I’ve seen legitimate proposals for basically just raising tower sails on a cargo vessel, and I always am flabbergasted that these people never seem to consider that super tall sails can cause the boat to capsize.
Torque increases the further you get from the center of rotation, and windspeeds pick up damn quick when you start building upwards.
If you wanted to protect the ship from a capsize you’d need to make it into something like a Polynesian style double hull to act as a buoyant force against the wind trying to push the boat over, and voila, now you’ve made a bunch of major canals unnavigable to your ship.
I mean I could see there might be clever optimizations, ways to handle wind power or even some kind of tidal/wave harnessing. But it definitely won’t be the way Columbus did it.
I’ve seen legitimate proposals for basically just raising tower sails on a cargo vessel, and I always am flabbergasted that these people never seem to consider that super tall sails can cause the boat to capsize.
Torque increases the further you get from the center of rotation, and windspeeds pick up damn quick when you start building upwards.
If you wanted to protect the ship from a capsize you’d need to make it into something like a Polynesian style double hull to act as a buoyant force against the wind trying to push the boat over, and voila, now you’ve made a bunch of major canals unnavigable to your ship.
I mean I could see there might be clever optimizations, ways to handle wind power or even some kind of tidal/wave harnessing. But it definitely won’t be the way Columbus did it.