I wonder now with post-covid remote working options and starlink if you could actually make it work.
I do wonder though if sailing the ship is basically a full-time job in itself (navigation channels? Docking at foreign countries? Getting food etc?).
I'm not a full-time liveaboard, but I have been on-board for the last couple of months and you can definitely make it work.
Sailing is labor intensive, but not in the ways you imagine. Navigation, docking and provisioning are all straightforward.
Where it can sometimes feel like a full-time job is maintenance. Everything on a boat wants to break all the time. Doesn't matter if the vessel is brand new or 40 years old; finding a balance between maintenance and life is difficult.
Pipes are made from plastic and last decades, but they're generally not too hard to replace though.
I'd argue the biggest maintenance jobs to a house is keeping everything clean, basically the same as a boat. The other one would be painting every couple of years, and of course garden maintenance.
That said, unless you are able to drop anchors, I am guessing that you would spend most of your working hours at a dock or with a partner piloting instead.
It will not work either far away from the shore.
On certain routes, packets will be artificially delayed so that high-speed traders can pay big bucks to get their packets through first, ahead of fiber. And, maybe pay even bigger bucks to prevent their competitors from getting their packets through as fast. Imagine tiered pricing, where each millisecond ahead of the rest of the pack is ten times the price.
So, for example, orbits inclined near 70 degrees pass near New York and London/Frankfurt. Packets going by satellite laser links can get there many milliseconds ahead of those poking along on subsea fiber. Somebody in London who finds out 10 ms before everyone else about a price change in New York gets to make a killing trading on the exclusive information.
Regardless I just don't see SpaceX as the company that doesn't evolve with times tbh.
"Evolve with times" does not seem to mean anything. In markets where Starlink is viable, they have no effective competition, and can charge as much as the market will bear. As long as they have more potential users than bandwidth to sell them, they are under no pressure to reduce prices or give up profit. A goal to subsidize Martian colonization provides a very strong incentive to maximize income. We should expect to see very high gross margins until other constellations begin to compete.
London/New York doesn't seem like the distance that there is going to be huge wins for back bone connected entities. But I guess that even if you can land a percentage of packets quicker via starlink, then there is some value in the trading world?
Compare to fiber. Best ping time is 76 ms, or 38 ms one way. So, our budget margin is 10 ms. Suppose, instead of a direct downlink, packets are dumped to a nearby hub and carried via 1000 km of fiber to the destination, with various routing delays, adding 5 ms, leaving a 5 ms lead, 5000 microseconds.
In finance, we say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. That is because in a microsecond we can do >1k multiplications. 5 ms is time for >5M multiplications, many more than needed to evaluate a position and choose a response.
The only routing choices are which satellite to uplink to, and whether to forward or downlink each packet. Whatever choices are made don't need to be re-evaluated more than per second. Packet queuing delay can be negligible; modern switching equipment will start forwarding a packet while the rest is still arriving; this would happen when forwarding via laser link.
The latency advantage for New York/London/Frankfurt <-> Singapore/Tokyo/Hong Kong would be even more compelling.
There are many things rich people can do, poor cannot. You gotta have money, to make (real) money. Thats the harsh truth and most of us who do not have it, have to struggle hard, to make some wealth and very, very hard and be very lucky and gifted, to get rich by it (without negating all ethics).
Someone should always be on watch if possible. It doesnt always happen as people do solo voyages. Open ocean most vessels would have transponders but if you're anywhere coastal you couldn't take the chance as smaller vessels don't always have and you can't rely on radar either.
I do think you could make it work though. Similar to van living. Plan your legs based on availability. You down time will be part maintainance etc.
Other options like kites and wind turbines can work well but they all all significant upfront costs as well as ongoing maintenance issues. Spending that same money on a bigger boat gets you much more space, and of course a generator can give you redundancy or higher top speeds.
This is a net positive. The alternative is to roll back and forth with the waves. It’s much nicer with the sail up and ata bit of a heel.
Also, just to throw this in, one of the world cruising sailing couples which wrote for the magazines switched to a diesel powered boat as they aged and found that they spent less of fuel than they had on new sails. Sails are consumables if you care about performance.
Your point on the diesels still stands. Properly designed cats are unsinkable and don't readily capsize, but not weathering a storm is worth every penny invested in diesels. Besides one needs them in marinas anyway.
It's an interesting question, where does the wear come from. But sails are a very active part of the boat; every tack is going to drag the sail across the deck of the boat, rub against fittings. When a sail luffs, head-to-wind it's whipping around with the weight of the sheets (control lines), and then when you're taking the sail down it's getting folded (best case) or stuffed into a bag (worst case) [EDIT: some sail materials like being shoved in a bag!]. And of course even when a sail is just sitting there powering the boat it's under a tremendous amount of force, which stretches it over time.
Sails do fail, and yes often by ripping in half. I've personally never heard of a sail failing at the control points (e.g. the tack of a jib), probably because those areas are heavily reinforced.
Those areas where the sail needs to be strongest is where they are re-inforced doubling up the layers (and not just 'two', a corner can easily be 10 ply or more thick), on older boats further re-inforced with leather or heavier grades of fabric. The panels are carefully laid out so that the highest stress aligns with the warps. A large sail can be made up from many 10's of panels, which are joined in a variety of manners (glue (typically for very fast boats or as re-inforcement of stitching), stitching, sometimes ultrasonic welding for special applications). On the very high end there are even laminated custom laid out fibre pattern sails (for instance: a sandwich of Kevlar wire between two layers of bonded fabric or plastic).
At one time I worked for a competitor of North Sails, who by the way were pioneers in the digitization of sail manufacturing.
The cheapest ones last the longest but offer the worst performance.
If you're living on your boat 365 then I imagine avoiding severe weather becomes more important?
Most people living in boats actually live on ports and don't get very far from the coast most of the time.
For those that do not really stray far from the shore or who are willing to take more risk for more comfort, they use a slower boat.
Yes, but it makes less noise.
It looks like shit though. The other yacht looks much nicer.
In the netherlands they have flaoting houses in the canals, but stationary AFAIK
Wind is more consistent than sunshine.
Considering loitering is a very important goal for military drones, I expect them to be using solar power extensively too.
My favorites atm are the yachts that are capable of sailing just about anywhere in the world without a drop of fuel. The price is prohibitive, but considering that you might not need a house anymore it is actually getting close to possible for a reasonably senior tech employee.
[full disclosure: no affiliation]
https://www.azura-marine.com/aquanima-45/
https://www.silent-yachts.com/silent60/