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A Ghost Ship Drifting Through International Waters
- jkot 11y agoPerhaps more exact would be 'Canadian' ghost-ship. It was build in Russia, but Canadians are to blame here.
- dang 11y agoWe'll just take nationality out of the HN title. Seems safer than trying to adjudicate.
- analyst74 11y agoI'm sorry for what we did to the ship, and whoever titled the article wrong.
- schwap 11y agoThis article[1] has a lot more detail about the ownership and what happened initially to the ship. It seems it actually was lost 3 separate times. [1]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/cruise-ship-without-crew-abandoned-in-stormy-north-atlantic/article8156758/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/cruise-ship-wit...
- pyre 11y agoOr you could make the title even more ambiguous by calling it a "Former Russian Ghost Ship."
- ant6n 11y agoSo is it formerly Russian, formerly Ghost or formerly Ship?
- steinnes 11y agoI remember this being all over the local (Icelandic) news media a couple of years ago. Pretty interesting story: http://www.mbl.is/frettir/erlent/2013/02/28/hefur_thu_sed_lyubov_orlova/ http://www.mbl.is/frettir/erlent/2013/02/28/hefur_thu_sed_ly...
- x0054 11y agoWow! So does this mean if I find it, I can claim it as my own, and build an evil layer on it? :) So cool!
- notatoad 11y agoor you could build an evil lair in one of the existing layers of the boat.
- x0054 11y agoIndeed, that sounds easier. Damn dyslexia! :)
- bostonpete 11y agoI think you mean lysdexia.
- bane 11y agoI believe the correct incorrect spelling is "lexydisia".
- 6t6t6 11y agoI suspect that price of the fuel that would be needed to tow that vessel would be greater that its value as scrap.
- ctdonath 11y agoWhich is basically the definition of entropy: where the [energy] cost of doing anything with something exceeds the value of doing it. Entropy has overcome this vessel. Cheaper to buy one than to find and fix/recycle it.
- piqufoh 11y agoI think that's actually the activation energy. Entropy is a measure of disorder - it's a count of the number of different ways something can be arranged.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- joshontheweb 11y agoI am a programmer and I found it interesting. That means it qualifies by definition.
- everyone 11y agoQ: Are you being sarcastic? No: Ok cool! Yes: This is the sort of random cool article I visit HN to see. I honestly couldnt give a shit about so called startup culture and the latest trendy javascript library or whatever. I am not web-app developer. I (like many other HN visitors it seems judging on the comments) am just interested in tech/science/computers/interesting miscellanea, and HN is a great quickly updating source of this sort of thing. Also I really appreciate the sites magnificent design. Also stuff gets on the main page here via upvoting, so obviously enough HN viewers liked this particular article. ps. Sarcasm is not very easy to detect via text!
- joaq 11y agoIt wasn't sarcasm obviously. I get your point of view, though. Cheers.
- detaro 11y agoJust in case you haven't seen yet, this is what the guidelines say about "good" vs "bad" posts: What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- everyone 11y ago"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." Thats beautiful.
- paublyrne 11y agoReminds me of an X Files episode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(The_X-Files) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(The_X-Files) It was one of those lovely standalone episodes built on a What if premise, that is never mentioned again.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoOr even Waterworld. Minus Dennis Hopper.
- stevewepay 11y agoArticles like this really strike home how huge this world is. I feel ignorant when my first thought is that we should be able to locate a cruise ship in the ocean, but I clearly underestimate how huge this world really is. It's also hits home when entire planes like the Malaysian airline plane can disappear and literally no one knows what happened to it.
- ikeboy 11y agoThere's an Israeli company called Windward that tracks ships, you may be interested in it (I read a profile of it recently that was intriguing.) See e.g. http://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-tracking-startup-windward-valued-at-about-100-million-1430215202 http://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-tracking-startup-windward-v... and https://pando.com/2015/04/27/the-last-great-analog-frontier-with-new-growth-round-windward-sets-sail-to-digitize-the-high-seas/ https://pando.com/2015/04/27/the-last-great-analog-frontier-...
- grecy 11y agoI find it difficult to believe that the large governments, in control of many imaging satellites, could not find something like this if they were so inclined. Take an enormous number of photos of the region at the right resolution, and have software eliminate the boring (empty) photos and flag the interesting ones (contain something of the right size) for human review. Heck, I bet it could even exclude known shipping lanes to minimize false positives.
- akira2501 11y agoThere are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet. Just.. imagine the logistical challenge of taking and storing these pictures, let alone the _process_ of obtaining them. It's almost impossible to achieve anything like a "snapshot" of the surface; because of this, it's almost useless for locating moving objects on the surface. You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes; or the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment, meaning you're missing a huge chunk of data for a while. You might also have to move the satellites around occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well. Also.. there's night and weather. You can't always freely image the surface just because you have a camera pointed in that direction. These are just a small number of reasons that whole-earth real-time imaging is seriously difficult.
- chkuendig 11y agoThis ship already made headlines last year: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mystery-of-the-lyubov-orlova-ghost-ship-full-of-cannibal-rats-could-be-heading-for-british-coast-9080103.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mystery-of-th... http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2014/jan/24/lyubov-orlova-ghost-ship-cannibal-rats http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2014/jan/24... From the new article it looks like it finally sunk now.
- speeder 11y agoThis made me remember of Battleship São Paulo Battleship São Paulo was a ship that... sort of fought on WW1 (it started the war as active, but the British complained it had poor fire control, the ship was sent to US for refit, but the refitting ended after the war ended). And fought on WW2 (during WW2 the ship had problems with mobility, having a top speed of only 10km/h, that was nowhere close of the original design speed, so it was decided to use it as stationary defensive platform in Brazil's northeast, where a couple of U boats were attacking transport ships). In 1951 it was sold to a british scrap company, the tug line broke mid-transport and the ship was lost very hard (as in: people have no idea where to look for it, they don't even know the initial direction that the ship went after the tow line broke).
- facepalm 11y agoWouldn't that ship be bigger than the resolution of modern satellites photographing earth? So in conclusion, not all parts of the world are being monitored from space, or at least nobody wants to admit to it?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoIt is, but surveillance satellites do not and cannot image the entire earth regularly. They take pictures of comparatively small targeted areas on demand.
- rtkwe 11y agoYou're partially right. The whole of the Earth isn't constantly monitored by the kind of satellites that could resolve this ship. However a lot of the high resolution satellites are in polar or nearly polar orbits so one satellite will see the whole Earth in a couple orbits. There's just not a need to collect and process all that information unless there's some reason to be looking at that chunk of land or sea. Generally they'd be focused on more pressing issues like monitoring other countries military bases instead of trying to find a mostly harmless ship in the North Atlantic. If there was some reason that this ship was an actual threat to countries like the US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly. There just wasn't a reason for the effort to be expended to look for it, the ship was old and being scrapped and wasn't full of anything particularly dangerous to worry any of the countries that could find it.
- grecy 11y ago>US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place it probably would have been found pretty quickly Which makes me wonder about MH370. 1. Did a large country find it, but not want to divulge that because it would give away their "find stuff" capability. 2. Did the large countries try, but fail to find it, and obviously not divulge that because it would give away their inability to "find stuff" quickly 3. Did the large countries not even bother looking, because they have more important things to look at.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoIt looks like smoke is coming from the funnel on one of those photos? Did people board it while it was adrift and start up a boiler (presumably there was fuel still on board?)
- bryanbraun 11y agoMore likely, these photos are from when the ship was operational.
- Macha 11y agoAs far as I can tell from the article, no one has photographed it after it went adrift, so those pictures must have been taken when it was being actively used.
- mikewhy 11y agoCool, I'm from St. John's, NL and remember the years that was just stuck in our harbour. Had no idea that's what happened to it afterwards.
- itsbits 11y agoA ghost ship & cannibal rats!!! I can make a story for a scary movie out of this.
- mrestko 11y agoI'm highly ignorant about sea travel, but I wonder why the towing vessel didn't hook back up to the ship when the line broke. Maybe someone here can explain.
- lugg 11y agoArticle says it happened in rough ocean waters, things get tricky in stormy weather. Wouldn't be surprised if they cut it deliberately.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoDon't fall for it! It's a trap! The collector is at it again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xNXTpQA5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xNXTpQA5Q
- greens231 11y agoI trained as a navigator in the merchant navy for two years and i find it hard to believe that such a light ship (displacement ~4500 only) could be lost due to a broken tow line (considering it had a full fledged crew onboard who could have easily made fast another one). what a sad loss. would have loved to have that moored on my marina
- ablation 11y agoAn interesting, but fairly poorly-written article.
- DonaldFisk 11y agoLooks like a very interesting web site, well worth a look around. Bookmarked. Those interested in ghost ships will have heard of the Mary Celeste, but what about the apocryphal Ourang Medan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan After a brief perusal of Sobify, I found http://www.sobify.com/vogelsang-where-the-soviets-kept-the-missiles-to-nuke-the-west/ http://www.sobify.com/vogelsang-where-the-soviets-kept-the-m... I've been there, but visited mostly different parts of the site, and didn't find where the nuclear missiles were stored. It occupies several square kilometres. The closest railway station is at the nearby village, also called Vogelsang. I had to press a bell to stop the train to get off, and put my hand out to stop it to get back on.