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Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicop
by qbasic_forever 6y ago
Comedy option, what wacky cold war era aircraft do we have capable of lifting massive loads like a container ship? Perhaps an enormous fleet of Chinook helicopters could take it straight up?
- munk-a 6y agoI'd be amazed if the density of weight on the ship is such that an arbitrarily large fleet of Chinooks could actually safely accomplish this. And helicopters flying in a dense formation under strain is quite likely to result in a lot of really big problems.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoThe rotor wash beneath it all would be breathtaking.. and might blow all the water out of the canal. :)
- munk-a 6y agoSomebody get Randall Munroe on the phone - I think we've found the next What-If topic.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWhich makes me think - what about using all these choppers to blow the water in - and keep it there? :). (I assume this is an equivalent problem to the lifting problem, as the extra pressure they'd be fighting would be that of the ship displacing water.)
- munk-a 6y agoThat's actually an interesting idea - set up a temporary lock/dam on either side of the ship to float it. If, instead of a boring dam made out of concrete or something "normal" we used a fleet of Chinooks then all the better! I do believe this is probably one of the solutions that's being investigated but I also believe it's 1. Super expensive to construct an impromptu dam under water 2. Floating a listing ship can result in more severe listing if you're not careful (See, for instance, the fact that when a ship beaches itself while the tide is out it's initially bad news - and when the tide starts to come back in it becomes significantly worse news. Learning and humor are fun together!
- Izkata 6y agoNow I wonder... Let's assume it was possible. Would the force of lifting that much mass be enough to shift the earth in a measurable way? (I'm assuming it would be a lot stronger lifting it into the air than what floating on the water produces, but have no idea what the math would be)
- lisper 6y agoF=ma no matter what, so if things aren't accelerating, the force isn't changing, it's just being transferred to the earth by other means. In this case, it would be through the air rather than the water.
- Izkata 6y agoIt is as it's lifted though, right?
- lisper 6y agoI don't understand the question. Try restating the question without using the word "it".
- Izkata 6y agoThe ship is accelerating as it's lifted though, right?
- lisper 6y agoYes, but the ship is already being accelerated upwards by the surface of the earth at 9.8 m/s^2. If you were to lift it, you'd do it very, very slowly, so you'd increase the acceleration (temporarily) to, say, 9.8000001 m/s^2. The extra force required to do that is very small. Note that ships actually are accelerated up and down in the Panama canal, which has locks. (The Suez doesn't.) That amounts to pretty much the same thing. It doesn't matter whether the forces are transferred to the earth via a column of water or a column of air.
- smegger001 6y agoYeah because what we really need to fix this situation is several hundred giant blenders exploding in mid air fireball of high velocity steel on top of the jammed ship
- kuzko_topia 6y agoAbsolutely glorious, though I'm wondering what recent synced drones could do for that instead of faking foreworks.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoIt has a 20,000 container capacity, so if it's full and you could unload them at a rate of 1 per minute (assuming multiple choppers) it would take 2 weeks with no stopping, but I assume the frequency would be much lower than that so you're talking possibly months to unload even a fraction of them.
- munk-a 6y agoAlso - it's quite possible it'd further beach itself during the unloading unless you replaced the mass in an easily removable manner... To which end I'd like to suggest self-launching lead trebuchets.
- sverhagen 6y agoI understand this is all not realistic, but since we're just spitballing here, before I realized how many containers we're even talking about here, I had rather wondered if lifting off a lesser number of containers in the right place would be exactly right to shift the weight/balance for the ship to get unstuck.
- munk-a 6y agoThat might be the case - also, just for the serious - a less silly recommendation. This is what ballast does (sorta) and replacing the containers with water (i.e. in inflatable reservoirs) that can quickly be pumped out might be a reasonable way to Inidiana Jones your way into tricking the rolling boulder and/or listing vessel.
- josiahq 6y agoYeah, from the middle out.
- IAmGraydon 6y agoSomeone grab a whiteboard...
- leesec 6y agoNot even close. This ship is absolutely giant.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoHrm change of plans, let's pull a few ICBMs out and set them up on each corner with massive tow lines. We'll get it out the way in an instant... and into low earth orbit minutes later!
- WJW 6y agoYa no. An ICBM like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas has a launch thrust of only 1,300 kN, or about 130 tons. That would lift about 4 of the 20000 containers aboard.
- lstodd 6y agoForget it. Let's just nuke it, them nuclear weapons have to be disposed of somehow, and the channel needs some expansion, it seems.
- smegger001 6y agowell lets just dig out the old mothballed project plowshare out of the coldwar toolbox and see what we can do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- pjc50 6y agoIf I've done the maths right, you need a force of two billion Newton to lift it, and even if you round up a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman to 1MN you still need two thousand of them. ICBMs are not that big. Use musk's starship and you need >166 of them...
- qbasic_forever 6y agoDrat, we never should have given up on nuclear powered rocket engines in the 50s!
- erulabs 6y ago(200,000 short tons) / (130,000 pounds lifting capacity) = 3,076 Spruce... Geese.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoI'm imagining an incredible system of hooks setup so that the fleet of Spruce Gooses pass over at low altitude and speed, snare the hooks, and YOINK pull it right out in one pass.
- ceejayoz 6y agoIt's been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...
- eCa 6y agoIf I understand [1] properly, the Chinook can lift 13 tons[2]. The Evergiven's maximum weight is 200000 tons. So that would be 15000+ Chinooks lifting it. A sight to behold. Added: Only about 1200 were ever produced, so that won't fly. [1] https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter https://www.army.mil/article/137584/ch_47_chinook_helicopter [2] 26000 pounds
- gizmo385 6y agoI desperately want someone to photoshop this.
- ryankrage77 6y agoPerhaps mention it to Wren https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZsp1tgXkUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZsp1tgXkUI
- nicbou 6y agoOkay but what about rockets?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eCa 6y agoWell, according to[1] elsewhere in this thread, we can use 130 tons as an approximation for lift capacity. So for 200000 tons, that would require 1500 ICMBs connected to the ship and launched at the same time. Probably more expensive than most other solutions, and I doubt that the Evergiven will be in a good condition afterwards. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586189
- eCa 6y agoApparently I can’t spell ICBM.
- 6y ago
- qbasic_forever 6y agoOh what about magnetism? Could we wrap the ship in wire and send so much current through that it repels against the Earth's magnetic field and shoots itself right into the atmosphere? Basically building a giant rail gun. Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible.
- stordoff 6y agoI've now got the most amazing image in my head of a container ship being fired at the moon.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoHah or if we reverse the polarity maybe we can crush it into something the size of an aluminum can.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago> Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible. Amazingly, that's a severe underestimation. The force on a wire carrying current in a magnetic field is given by F = B*I*l, and to move it upwards that force needs to be at least equal to gravity, so equate to F = m*g. - Let's be generous and assume B = 100 uT = 100 * 10^-6 T. - Likewise, assume the ship is a rectangular box with sides of 400 m x 100 m, so a circumference of 1000 m, and that we can wrap a wire 100,000 times around it, to give total wire length l = 10^8 m. - m = 200,000 metric tonne = 2 * 10^8 kg (we assume magic wire that is massless). - g = 10 m/s^2. Solving for I yields I = mg/Bl = 2 * 10^5 A. That's a lot of current. If we assume the wire has a diameter of 10 cm (which is ridiculously high considering we just wrapped it 100,000 times around the ship, but whatever) and is made out of copper, it has a resistance of ~200 Ohms. Necessary power to generate such a current is P = I^2*R = 8*10^12 W (= 8000 TW). That's about half the total energy consumption of humanity. The largest nuclear power plant puts out about 8000 MW, so you'd need a 1000 of them.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoWell, on the bright side once we free it with this incredible contraption then we've also solved all of humanity's power needs for a few more centuries. :)
- neartheplain 6y agoBetter Cold War option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare The ship’s a total loss, but Egypt also gets a new lake!
- qbasic_forever 6y agoYou know there's probably someone doing the cost-benefit analysis right now to see if just digging a new canal channel around the ship would be faster and cheaper than removing it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neartheplain 6y agoWhy dig when you can blast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chagan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chagan
- mark_mart 6y agoI see you like to blast things hah. That canal was built in 10 years.
- HPsquared 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elihu 6y agoMaybe supplement the Chinooks with V-22 Ospreys and Harriers?
- jacquesm 6y agoNot enough of them in the world. This thing is truly massive.
- afarrell 6y agoAn entire fleet of Chinook helecopters would blow a mighty draft of air downward onto the ship, holding it in place.
- jacquesm 6y agoNot a chance. 224,000 tons. But you could use those to lift containers off one-by-one. Then you still have to move the ship but maybe when it is unloaded it can be done.
- a_t48 6y agoJust attach some thrusters to the dang thing and we are good - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPg4JP1WzQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPg4JP1WzQc
- dharmab 6y agoThe Mil V-12 was built to lift ICBMs, and could easily lift any container. https://youtu.be/yOApFeEgHcE https://youtu.be/yOApFeEgHcE
- nicbou 6y agoWhat about using a really, really long lever?
- qbasic_forever 6y agoHah that would be incredible. Build something so long that a small child in China steps on it and WHOOSH out goes the ship thousands and thousands of miles away! We'll use the peak of Mt. Everest as the fulcrum!
- IgorPartola 6y agoWith levers you trade force for time. How long would a lever like that take to complete its arc?
- engineer_22 6y agoAssume the lever is steel. The speed of sound in steel is approx. 10,000 ft/s. The distance from Suez to Beijing is approx. 25,000,000 feet. The time for a force to be applied in Beijing and a reaction in Suez would be ~2,500 seconds - or 1.7 days.
- elihu 6y agoEven more whimsical option: Evangelion is set in 2015, which means if we were following their projected technology timeline, we could just unload the ship by Eva. Probably unit 0, because Rei tends to get the crappy jobs. Not Asuka, she'd turn it into a contest of who could sink the most tugboats by throwing containers at them or something like that. The Evas can be airlifted anywhere in the world, but IIRC they have about five minutes of battery power. So, the biggest logistical problem would be getting suitable power on site. What are the voltage/current/frequency requirements of an Eva charger? How many months/years would it take to charge an Eva with a J1772 port or whatever they use in that part of the world? Looks like the nearest Tesla superchargers are in Israel and Jordan, which is too far even if they were compatible. Maybe NERV has a mobile generator? The Jet Alone folks could put in a competing bid, but their robot would just get sabotaged again.
- andygates 6y agoThis looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.
- tzs 6y agoThe best comedy approach is to hire Planet Express to fly in a giant can of WD-40. That stuff will get anything unstuck.
- nullsense 6y agoSeriously underrated idea.
- Philadelphia 6y agoJust use the Philadelphia Experiment technology to teleport it to another dimension
- salawat 6y agoNow that's an idea I can get behind, but unfortunately, the guy with classification authority over that material didn't write down where it was eventually stored... In fact we can't find him anywhere...