The kid with learning difficulties struggling with English. It’s a shock I know.
See it’s why the one/two word “correction” response comes off as such a dick move. It doesn’t actually help the other person. It either comes with zero meaning so offers no way to learn (if it’s actually meant as help which, I have my doubts that it actually is most of the time). Or it’s being said in a superior tone to someone who can not help it and has heard it soo many times it basically becomes an insult.
It's cutting off other ships because when it lost power it drifted sideways and blocked the canal. It's now stuck in both embankments and the only vessels getting past are very flat submarines.
GP is referencing a comment on Instagram [0] that states that it cut off another ship enter the channel /before/ it grounded:
> @tjcsalisbury Yepp! And I believe they cut us off this morning entering the canal and then this happened and right after they ran aground the ship behind us lost power and almost hit us so it’s been a fun day lol but now we are just anchored here hopefully it won’t be to long but from the looks of it that ship is super stuck they had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere there is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow
I don't think that happened but if I did I'd be thinking financial market manipulation for private gain long before intelligence agency shenanigans by states.
I'd imagine a long blockage has an effect on oil prices, as most oil coming from the Gulf States to Europe (and America's west coasts?) would normally travel through there.
I guess it won't be too hard to unjam it, but imagine how the world would change if it does get stuck, everyone would now have to go around Africa, probably boosting a few African economies.
A bit like how a tiny bat (citation needed?) changed the course of the world for at least a year.
> a tiny bat (citation needed?) changed the course of the world for at least a year
It wasn't a tiny bat, or a lab accident that changed the course of the world.
It was a corrupt non democratic government trying to hide it under the carpet, in similar fashion that a similar government in USSR try to hide under the carpet the biggest nuclear accident in its time.
Covid was detected in China and the world was alerted. Most other countries didn’t even react, though. That’s hardly on China.
From the data we have so far, it was already present and undetected in Europe the year before. It may have originated in Europe, but that isn’t yet clear.
At the time it was not yet know that the virus is lethal, that’s all that was reported.
Everything was also under control in China, as was later confirmed. Unfortunately by the time the virus was detected in China, it was already spread throughout Europe, since at least November 2019.
I really didn’t expect this sort of rejection of science and facts on HN.
IIRC even when Wuhan had been under total lockdown China was still upset that other countries called for flight bans from China. How is that responsible behavior?
Again the facts are useful. Early on, several countries (including the US and I believe France) repatriated citizens even from Wuhan and in several cases without quarantine, against the recommendation of Chinese authorities and the WHO. After the outbreak in China was determined to be limited to Wuhan and there were plenty of cases worldwide, it made little sense to ban flights from the whole of China. It was obviously an attempt to attack China as part of the trade war the US & friends have been waging.
After all, most countries still haven’t dealt with covid. In China (and a few other countries) people’s lives have returned to normal a long time ago. We should demand our politicians put lives before profit instead of letting them distract us with lies about China.
The pangolin seems to be the bridge species. Bats have tons of coronaviruses, but none of them usually infect humans. The question is which animal bridged the gap.
Kinda like how the Mink was going to become the bridge-species in Denmark (humans infected Minks with COVID19... and then the mink was probably going to infect another species after that).
Some lucky places can open ports for the giant ships to stop and refuel/resupply, that brings a lot of income.
Though maybe I've got the scale wrong, and these ships can just buy more fuel and more food at their departure ports and go around Africa without stopping...
They just go around. It’s not catastrophic just adds cost and time. No refueling or ports required for these mega carriers. We’d go around the cape sometimes just because of loads, some aren’t allowed through, or because fees were too high for the value of cargo. Depending on the size of the carrier it can add 20 days or so to the voyage.
I don't think I'd ever considered prior to now how much more economic it would be to release "The one nuclear bomb [TerroristOrganisation] can afford to muster" in a shipping choke-point, rather than a city.
Dozen or so ships would be enough to blockade both Suez and Panama... That would cause substantial damage to global shipping industry... Not even that expensive. Hundred or two hundred million would do...
Panama is not that busy. A much better target would be the kiel canal (Nord- Ostsee Kanal in German), which is the busiest waterway in the world 25000 ships yearly vs 19000 ships for the Suez vs 12000 for Panama.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
I suspect it's not the use of the bomb that is the biggest concern.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
The major canals aren't around big population centers so blowing something like that up wouldn't make a huge impact. Also due to the structure of a canal (limited blast containment; most of a ship is above the surface) the actual damage would be limited.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
> In October 1967, the officers and crews of all fourteen ships met on the Melampus to found the "Great Bitter Lake Association" which provided mutual support. Crew members continued to regularly meet on board their ships, organized social events, founded a yachting club and held the "Bitter Lake Olympic Games" to complement the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Life boat races were arranged and soccer games were played on the largest ship, the MS Port Invercargill, while church services were held on the West German motorship Nordwind and movies were shown on the Bulgarian freighter Vasil Levsky.[2] The Swedish Killara had a pool.[3]
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
No they’d be geniuses because they would cause economic losses to powerful people a lot like how the good Friday agreement came about quite quickly after the IRA broke every office window in the finicial district of London with a truckload of fertiliser. No-one was killed and glaziers rates went up 10 times for a few months. It caused a big disruption to the financial district but most ordinary people weren’t that bothered by it. Actual terrorism, chopping peoples heads off or letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything, it just pisses ordinary people off and makes them want the government to bomb you right back.
But who cares if it terrorises? I mean, I care if my tube train seems scarier than last week but I'm irrelevant. If the goal of Islamic terrorists is to have America or Britain change its foreign policy towards Islamic countries, I think that Islamic terrorism has achieved the opposite of that. If the IRA's goal was to change the position of the British government from 'we don't negotiate with terrorists' then the bombs that had a big impact on the financial centre of the UK had the effect of changing that policy. I'm arguing that terrorising normal people only has the effect of turning normal people against your cause, much like the Blitz which was designed to terrorise the population didn't make the British want to surrender to Germany, and when Britain did gain the upper hand, the British public were happy for the British state to visit worse destruction on German cities.
The main effect of terror is destabilisation, which is also what breeds terrorism. Islamic terrorism in Europe turns people against their muslim demographics, and most importantly promotes populism and right-wing politics in general. Those are all pretty auto-destructive things. Some normal reactions to terrorism is to alienate some demographics or to exact revenge on some countries, both of which just create more recruits for the terrorist. It makes sense if you don't take that universal-islamic-state narrative too seriously.
You’re right, I misremembered. I’m not saying that the IRA weren’t bad, they killed more people than 9/11, but they learnt that killing random people was bad for PR and adapted thier tactics to economic targets in the 90’s. I’m from London and I lived through the IRA bombing campaign of the 90’s and the various ISIS attacks of the 2000’s. The IRA made me annoyed, angry maybe but not terrorised, they phoned in warnings and thier attacks were mostly inconvenient. The 7/7 suicide bombers were a completely different intent, they were out to kill as many random people as possible, the IRA weren’t by that stage.
There could be real values in faking a technical outage and then getting stuck.
I don't claim to understand the global shipping dynamics, but I do see that there's lots of frustrated ship crews with nowhere to go, because of the pandemic.
Super-ships emit ~5g_Co2/Ton/km on average[1], while railway is 2-35g, air transport is 700-3000g and truck transport is 100-2000g.
Surprisingly, the bigger the boat the more effective. We tend to have a bias against larger machines, but often they can be the cleanest in proportion.
Isn't the problem that ships are burning heavy oil instead of diesel or similar? CO2 isn't the main worry afaik, it's the rest that gets blasted unfiltered into the atmosphere and the left over sludge that gets illegally dumped into the sea.
The upper limit of the sulphur content of ships' fuel oil was reduced to 0.5% (from 3.5% previously) - under the so-called "IMO 2020" regulation prescribed in the MARPOL Convention. This significantly reduces the amount of sulphur oxide emanating from ships.
And it makes sense if you think about it - as you scale up, the ammount of fuel you can carry goes up roghly by cube while structure mass, forming a shell effectively arround the fuel, goes up by square of size of the rocket.
Similar things for air resistance - as you scale up yuour rocket the front part creating the most drag will scale more slowly than the volume of the rocket that goes to fuel, payload and structure.
No wonder Starship is already at 9 meters of width and 18 m has been mentioned as a possible future upgrade. Its already bigger than the massive 66+ meter high medieval watchtower in my home town yet it can fly to sub orbital speeds without its first stage booster (which is even bigger)!
For pressure vessels like rockets, the mass of the structure and the mass of the fuel scale together as far as square-cube reasoning goes. The surface area of the structure scales with the square while the volume of the fuel scales with the cube, but the thickness of the cylinder walls must also increase, so you end up with cube vs cube.
5g per km-tonne adds up to a lot though doesn't it.
"Maritime transport emits around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually and is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (3rd IMO GHG study)."
Possibly road conditions and distance. A truck moving goods around a city will be much less efficient (stop-start traffic) than a truck moving goods over a long distance between cities (likely mostly highway).
There's nothing surprising about large ships being more efficient. But a big issue is that many ships burn dirty fuel. Apparently there are no fuel standards in international waters.
As for the comparison to trains, it matters a lot whether you're talking about diesel or electric trains. Most train lines in Europe are electrified, and as electricity production switches to solar/wind, it may actually end up being cleaner than ships. (Although work is also being done on making ships cleaner. But new international laws are probably needed to get everybody on board.)
The real issue, though, isn't no much whether the transport happens by boat or train, but that it happens at all. The scale of global shipping is this big because everything is produced on the other side of the world. Big ships make that transport more efficient, but a more egalitarian global economy that didn't create incentives for companies to seek out every low-wage country and tax haven, would make local manufacturing more attractive and reduce global shipping.
Maritime traffic dropped significantly during mid-2020 but has largely recovered. For example, Singapore's stats for Feb 2021 are basically flat year-on-year for container throughput.
"I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is."
For yachts it is (supposed to be) two days. It's one day to Ismailia on either way and then one for the rest. (The paperwork however, may take longer, but can be arranged in advance.) See more at https://www.noonsite.com/report/suez-canal-transit-informati...
walrus01 linked a video here yesterday [0] of a ship transit. For a ship it takes 11 to 16 hours, including stop on Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the canal.
Hoping I'm not misreading and this is what you're after - basically, less predictable weather that is more prone to suddenly changing when going that route and also naturally given the extended period of time involved. Longer it take to go around, the more time for potential sea conditions that large container ships may not be safe in.
Look at a globe. You'll notice that the water around the tip of South America/South Africa is one of the few bands of the Earth completely unbroken by landmass.
That's a lot of fetch for wind, which transfers energy to the ocean's surface, which travels as waves, which build up because there's no land damping from west to east. Throw in the Antarctic Circumpolar current and weather systems interacting with the Benguela current an Agulhas current... That's a lot of energy getting put into a relatively tiny band of water.
The Cape of Good Hope was previously known as the Cape of Storms based on the aforementioned confluence of forces generally making sea states miserable. The Good Hope part was what putatively happened after you got through it, and the seas you'd have to worry about would generally be calmer.
There are professionals, I don't know how it works at suez but we have people called "Havarie Kommisar", they are the guys brought in by insurances to document and certify accidents involving transportation.
Fond memories. I once tracked a ship carrying a couple of containers that were urgently needed driving in circles in the English Channel for two weeks.
My partner and I shipped our furniture from the US to Europe for an international move. We were tracking the ship going back and forth between Hamburg and Copenhagen for weeks. Turns out the moving company gave us the wrong ship number, and our stuff had been waiting for us in the destination port.
Niche, but very important to participants in the market. There is a growing industry of cargo and vessel tracking SaaS solutions (including https://Vortexa.com)
According to the Twitter feed there is now a excavator trying to dig out the bow. It really shows off the scale as the excavator looks like a tiny toy next to the massive container ship.
I didn’t think that “natural” conversation was an actual goal on HN. You see this particularly in the way that humour (among other things) is often downvoted and discouraged.
I upvote humour for this reason, and down vote posts that are anti-fun. Believing all writing should be dull is a characteristic of people who can't write well.
...and as the article says, "Furthermore, some of the world's main waterways such as the Suez Canal and Singapore Strait also restrict the maximum dimensions of a ship that can pass through them.", which explains why the list consists of large fleets of ships all almost exactly the same size.
Much like Panamax being the largest ship size which can traverse the Panama canal, there's a corresponding Suezmax[1]. Sort of like the old story of the Space Shuttle's SRB size being dictated by old Roman road design, it's interesting how modern design is influenced by historical limitations we might not consider.
The Shuttle SRB design still was dictated at least in part by the segments being transported by rail - each individual segment could be only as heavy, wide and long as the cobined stretch of railway from the factory would allow.
It influences other rockets as well - for example the Proton:
The long thin tanks you see mounted on the first stage are not drop tanks or additional boosters, its the tanks holding the first stage fuel, with the central core holding all the oxidzer.
Thats because the core stage is limitted in width by what you can ship to Bayokonur by rail, especialy IIRC one specific rail tunnel on the route. So they ship the core stage and the additional fuel tanks on separate rail cars and then bolt them in place on the cosmodrome.
In similar manner Falcon 9 is limitted to 3.9 m of width as that is the maximum you can ship over the US highway network without special care.
If you want to go bigger, you need special aircraft and barges, or build the thing in place like it is currently being done with the SpaceX Starhip.
One of the main roads near where I live is a Roman road. It's fascinating that the new buildings being built along it have their design constrained, in some way, by a decision made 2000 years ago.
In 2016, Prokopowicz and Berg-Andreassen defined a container ship with a capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 TEU as a Very Large Container Ship (VLCS), while that with a capacity greater than 20,000 TEU as an Ultra Large Container Ship (ULCS)
They are gonna run out of larger adjectives pretty soon.
Same with IC size. Started with SSI (Small Scale Integration) then MSI (Medium Scale Integration), LSI (Large Scale Integration) and finally VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) in the early 1980ies. There was some talk of ULSI (Ultra Large Scale Integration), but thankfully this never caught on.
Edited to add this (which I did not know, but think it interesting) from the Wikipedia article:
The modern practice of ships being registered in a foreign country [ie, a flag of convenience] began in the 1920s in the United States when shipowners seeking to serve alcohol to passengers during Prohibition registered their ships in Panama. Owners soon began to perceive advantages in terms of avoiding increased regulations and rising labor costs and continued to register their ships in Panama even after Prohibition ended.
Does anyone have some insight on how this could affect global supply chains, depending on how long the canal is blocked? It seems like it's been blocked for a day or so, and there's already a pretty big queue. I'd imagine that has to have some significant impacts already.
I don't think this will impact. There is already a lot of possibility of delays, for example ships taking detours due to bad weather systems, etc. Nobody plans success of their production based on the ship arriving on exact day.
Global trade will probably only be significantly impacted if the canal stays blocked for more than 2 weeks, which is when it starts to become a reasonable option (time-wise) to go south instead and round the cape. A backlog of ships on both sides will start to be really significant after 4 days of blocking, with longer blockade implying ports increasingly further down the routes being impacted as well. Currently, the worst that probably is happening is that the local logistics sector (train, truck, etc.) is in re-booking hell to handle the suddenly delayed ships.
src: I work at a container-logistics software company, and we've handled and seen similar situations (sudden loss of a main class of transport for a few days).
Yep. Operationally, things like that are interesting. Global as a whole usually recovers pretty well. Might drive container and shipping rates a tad more so.
Truck and train will probably see an increase as well on the China-Europe route if it takes too long.
In a chapter of "Ninety Percent of Everything", the author rides a container ship through the Suez Canal and relates what it's like, if this has piqued your interest about the shipping industry. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16044961-ninety-percent-...
Aren't they just a dozen Filipinos or Russians keeping the boat clean while the auto pilot makes a slight adjustment every few hours? I'm not sure how exciting it would be.
I haven't read the book, but I have traveled on a container ship through the Suez Canal. It's not really what I would call exciting, but it is fairly interesting. It takes less than a day to transit, and the scenery is relatively varied - you get to see urban areas, some rural farmland, beaches, and full out desert. Both in front and behind are dozens of massive container ships, just as big as the one you're on. It's quite humbling.
All this is in contrast to the rest of the time you are onboard. You are right that not very much happens. The ocean is very, very big. The vast majority of the time you can't see any land, or any other ships. If you don't have a satellite receiver of your own, there is no internet, no news, no nothing. Sometimes there is a storm. Sometimes there is a sunset. Most of the time there's nothing of note. I found it really relaxing, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's also a very expensive way to travel compared to commercial airlines or even long distance rail.
Most of the ships have unused cabins, and some shipping companies allow civilians to book them as a sort of quirky cruise experience. There is quite a lot of paperwork involved, and you need to book fairly far in advance, but it's totally doable if you have the cash and the time. When I went it cost around us$100 per night. Going from Europe to Asia takes 3-4 weeks, I think going around the world (both Suez and Panama) can take 6 weeks or more.
The company I travelled with was actually Evergreen, so I was on one of these "Ever Foo" ships people are talking about upthread. The photos on Twitter look very similar to ones I took at the time.
I booked through a specialized travel agent in the EU that has since gone bust, but if you search the web for freighter cruise or cargo ship cruise you should be able to find some other companies that can help out.
My parents traveled on container ships quite a few times (twice to NZ and OZ). Trips are typically booked through specialised travel agents (you can find them quite easily via Google). There is quite a community of people doing these trips, mainly pensioners, because you need to have time and can't be sure about timing.
For those thinking about doing it, the Asia/Africa routes from Europe are much more interesting. Going across the Atlantic or Pacific is much less interesting. Also in the modern age of container freight you don't have much time at the ports, and often the captains are reluctant to let you get off, because they are on such tight schedule and delays would quickly cost 100s of 1000s of dollars per hour (that will give you an idea about the economic impact of this blockage).
My mother actually travelled on a loose cargo freighter in the 90s. That was a completely different experience because you would often have several days or a week at port.
I did this in 2012 from Australia to South Korea - theres a bunch of specialized travel agencies you can book through. From memory it took about 10 days.
The cost was about $100 / day, but this was almost 10 years ago, so I guess it went up by now. This isn't really competitive as travel, but if you consider the experience of being on a container ship a holiday in itself, the cost was quite reasonable IMO.
There was one other passenger on board, and we could go anywhere on the ship without an escort except the engine room. I really enjoyed it, but its not for everyone as there is no communication / internet access available so you have to be the sort of person who can entertain yourself.
Also wouldn't go if you get seasick easily. Unlike say cruise ships, the crew isn't too worried about passenger comfort, and wil just plow straight through storms.
I've never travelled through Suez, but did some other canals like Panama and Kiel. Autopilot won't be used there I'm sure. Canal Authority requires having a Pilot onboard and he gives commands to the Helmsman.
Even on the open sea I've never seen that the autopilot actually steers the ship, it will only keep the heading, and sound an alert when there is time to change heading. So the watchkeeping Officer will set new heading and steer the ship in a new direction.
From what I recall they wanted to sell apples to the Egyptians, but the government refused. The crew ended up throwing the cargo overboard before it could perish.
Seeing how it is positioned, the worst case is that they will not be able to move it and they will have to remove some of the load. This might take a day or three depending on how difficult it is going to get a crane and a ship positioned to take the load off.
Any fans of What We Do in the Shadows here? Getting strong vibes from the second season when Colin Robinson parks his car across the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel.
Some back-of-the-napkin calculations: The ship's got over 20k containers, so less than $10 per container. Shipping a container from Asia to Europe costs thousands of dollars, so passing through the canal is less than 1% of the cost. Sounds fair to me?
The ship in the video is not a container ship but a taker or bulk cargo ship, so you cannot calculate this way. But I am sure it is not much if you divide the toll fee by total shipping cost or even the value of the cargo. It was just the total sum that I found impressive.
Oh, good point - I mixed it up with Ever Given. Agreed $200k is a lot, but probably totally insignificant compared to the major costs (fuel, wear & tear).
Maintaining the channel seems to be a lot of work... like when ships crash into the bank and block it.
My bad. I didn't mean scuttle and leave there. I meant take apart with welding torches. Not sure what the proper term is for that. However they got it moving so we are all good to go.
Ha, I happened to see it leave Boston August of last year and snapped a photo of it because it was jaw dropping big (and I’m not a boat person!) the Evergreen had 4 tugboats guiding it. Yeah that thing isn’t moving without professional help. https://photos.app.goo.gl/6Ywgot5wmK6HDNoV6
Edit: so this is the “ever living” that’s 335 meters long. The ever given is 400 meters long
Looking at GP's foto again I believe the name of the ship they photographed ends with a 'G'. But I also realized my mistake with mixing up the ship's name with the company name.
There you have it, shows you how much I know about boats, although the more I’ve been reading this thread the more interested I am about learning more about the industry.
Evergreen is one of the shipping companies from Taiwan. Incidentally, one of my favorite airlines EVA Air is their spinoff airline, based in Taipei (and far better than the flag carrier China Airlines)
The ship is Japanese operated by Taiwanese company, according to NHK News this evening in Japan. The ship ran aground due to bad weather conditions, poor visibility due to sand storm.
Only familiar with much, much smaller boats - but that's not unusual for station-keeping (or anchoring, but I expect a moon-shaped track at anchor). To be super clear, I'm extrapolating from 30ft boats, I could be wildly wrong in any of this.
In a nutshell you don't stay still, you drift around with wind and currents (and breeze-block shaped ships have a lot of windage!). So you drift off station, motor back, rinse repeat. ('Station' is usually a box you're bound to rather than a point you try to hit, for exactly this reason)
Anchor isn't much different - a cargo ship in an anchorage isn't a static fixture, it's realistically the world's largest windsock.
Compare another ship waiting in the same area - https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 Hit the "Track" button on the sidebar (under the photo of the ship), and you'll see a similar history. Theirs is tighter, but that could simply be a product of it getting crowded. I'd expect EG's arrival to be more planned, less chaotic - arrive, assemble the convoy, join the queue and go.
Sorta makes me wonder why another ship, larger than a tugboat, couldn't hitch it with a tow rope (whatever the marine term) and give it a jerk. I get that ships aren't normally expected to do that, but you know, probably need larger tugboats for gigantic ships.
Amusingly enough, the tugs not uncommonly have more thrust.
Large ships are _heavily_ optimized for the common case, which is sailing at about 13.5 knots. They take a very long time to get up to speed because their propulsion is sized to be just enough to overcome resistance at their typical cruising speed.
Consequently, it would be difficult to get another ship up to any sort of speed in a short enough distance. Even if you could, the the momentum is absurdly high so it's much more likely that any sort of chain would snap, or the attachment point would break than that the aground ship would actually move.
(The aground ship has a deadweight of approx 200,000 tonnes)
Expanding on your comment, it's analogous to torque vs speed in cars. You wouldn't use a Ferrari to tow just because it has a high top speed and lots of top-end power. You'd use something with high torque down low and good gearing.
Similarly, tugs use different propeller setups (e.g. ducted props for extra power, or vectored systems such as azimuth thrusters or cyclorotors for extra manuverability), which just cause extra drag if all you're doing is cruising at a fixed speed throughout oceans.
A big container ship trying to tow something is not unlike having a high-speed racecar spin its wheels. It's not designed to put that torque down at low speed and lift a big trailing mass.
Based on the photos, the most useful vector a tug (of any strength) might take is not available. Yanking the ship backwards, off the bank, would work nicely but pulling its bow 35 degrees through the bank is pretty rough.
They need to pull the aft sideways while keeping the bow steady, that way it would angle slightly and then pull back. Requires no space behind the ship, and is likely the reverse of what happened...
Apparently the limiting question is how much force can be exerted on the ship and from what locations without damaging it (or, damaging it too much).
That's why recovery specialists are flying in. They know how to do that kind of engineering calculation, as well as all the weight & balance calcs needed to e.g. move ballast in unusual ways, etc.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadEdit: should of ended it with “schooner or later”
Just so you know you are like the 1000th person to tell me that, if it’s not sunk in yet, it’s never going to.
> I bet your real fun at parties…
See it’s why the one/two word “correction” response comes off as such a dick move. It doesn’t actually help the other person. It either comes with zero meaning so offers no way to learn (if it’s actually meant as help which, I have my doubts that it actually is most of the time). Or it’s being said in a superior tone to someone who can not help it and has heard it soo many times it basically becomes an insult.
See similar vessels https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-...
The shipping company name “Evergreen” is in huge letters on the side of the ship.
How does something like this happen?
> @tjcsalisbury Yepp! And I believe they cut us off this morning entering the canal and then this happened and right after they ran aground the ship behind us lost power and almost hit us so it’s been a fun day lol but now we are just anchored here hopefully it won’t be to long but from the looks of it that ship is super stuck they had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere there is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow
0: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMxEKHanW62/
It essentially plugs a giant oil 'pipeline'
A bit like how a tiny bat (citation needed?) changed the course of the world for at least a year.
It wasn't a tiny bat, or a lab accident that changed the course of the world.
It was a corrupt non democratic government trying to hide it under the carpet, in similar fashion that a similar government in USSR try to hide under the carpet the biggest nuclear accident in its time.
From the data we have so far, it was already present and undetected in Europe the year before. It may have originated in Europe, but that isn’t yet clear.
Don’t fall to western chauvinism.
China is west to the USA.
Everything was also under control in China, as was later confirmed. Unfortunately by the time the virus was detected in China, it was already spread throughout Europe, since at least November 2019.
I really didn’t expect this sort of rejection of science and facts on HN.
After all, most countries still haven’t dealt with covid. In China (and a few other countries) people’s lives have returned to normal a long time ago. We should demand our politicians put lives before profit instead of letting them distract us with lies about China.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Kinda like how the Mink was going to become the bridge-species in Denmark (humans infected Minks with COVID19... and then the mink was probably going to infect another species after that).
Out of curiosity - are bats affected by these coronaviruses? If not, what's different about bats (as compared to humans)?
Humans with a pipette.
Do you mean some production would shift to Africa, or something else?
Though maybe I've got the scale wrong, and these ships can just buy more fuel and more food at their departure ports and go around Africa without stopping...
So, another thing to worry about :)
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
Someone hijacks a LNG carrier, parks it in the canal and says they have a bomb on the pressure vessel.
Regardless of what infrastructure it would damage or not, it will shut down shipping.
Who would be willing to get close to it to do anything about it? What do you do, stand off and launch a missile and definitely destroy it?
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
I'm surprised no one has made a movie of that.
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
They even introduced a postal system!
That is pretty cool.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
Well, it terrorizes. Terror not achieving anything is a bold statement. Maybe you'd prefer to argue that it's not efficient or productive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Exchange_bombing
I don't claim to understand the global shipping dynamics, but I do see that there's lots of frustrated ship crews with nowhere to go, because of the pandemic.
Surprisingly, the bigger the boat the more effective. We tend to have a bias against larger machines, but often they can be the cleanest in proportion.
[1] https://www.ademe.fr/sites/default/files/assets/documents/86...
Assuming that pollution primarily caused by fuel usage of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020
https://www.imo.org/fr/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/02-I...
https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(raketa)
And it makes sense if you think about it - as you scale up, the ammount of fuel you can carry goes up roghly by cube while structure mass, forming a shell effectively arround the fuel, goes up by square of size of the rocket.
Similar things for air resistance - as you scale up yuour rocket the front part creating the most drag will scale more slowly than the volume of the rocket that goes to fuel, payload and structure.
No wonder Starship is already at 9 meters of width and 18 m has been mentioned as a possible future upgrade. Its already bigger than the massive 66+ meter high medieval watchtower in my home town yet it can fly to sub orbital speeds without its first stage booster (which is even bigger)!
"Maritime transport emits around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually and is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (3rd IMO GHG study)."
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/shipping_en
The problem is that we (as a species) are moving far too much, far too far.
As for the comparison to trains, it matters a lot whether you're talking about diesel or electric trains. Most train lines in Europe are electrified, and as electricity production switches to solar/wind, it may actually end up being cleaner than ships. (Although work is also being done on making ships cleaner. But new international laws are probably needed to get everybody on board.)
The real issue, though, isn't no much whether the transport happens by boat or train, but that it happens at all. The scale of global shipping is this big because everything is produced on the other side of the world. Big ships make that transport more efficient, but a more egalitarian global economy that didn't create incentives for companies to seek out every low-wage country and tax haven, would make local manufacturing more attractive and reduce global shipping.
Even worse for planes on flight radar 24.
6000Nm and, say, 25 knots (probably a bit on the high side, but not by much) should add 240 hours of steaming or 10 days to the voyage.
(This will be somewhat offset by the lower speed through the channel, waiting times &c - I've no idea how long a typical Suez transit is.)
For yachts it is (supposed to be) two days. It's one day to Ismailia on either way and then one for the rest. (The paperwork however, may take longer, but can be arranged in advance.) See more at https://www.noonsite.com/report/suez-canal-transit-informati...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561816
That's a lot of fetch for wind, which transfers energy to the ocean's surface, which travels as waves, which build up because there's no land damping from west to east. Throw in the Antarctic Circumpolar current and weather systems interacting with the Benguela current an Agulhas current... That's a lot of energy getting put into a relatively tiny band of water.
The Cape of Good Hope was previously known as the Cape of Storms based on the aforementioned confluence of forces generally making sea states miserable. The Good Hope part was what putatively happened after you got through it, and the seas you'd have to worry about would generally be calmer.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5630138/zoo...
I see that labeling too, but the Tahia Misr2 is a tug, sister to the Tahia Misr1.
I'm not sure why it's displaying as a pleasure craft.
Edit: The phrase "pleasure craft" is a triple entendre, and possibly a quadruple.
Does anyone know the transit time to pass through the canal versus going around the South Africa route?
EDIT: Just saw they had outages, but I guess nobody ever expected it to be trending on twitter. Works fine for me.
https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1374468169784459267/pho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...
Off-topic, but does anyone else find it odd to find fillers like "umm" and "uhh" to be typed out on sites like HN or reddit?
It influences other rockets as well - for example the Proton:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family)
The long thin tanks you see mounted on the first stage are not drop tanks or additional boosters, its the tanks holding the first stage fuel, with the central core holding all the oxidzer.
Thats because the core stage is limitted in width by what you can ship to Bayokonur by rail, especialy IIRC one specific rail tunnel on the route. So they ship the core stage and the additional fuel tanks on separate rail cars and then bolt them in place on the cosmodrome.
In similar manner Falcon 9 is limitted to 3.9 m of width as that is the maximum you can ship over the US highway network without special care.
If you want to go bigger, you need special aircraft and barges, or build the thing in place like it is currently being done with the SpaceX Starhip.
They are gonna run out of larger adjectives pretty soon.
“Super Container Ship II' Hyper Turbo Extra Special Champion Edition HD Remix”.
Btw, there's a similar conundrum with large telescope projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333391
Large container ship 20 Ultra Plus 5G Fan edition
Apple's 12 Pro Max, though...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#ULSI,_WSI,_...
I'm all for Hella Container Ship
Ship sizes can just reuse that replacing “graphics array” with “container ship” e.g. Quad Size Extended Container Ship.
https://xkcd.com/1294/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...
I remember driving up to one of the battleship memorials as a child and it just seemed like this big gray mountain at the end of the street.
Covers lots of questionable business practices, from employment conditions/health and safety, to tax etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience
Edited to add this (which I did not know, but think it interesting) from the Wikipedia article:
The modern practice of ships being registered in a foreign country [ie, a flag of convenience] began in the 1920s in the United States when shipowners seeking to serve alcohol to passengers during Prohibition registered their ships in Panama. Owners soon began to perceive advantages in terms of avoiding increased regulations and rising labor costs and continued to register their ships in Panama even after Prohibition ended.
https://twitter.com/lookner/status/1374580367269711875
I'm no expert in detecting shoops. But ELA looks fine to me, I don't think it's photoshopped.
src: I work at a container-logistics software company, and we've handled and seen similar situations (sudden loss of a main class of transport for a few days).
Truck and train will probably see an increase as well on the China-Europe route if it takes too long.
All this is in contrast to the rest of the time you are onboard. You are right that not very much happens. The ocean is very, very big. The vast majority of the time you can't see any land, or any other ships. If you don't have a satellite receiver of your own, there is no internet, no news, no nothing. Sometimes there is a storm. Sometimes there is a sunset. Most of the time there's nothing of note. I found it really relaxing, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's also a very expensive way to travel compared to commercial airlines or even long distance rail.
Is that something you can pay to do?
I booked through a specialized travel agent in the EU that has since gone bust, but if you search the web for freighter cruise or cargo ship cruise you should be able to find some other companies that can help out.
For those thinking about doing it, the Asia/Africa routes from Europe are much more interesting. Going across the Atlantic or Pacific is much less interesting. Also in the modern age of container freight you don't have much time at the ports, and often the captains are reluctant to let you get off, because they are on such tight schedule and delays would quickly cost 100s of 1000s of dollars per hour (that will give you an idea about the economic impact of this blockage).
My mother actually travelled on a loose cargo freighter in the 90s. That was a completely different experience because you would often have several days or a week at port.
The cost was about $100 / day, but this was almost 10 years ago, so I guess it went up by now. This isn't really competitive as travel, but if you consider the experience of being on a container ship a holiday in itself, the cost was quite reasonable IMO.
There was one other passenger on board, and we could go anywhere on the ship without an escort except the engine room. I really enjoyed it, but its not for everyone as there is no communication / internet access available so you have to be the sort of person who can entertain yourself.
Also wouldn't go if you get seasick easily. Unlike say cruise ships, the crew isn't too worried about passenger comfort, and wil just plow straight through storms.
Ah, that explains it.
> I'm not sure how exciting it would be.
Right now it would be pretty exciting.
Even on the open sea I've never seen that the autopilot actually steers the ship, it will only keep the heading, and sound an alert when there is time to change heading. So the watchkeeping Officer will set new heading and steer the ship in a new direction.
I'm pretty sure that is a feature not a bug. Kinda like servers... if something is exciting it means something went wrong.
Yikes.
I heard about this originally from a great German podcast "Geschichten aus der Geschichte": https://www.geschichte.fm/podcast/zs180/
https://youtu.be/4DiXRCo7eBs
Presumably in the Gulf of Suez.
If the toll is deemed to be too high a vessel always has the option of going around the Cape.
Realistically it's always an option but the added time plus the additional wear on a vessel makes it undesirable.
Maintaining the channel seems to be a lot of work... like when ships crash into the bank and block it.
[0] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Capacity
Edit: so this is the “ever living” that’s 335 meters long. The ever given is 400 meters long
Edit: Comparing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship... it might or might not have been the ship. Evergreen is the name of the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine
https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1374513117326024705
In a nutshell you don't stay still, you drift around with wind and currents (and breeze-block shaped ships have a lot of windage!). So you drift off station, motor back, rinse repeat. ('Station' is usually a box you're bound to rather than a point you try to hit, for exactly this reason)
Anchor isn't much different - a cargo ship in an anchorage isn't a static fixture, it's realistically the world's largest windsock.
Compare another ship waiting in the same area - https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 Hit the "Track" button on the sidebar (under the photo of the ship), and you'll see a similar history. Theirs is tighter, but that could simply be a product of it getting crowded. I'd expect EG's arrival to be more planned, less chaotic - arrive, assemble the convoy, join the queue and go.
Large ships are _heavily_ optimized for the common case, which is sailing at about 13.5 knots. They take a very long time to get up to speed because their propulsion is sized to be just enough to overcome resistance at their typical cruising speed.
Consequently, it would be difficult to get another ship up to any sort of speed in a short enough distance. Even if you could, the the momentum is absurdly high so it's much more likely that any sort of chain would snap, or the attachment point would break than that the aground ship would actually move.
(The aground ship has a deadweight of approx 200,000 tonnes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDrFiQq1_k
Looks like fun actually!
Similarly, tugs use different propeller setups (e.g. ducted props for extra power, or vectored systems such as azimuth thrusters or cyclorotors for extra manuverability), which just cause extra drag if all you're doing is cruising at a fixed speed throughout oceans.
A big container ship trying to tow something is not unlike having a high-speed racecar spin its wheels. It's not designed to put that torque down at low speed and lift a big trailing mass.
That's why recovery specialists are flying in. They know how to do that kind of engineering calculation, as well as all the weight & balance calcs needed to e.g. move ballast in unusual ways, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...