I recently started making solarpunk postcards again, and I had a lot of fun with a quick scene of a solarpunk cargo ship (a steel-hulled, four-masted barque) in a storm. I'd like to do more but don't yet have any strong points to make or designs I'm excited to feature.
So what would you like to see? What scene is missing from solarpunk art of humans interacting with oceans, rivers, lakes, canals? What weird idea, or old, practical design should make a comeback?
I can't promise that I'll make everything but I really do try to include as many suggestions as possible.
So far suggestions from reddit and discord have included:
- Showing more of the mooring ropes and foundations festooned with underwater life (perhaps in another storm or low tide?)
- Boats or ships with soft wing sails which are apparently good (in theory) when it comes to performance as they maintain their shape regardless of wind conditions.
- edit to add: a clipper ship
I'll state up front that I'm not a nautical kinda guy. I like to pick up terminology and learn but I've never sailed anything larger than a sunfish and I see the ocean maybe once every five years. So feel free to spell out practical considerations and realism stuff because I probably won't think of it.
And thanks!
Some kind of solar powered boats with kite-sails could be interesting, but I doubt that would really scale to cargo transport. Although kite-sails for cargo ships do exist and apparently reduce fuel consumption by a low double digit percentage.
I also once read that submarines could have amazing fuel efficiency (similar to whales), so maybe some sort of fully automated slowly moving electric submarine could be feasible? In general the water drag grows in exponent with the speed, so slower moving cargo ships should be in theory a lot more fuel efficient and an automated submarine wouldn't have to worry about adverse weather etc.
The solar powered, electric drive ships are cool! I might include something like this homemade one in a scene sometime.
I'd never heard about the submarine efficiency, but it makes sense.
I'm thinking about types of ships etc, and I suppose a solarpunk setting might have less of a range of purposes in addition to less shipping overall? Like, fishing, lobstering, crab fishing, etc are the first industries that spring to mind for me but even if someone is opposed to solarpunk being vegan, I don't think it's controversial to say the populations of those species need time and space to recover. Plus a lot of ocean waste is from the fishing industry. (I know lots of cultures are basically built around fishing but I'm not exactly qualified to depict them anyways.)
But what does that leave? Cargo, transportation, research, ships involved in building offshore wind or tidal power?
In your previous artworks, I really enjoyed your themes of reusing/repurposing things from an earlier time. So the first thing that came to mind for me was an offshore platform (one of those shallow water ones that’s anchored to the seabed) repurposed as living space, research area, or a hub for an offshore wind farm.
I don’t know of the technology level in your setting could accommodate this, but I also thought about nuclear powered cargo ships. Lots of safety and environmental considerations, but the potential to vastly reduce emissions (since cargo ships switch to the cheapest, nastiest, most bottom-of-the-barrel bunker oil sludge they can get their hands on as soon as they’re in international waters).
I like both of those ideas! I've seen a few cool takes on repurposed oil rigs, I'll have to read up on them a bit to see what kind of resources they offer to long term residents, but I'd enjoy doing a take on it - maybe a ship charging station from windmills plus merchant hub/repairs like a bartering outpost from waterworld?
Nuclear powered ships are definitely proven and it's be cool to see the tech put to a nonmilitary use - though the regulation/control aspect would be challenging to do safely.
Thanks!