comp...

⬐ thesumofall

Working in the industry this is only partially true. All liners have aggressively cut operational costs over the last years (esp. by scaling their operations, ordering bigger ships, reducing sailing speeds). Still, the industry is by and large value destroying. So, while the prevalent strategies might have prevented worse, they certainly didn’t turn around the industry.

Edit: It is even likely that the chase of lower operational cost played a major role in the current oversupply of capacity (thanks to a glut of mega sized ships)

⬐ runeks

> One of the painful early lessons for the industry was the discovery that minimizing operational costs (particularly fuel and maintenance) trumps every other value. A pioneering containerized shipping company went bankrupt pursuing a high-speed shipping strategy that cost marginally more than low-speed competition.

I’m not convinced that this is static — as far as I can see it should depend on the prevailing rate of interest. The more a company pays in interest on a loan, the faster it should want to realize its investment (which doesn’t happen by goods sitting in a container).

I’m not sure what the equilibrium interest rate is, exactly, but at some level of interest it should become cheaper to ship the goods faster, since you will save more in interest payments than the extra you pay for shipping (due to your investment becoming operational sooner, allowing you to pay back the loan).

⬐ liber8

I'll second this, The Box is fantastic. It sounds like a dry subject, but Levinson did a fantastic job of telling the story of how containerized shipping changed the world.

⬐ jessaustin

...why the major container terminal ended up in Oakland instead.

Whatever the reason, I'm sure everyone who uses a bridge in SF is happy about this.

⬐ kemiller

The reason is that it was much easier to terminate the transcontinental railroad on the eastern shore of the bay. Not unrelated to your point.

⬐ ThomPete

Second the recommendation. Great book!

⬐ jherdman

You might enjoy "Containers", an eight episode podcast about the shipping industry too. https://medium.com/containers

⬐ heywire

Two non-technology related containers story on the front page of hacker news, and they're both actually really interesting! Happy Friday!

⬐ JshWright

Hmm... I've seen a couple shipping related stories, but nothing container related.

This one is about tankers, and the other was about bulk carriers.

⬐ dmoy

Hey sails are technology. Just, really old technology.

And these "sails" are much newer tech...

⬐ 8note

and containers themselves are pretty new technology

Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietnam war, the US military basically forced the ports to adopt container boxes. This dramatically increased the efficiency of shipping and eradicated longshoremen jobs. Nowadays though, the people operating the cranes loading and unloading the container boxes from/to container ships actually make 6 digit salaries.

The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.

(Source for all this is: The Box (https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...)

⬐ mikestew

The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that.

An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.

⬐ hangonhn

"but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it."

This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive. Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.

I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.

⬐ paultopia

Do you think part of the reason the longshore industry managed to keep a really strong union was just the geographic concentration? When you only have a few major container ports, it's gotta be pretty easy to keep union solidarity...

⬐ hangonhn

Yes! Actually, a lot of the older port cities were eventually bypassed because of this. For example, SF and NYC are no longer ports for shipping because rather than deal with the unions and their power, new ports such as Oakland and Newark (think that's the city in NJ) with facilities for containers were simply built close by.

⬐ wahern

If I remember The Box properly, West Coast unions faired better than East Coast unions. The East Coast unions fought container shipping tooth and nail, and when the Newark port and other East Coast ports were built they lost alot of clout and many more union jobs than necessary. Simultaneously, the leadership of the West Coast unions saw the writing on the wall and were able to achieve a less disruptive shift and downsizing. And this happened despite the fact that the West Coast unions had, historically, a more contentious relationship with business owners.

⬐ wahern

The Box is a _great_ book. Easily one of the best books I've read in the past 10 years. The history and analysis was fascinating, and remains surprisingly memorable and relevant even 5 years after reading the book.

In the past 20 or so years a literary genre has emerged that uses esoteric subjects as a narrative device for exploring broader social topics. The Box doesn't fit neatly into that genre because, AFAIU, the historical material is novel, rather than recapitulating a standard theory or, on the other hand, reframing beliefs with a contradictory or counter-intuitive narrative. The book remains earnestly focused on the history of container shipping, albeit at a more macro scale. The broader relevance just naturally follows from the keen, objective description of that history.