After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation. It was adapt or die; there were only about eleven thousand container ships afloat, only two hundred of them in the Very Large class, and after forty of those were sunk the verdict was clear, the writing on the wall. They weren't going to be able to stop the saboteurs, who still remained unidentified.
Maersk and MSC (a Swiss company) both began to rebuild their fleets, and all the big shipyards followed. It was that or die. That one of the biggest shipping companies on Earth was a Swiss company says something about the Swiss, and the world too.
An ordinary container ship was massive but simple. They were very seaworthy, being so big and stable that even when caught in cyclones and hurricanes they could ride them out, as long as their hulls kept their integrity and their engines kept running. And of course their capacity for cargo was immense. They were well-suited to their task.
So the first attempts at transitioning to ships the saboteurs wouldn't sink involved altering the ones that already existed. Electric motors replaced diesel engines to spin the props, and these motors were powered by solar panels, mounted as giant roofs over the top of the cargo. This could work though the speed of the behemoths was much reduced, there being not enough room on them for the number of solar panels needed to power higher speeds. But if the supply chain of commodities was kept constant, in terms of arrivals at destination ports, these reductions in ship speed, and thus in economic efficiency, were just part of the new cost of doing business. "Just in time"—but which time?
Because they were slow. Fairly quickly there emerged specialized shipyards devoted to taking in container ships and cutting them up, each providing the raw material for five or ten or twenty smaller ships, all of which were propelled by clean power in ways that made them as fast as the diesel-burners had been, or even faster.
These changes included going back to sail. Turned out it was a really good clean tech. The current favored model for new ships looked somewhat like the big five-masted sailing ships that had briefly existed before steamships took over the seas. The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever.
Mary took a train to Lisbon and got on one of these new ships. The sails were not in the square-rigged style of the tall ships of yore, but rather schooner-rigged, each of the six masts supporting one big squarish sail that unfurled from out of its mast, with another triangular sail above that. There was also a set of jibs at the bow. The ship carrying Mary, the Cutting Snark, was 250 feet long, and when it got going fast enough and the ocean was calm, a set of hydrofoils deployed from its sides, and the ship then lifted up out of the water a bit, and hydrofoiled along at ever greater speed.
They sailed southwest far enough to catch the trades south of the horse latitudes, and in that age-old pattern came to the Americas by way of the Antilles and then up the great chain of islands to Florida. The passage took eight days.
The photo reminded me of this chapter of Ministry for the Future.