I’ve been wanting to do scenes of solarpunk ships and shipping for awhile now. I love reexamining old technologies and seeing if they could work again, mixed with modern advancements, especially in a society with different values, or one that uses more metrics than just money to make their decisions.

I’ve read about the various attempts to make container ships more green with massive sails and kites and alternative fuels, but I never really loved any of them enough to make art of them. At best, they seemed to promise that they might use somewhat less fuel in the future, but they seem committed to the basic container ship format because its so efficient (in cost) and because everything is optimized around it.

I was talking with some of the folks from Fully Automated! about future weather changes, megastorms and tsunamis (and the potential for tsunamis to set off undersea avalanches that cause more tsunamis) and the damage those could all do to ports. How all that carefully-optimized equipment, even the depth of the ports themselves, could be damaged suddenly.

I started to think about solarpunk ocean scenes again, and about smaller vessels (which could perhaps use the shallower ports) could operate largely by wind, more or less traditionally.

Can the concept of container ships fit solarpunk? I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things.

So I’m skeptical.

Alright, my complaints out of the way, what’s actually in this scene? We’ve got an offshore windmill and a steel-hulled, four-masted barque with what’s hopefully an open-source variant of DynaRig sails.

So what does that mean? I’m very much not nautical – as with most of my postcards I’m doing my best to combine a bunch of concepts I’m only newly familiar with, so I’ve tried to make sure they’re at least based on reasonable starting points:

Cromlyngames in the FA! team mentioned DynaRig sails, these kind of funny-looking sails that taper towards the base, with thick masts and curved yards. They’ve seen some limited use on expensive yachts, there’s some proposals/plans to use them on container ships, and do seem to work well from what I’ve read. Their main advantage is in labor-savings and safety – the sails apparently slide out from inside the masts following tracks in the yards, so nobody has to climb the rigging to raise or lower them. And the entire mast rotates to best catch the wind. This allows for a smaller crew, and less of the traditional risks.

Crom suggested that they could work with any square-rigged ship, and a quick perusal of some nautical and sailing forums agreed with that (and taught me what those were). I started reading about traditional maritime shipping, and eventually found a forum discussion about the potential return of sail to modern day shipping. A poster on there mentioned the Passat, a German Flying P-Liner, and I was delighted to learn that a whole set of steel-hulled sail ships were hauling cargo well into the 1950s. Heck, one of them was captured by New Zealand during WW2 and put right into service hauling construction supplies.

So I borrowed the hull. IRL, I’m sure there’s a ton of quality-of-life improvements ship designers and sailors could suggest for a modern barque, and I’m sure I’ve included some stuff that doesn’t belong, but I’m just happy to have found a sail ship that was still effective in fairly modern days. In fact, it looks like staffing (both the difficulty finding qualified crew, and changing laws requiring more crew than traditional) was a big factor in the end of their service, and that’s something I suspect the modernized sails could help with.

I’d like to do more nautical scenes, so if you have improvements or alternative designs, let me know! I think I might do one with an offshore windmill substation, a clipper ship, or anything else you think would be worth showing. I know there’s been a ton of tech and safety features invented and added to ships since the P-Liners were modernized, and I think those things could help shorten their journeys and improve their safety at sea.

Art stuff: usually, unless I already have a strong plan for the visuals, part of my research is looking up various real life postcards and other art of similar content for inspiration. People have made postcards of almost everything.

There’s no shortage of paintings of ships at sea – I started this as a peaceful, sunny scene, but eventually gave in and went for a dramatic storm instead. Maybe showing the ship in a storm weakens the point a little, but ships run into bad storms even now, with all our modern day early warning systems – you can see plenty of videos online of even massive container ships losing cargo from being heaved around by the weather.

And one of my goals is to show weather, seasons, and locations that Solarpunk art doesn’t often feature. Bad weather is a fact of life, and it’s likely to get even more wild as our climate changes. I’ve done a couple scenes of blizzards, but none of terrible rains yet.

Given the premise that this is a postcard from a solarpunk future, it might be a historical scene of a famous ship that survived a hurricane, perhaps in the moments when the storm blew it dangerously close to an offshore wind farm.

This image (and all the other Postcards from a Solarpunk Future) is CC-BY, use it how you like.