No steel and captain-less yachts – a viable vision for the future?

Ships of the future will be made with steel alternatives and remote controlled by captains on land with up to ten ships under their command being operated remotely, delegates heard at a recent Lloyd’s List Summit.
 
In as little as 20 or 30 years time, top shipping industry figures suggested that composite materials could replace steel as the hull type of choice.
 
“[The man who] successfully finds a way to get rid of steel on ships, stands to become a billionaire,” said Seaspan chief executive Gerry Wang, as reported on Lloyds List.
 
Pointing to the use of composite material in aircraft, he said steel is becoming increasingly uneconomical: “ships carry their own weight, for which the operator makes no money.”
 
For the superyacht sector, composite and aluminium are used in the construction of performance vessels and favoured for their weight-saving properties. But steel remains the material of choice, and to replace it completely with these alternatives would be complicated, said designers:

“The raw material from which [a proportion of] aluminium is made is Bauxite. This is not cheaper than iron ore, from which steel is made. The market price per tonne of steel is about $600 and for aluminium this is about $2000 per tonne,” said Piet van Oossanen, naval architecht at Heesen.



Yards would also have to invest heavily in moulds for composite production, one of the alternatives to steel, which might not align with an industry focused on custom building:
 
“In the superyacht arena all hulls are prototypes so people are less inclined [to incur the expense of] producing a mould for a single use,” said Franz Weger, director of technical concepts for yachts at aluminium specialist Aluship.
 
But does the concept of remote controlled yachts find greater favour amongst captains and yacht management companies?
 
Sotiris Konstantakis, of 360 Yacht Management services in Greece thinks, although it may seem a ridiculous concept now, remote control could be possible in “20 years time.”
 
“I am a fan of technology but there are perils of the sea you have to deal with onboard a yacht. I don’t see it’s easy to programme everything and operate it remotely. Maybe in 20 years time it would be possible. At the moment I see it as a fiction.”


 
He said additional duties were already detracting from the physical manning of yachts, with the introduction of ever more regulations, and that talk about extending this further was not now helpful:
 
“You work more with papers than the ship itself. It’s not the case with yachts, more so with ships, but I see it coming to yachts as well.”
 
Talk about yachts of the future in the superyacht industry, has centred not on material or manning but on yachts’ systems. The design panel at the American Superyacht Forum, which recently took place in Las Vegas, saw Bill Blount at Donald L. Blount & Associates point to hybrid propulsion and advances in stabilisation as the key things to watch out for in the future.
 
Lloyd’s List held its inaugural shipping summit at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London on 9 May.

Profile links

Heesen Yachts

Aluship Technology Ltd

Donald L Blount & Associates, Inc.

360 Yacht Management Services

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