
Ask HN: Can the martime industry, i.e shipping, travel, be disrupted? - hsikka
I look at startups like Shone from YC and others, and I see some working on pilot assistance programs and collison for cargo ships. Wouldn&#x27;t fully autonomous self driving ships be a huge disruption to a very old and inefficient industry?
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1ba9115454
AFAIK a container ship has about 30 crew. Most of which are maintenance and
engineers. You would need those people anyway. Most shipping companies use
cheap labour now.

I imagine the largest cost after the ships themselves is fuel.

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wnkrshm
Afaik, historically they switched from fast ships to bigger, slow ones to
minimize fuel use per cargo tonnage. At the beginning of the 'standardized
container age' there were fast vessels but they lost out to the fuel saving
spiral.

If we're just bullshitting, more autonomous sailing vessels that mainly use
streams and are automated could be used (like some autonomous little robot
floats using wind for propulsion and the sun to power their electronics and
small motors crossing the Pacific/Atlantic). But in contrast to the small
robotic boats, they won't be able to correct their vector using solar power.

If there are goods that can arrive whenever but need to be cheap, maybe that's
an option - but only if the ship can work without maintenance underway, which
it probably can't during its entire lifetime.

Edit: The crew is there to make a ship work even though it needs maintenance.

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karmakaze
Again? I can't think how. It's already been dockerized.

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Endy
Autonomous ships would all too easily fall prey to pirates with a GPS spoof
and a radio jammer.

