American clippers were fast for the day, but like all sailing ships they were held up by the doldrums for an unpredictable time. It was this unpredicrability as much as the faster pace of steam ships that sealed their fate.
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Arts and crafts: Go forth and make life!
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“Continuous stirring made early life-like RNA systems more extinction-prone, experiment shows”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-06-early-life-rna-extinction-prone.html
Naah. Go straight to DNA. There was a documentary about some kind of park.
Snarki, child of Lokisays
Certainly, “motorized” ships were more efficient, and less at the mercy of the elements.
But DAMN those sail ships were beautiful!
…or maybe that’s just a learned response? Not sure I care.
antaresrichardsays
Goodness, for the remaining 18 minutes and 42 seconds, I thought you had resorted to constructing a model Cutty Sark in the dark!
;-)
chigau (違う)says
Well done. Carry on.
You should try Lego.
whheydtsays
There were several problems with sailing cargo ships as compared to the steamships that replaced them. Beside the issue of not going anywhere when there was no wind, they required large crews. In particular the clippers needed larger than average crews and had very limited cargo capacity. Those fast hulls meant tradeoffs elsewhere.
Beautiful ships, though, and fast for their period.
astringersays
Nice resonance, PZ, thank you. During covid lock-down I built a working model Steam Drifter as a link to my grandfather. He was a skipper on a Fifie class drifter, the Alpha, one of the fleet bringing in the herring to Scotland at the start of the 20th century. He died when my own father, the last of 8 children, was two years old, so all we have in memory is one stuffy seated photograph and a blurred picture of the boat. To link to myself and the modern age, I installed Pixhawk avionics, so the wee boat can ‘drift’ with the sail set, and the autopilot working the tiller.
Silentbobsays
Just replace the rigging with spider web man. You know you want to.
Most [spider] silks, in particular dragline silk, have exceptional mechanical properties. They exhibit a unique combination of high tensile strength and extensibility (ductility). This enables a silk fibre to absorb a large amount of energy before breaking (toughness, the area under a stress-strain curve).
Strength and toughness are distinct quantities. Weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel, but not as strong as Kevlar. Spider silk is, however, tougher than both.
#6: My paternal grandfather died in 1940. Obviously, I never met him, but we have a photo of him serving on a naval vessel in Alaska.
Ridanasays
Weird, I am not that much older than you, and yet my father was born 7 years before your grandfather, and my mother was born 3 years before your grandmother.
You have no idea how much I wanted you to dust that wooden base before you started, or at any time thereafter.
American clippers were fast for the day, but like all sailing ships they were held up by the doldrums for an unpredictable time. It was this unpredicrability as much as the faster pace of steam ships that sealed their fate.
.
Arts and crafts: Go forth and make life!
.
“Continuous stirring made early life-like RNA systems more extinction-prone, experiment shows”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-06-early-life-rna-extinction-prone.html
Naah. Go straight to DNA. There was a documentary about some kind of park.
Certainly, “motorized” ships were more efficient, and less at the mercy of the elements.
But DAMN those sail ships were beautiful!
…or maybe that’s just a learned response? Not sure I care.
Goodness, for the remaining 18 minutes and 42 seconds, I thought you had resorted to constructing a model Cutty Sark in the dark!
;-)
Well done. Carry on.
You should try Lego.
There were several problems with sailing cargo ships as compared to the steamships that replaced them. Beside the issue of not going anywhere when there was no wind, they required large crews. In particular the clippers needed larger than average crews and had very limited cargo capacity. Those fast hulls meant tradeoffs elsewhere.
Beautiful ships, though, and fast for their period.
Nice resonance, PZ, thank you. During covid lock-down I built a working model Steam Drifter as a link to my grandfather. He was a skipper on a Fifie class drifter, the Alpha, one of the fleet bringing in the herring to Scotland at the start of the 20th century. He died when my own father, the last of 8 children, was two years old, so all we have in memory is one stuffy seated photograph and a blurred picture of the boat. To link to myself and the modern age, I installed Pixhawk avionics, so the wee boat can ‘drift’ with the sail set, and the autopilot working the tiller.
Just replace the rigging with spider web man. You know you want to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk
X-D
#6: My paternal grandfather died in 1940. Obviously, I never met him, but we have a photo of him serving on a naval vessel in Alaska.
Weird, I am not that much older than you, and yet my father was born 7 years before your grandfather, and my mother was born 3 years before your grandmother.
You have no idea how much I wanted you to dust that wooden base before you started, or at any time thereafter.
My parents had me when they were in their teens, so that’s the difference.
I’m the oddball there: my wife’s parents were the age of my grandparents.
I’ll go dust that base right now.