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Building the Largest Ship in the World
- Havoc 12y agoSeems a little idiotic? Building the 5th largest ship seems much better...you get much of the scale benefit without having to worry about all the possible issues with harbours etc.
- pkfrank 12y agoSomebody has to be first. And this is the flagship for the world's largest shipping company.
- Svip 12y agoThis isn't the largest ship ever built, that was Seawise Giant, an oil tanker.[0] That was scrapped in 2010. However, unlike the Triple E (of which 20 are to be built), the Seawise Giant was a one-off. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawise_Giant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawise_Giant
- satyap 12y agoHey, my dad was aboard that one.
- Svip 12y agoConsidering Mærsk have been doing this for more than 100 years now, I'm gonna go with 'they probably know what they are doing'. Since this ship was able to dock at Langelinie in Copenhagen (which quite frankly, isn't the most adaptive harbour in the world), I am pretty sure harbours like Rotterdam and whatnot can handle it. Sure, it cannot sail through the Panama Canal, but as mentioned in the article, it is for the Europe-Asia route, which tends to go south around Africa anyway. Because the Suez canal wouldn't be able to handle the 5th largest ship in the world anyway. Edit: It turns out I am wrong, they can actually use the Suez Canal (even the Triple E mentioned in the article).
- toomuchtodo 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
- jsdir 12y agoWhat a massive project. The images remind me of Shell's construction of the Prelude FLNG at Korea's Samsung shipyards a couple years ago.[1][2] Regarding the Prelude, it's interesting to see the ways in which the industry values operations and processing performed on-site rather than on land. [1]: http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/prelude-flng.html http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/prel... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=660isW3W95g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=660isW3W95g
- liotier 12y agoIt only remotely reminds of FLNG, FPSO & al. because they all float - a container ship is orders of magnitude simpler those pipe dreams !
- Already__Taken 12y ago20, they ordered 20 of them. I'm just in awe of such a thing, who even gets to make that phone call "Yep, well take 20". I imagine the amount of people involved in such an undertaking dwarfs a few entire industries.
- Link- 12y agoYou'd be surprised at how few are the people involved in the decision making process in the Shipping industry.
- kyllo 12y agoAnd also how poor the market intelligence informing their decision making is. After China joined the WTO in 2001 and their exports and exploded, steamship lines extrapolated that growth indefinitely and ordered as many new ships as they could finance. Since it takes about 5 years from order to delivery, a glut of capacity hit at about the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis. So in 2009 all the major steamship lines lost upwards of a billion dollars each. I doubt any of them have made that money back since, and many have been dependent on a series of emergency equity sales and government bailouts.
- jacksonwds 12y agoI don't think these ships run on steam. They use gas turbines, which produce hot air and not steam, which generate electricity which goes into electric motors connected to the propellers.
- mikeyouse 12y agoShips of this size just use diesel engines. The Triple-E is using a pair of MAN 32MW diesels. http://marine.man.eu/applications/container http://marine.man.eu/applications/container
- 30thElement 12y ago
- notastartup 12y agohookers is a pretty strong word for Doumi girls who are not prostitutes but just girls who party with you in Karaoke bars. Sure some might spend the night but for the most part there's no sex involved. Their job is to sell you as much alcohol as your body will tolerate and get a nice comission off it. Even if it means dressing like a hooker to get more business.
- cdwhite 12y agoCached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Aalastairphilipwiper.com%2Fblog%2Fbuilding-largest-ship-world-south-korea%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%... (I couldn't get to the original; I suppose the site is attracting an entirely deserved flood of attention.)
- Someone 12y agoWhen finished, http://www.deltamarin.com/reference/pieter-schelte/6 http://www.deltamarin.com/reference/pieter-schelte/6 will be slightly shorter, but about twice as wide, so I think it will be larger in the sense that it will have a larger maximal displacement (surprisingly, I could not find that number for the triple E class), at 932.000 tons. There are several different 'tons' used in shipping, but I think all would make it larger than the Seawise Giant was.
- iancarroll 12y agoAnyone know what the license is for these photos? They're pretty nice...
- avn2109 12y agoIf ever you were going to make another nuclear powered civilian vessel, this would probably be the one.
- gaius 12y agoThe only reason these ships exist is they are cheap per ton per mile. Fossil fuel would need to get a lot more expensive before a nuke would make sense here.
- darkmighty 12y agoReally? Afaik, the main cost for nuclear isn't fuel. A ship like that would run for so long that the initial cost seems quite amortized. Also, simply not having to carry those huge amounts of fuel for weeks/months seems like a big structural design bonus (and compound fuel economy). Care to ellaborate why nuclear doesn't make sense?
- krschultz 12y agoNuclear doesn't make sense at all for this. The expense for anything nuclear is astronomical. Every single component is build out of higher grade material, has fewer suppliers, needs more inspection, has higher maintenance, etc etc. The crew needs to be 10x better trained. The system itself is massively more complicated. I couldn't imagine it ever being more economical. Fuel costs have absolutely nothing to do why you switch to nuclear. Note that the US Navy has stopped making nuclear powered cruisers, and only makes nuclear powered submarines & aircraft carriers. They cost massively more than other ships of their size, and only 2 ship yards in the USA can build them.
- Amezarak 12y agoTo be fair, the Navy hasn't built any cruisers in 20 years and is doing everything it can to retire the ones still in service - which, as you say, are non-nuclear.
- Gyonka 12y agoThat seems like a comically small steering wheel for such a large ship.
- Tuna-Fish 12y agoNear a harbor, ships with azipods or other similar rotating propulsion units are steered by joysticks instead of wheels. I've seen a reasonably large ship like that being steered with a mass-market gaming joystick. It plugged in through usb. Feeling a mountain of metal the size of an apartment block move under you to the tune of a plastic consumer toy that looks like a cheap replica of a fighter jet stick is surprisingly disturbing. I asked them why they used it -- they wanted a mobile wired stick so the guy steering the ship can move to a good position where he can see whatever he's approaching, and for that kind of thing, apparently consumer toys are more reliable than specialist marine equipment. Go figure.
- dredmorbius 12y agoAnd spares are easy and cheap to obtain and keep a few on hand. Though the idea of losing my steering on account of a joystick or USB fault ... is a bit terrifying.
- yzzxy 12y agoYeah, wouldn't this violate tons of labor laws? Perhaps not on the high seas?
- Dylan16807 12y agoI can't imagine what kind of law you have in mind.
- yzzxy 12y agoUsing equipment that was designed under the assumption that the worst fail state is a frustrated gamer, to operate a leviathan cargo ship, seems like a huge liability. If a ship were to crash, can you imagine the headlines or accusations in court? "Video game controller was used to operate billion-dollar crashed cargo ship"
- javert 12y agoI don't understand why the article calls this the largest ship ever built, since (going by Wikipedia, [1]) it is not the largest ship in any metric (gross tonnage, deadwight tonnage, or length). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships
- malkia 12y agoMaybe he really meant "in operation" or "active".
- lmm 12y agoAll the longer ones in that list are down as "broken up".
- EliRivers 12y agoUsing the metric "number of containers it can carry at once", which is the metric that formed the basis of the purchase and the key metric for a container vessel, it is the largest.
- bane 12y agoA comment I recently made about the shipyard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406975
- invictusjs 12y agoI'm a South Korean and quite amazed by this article, and the fact that this is the most popular link in HN. Visited a shipyard several years ago but I didn't think it's interesting place. Now I realize it is and even can be a great tourist attraction.
- vdm 12y agohttp://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container-shipping/ http://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container-shipping/
- aligajani 12y agoThis is hard engineering. Wowzers.
- ck2 12y agoAmazing we have the tech to build that now. I saw a segment on TV with wind turbines from 30 years ago compared to today and they were practically toys compared to the current behemoths. How do the sides of the ship not collapse before they assemble it in this photo: http://alastairphilipwiper.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Maersk-Triple-E-c-Alastair-Philip-Wiper-1-3.jpg http://alastairphilipwiper.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/... or is that what the pylons on the side are there for?
- DenisM 12y agoIn related news Maersk, the company ordering ships, is responsible for 15% of Denmark's GDP. [1] Talk about huge! [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2010/all_at_sea/a_dangerous_isolating_and_essential_job.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f...
- noselasd 12y agoDiscovery also produced a documentary on the building: http://www.worldslargestship.com/triple-e-stories/ http://www.worldslargestship.com/triple-e-stories/