[usrusr]

Yeah, I'd say that kites would be far more practical considering that automatic piloting should be easily solved (trivial compared to e.g. driving cars or landing rockets) and structural changes to the ship would be so much smaller.

But https://skysails.com have completely given up on ships (full focus on stationary electricity generation), and they had already been at the point of operating an installation on a real life freighter. But at least it's not clear that their goodbye to ships was due to technological challenges: it might be because of unrelated business events, e.g. the shipping company they partnered with was already on the course to failure (chances are from their perspective the kite project has been a desperate hail mary from the start), and are some point the not-electricity part had mostly pivoted to shopping management software and that part was eventually completely separated from anything kite related.