Seems 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.
Considering 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).
What 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.
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.
And 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.
I 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.
To expand a little, most container ships use bunker crude, which is borderline sludge. It even needs to be heated before being pumped out. But it's cheap and at the size, pressure, and speeds these engines run at they get most of the energy out of just about any fuel.
An important note: as much sulfuric pollution as all the cars in the world. Which is bad enough, but -- for instance -- cars are (probably) still winning on CO2 emissions.
For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
I concur, it's an almost perfect application. So much that most aircraft carriers already use it, not sure what's holding back the private sector (probably safety concerns).
I read somewhere that container ships' fuels are the dirtiest of all fuels used everywhere, which made buying electronics really non-green (since they're all come in ships from the other side of the globe). Anyone here knows how accurate this is?
When I was contracting for some undisclosed financial company in Ireland I was doing some work around the building and one evening I was said there will be Director coming from a meeting, so I should be around to open doors for him (I was only in the whole office atm) - the guy was pretty happy about deal so he started talking that he just made a deal for delivery of fleet of lease planes to some airline in EU. When I said the team must be really happy, he answered it is his own project, only few people in office knew about it.
This illustrated to me that directors of finance companies can make multi billion deals and yet only few people knew about it... There was no teams working on it, bunch of risk management people trying to figure if this is worth it. Just one guy encouraged by few of his employees...
One of the major reasons why the finance industry works such ridiculously long hours is that small, arguably-understaffed teams are better at keeping secrets and maintaining client relationships and more easily held accountable for their errors.
Aircraft leasing is a well-defined, finite market with most of the commonly-leased aircraft types having well-understood risk characteristics, and the lessors can and invariably do buy reputable independent opinions on market lease rates, residual values and empirical data on market activity (they can buy them by contacting me, actually :-) ) In many respects it's more risky to throw a large team at building a model to come up with a contrarian view.
Needless to say, the airline will throw far more people at trying to ensure they can keep up with the lease repayments and bills from actually operating the aircraft and there are quite a few lawyers and technical consultants involved in the final signoff and aircraft redelivery. Similarly, some teams involved in supply chain management and business development at Maersk must have spent a vast amount of time figuring out the logistics of filling larger ships in future, which based on how little time the last generation of "biggest ships ever" stayed in service is a much bigger gamble than most airlines will ever make.
Your finance guy didn't buy the planes though, he just sorted out the way the money is handled for the company that did. Still a pretty big deal, to be sure, but it's not his company that will go bankrupt if the end buyer can't figure out a way to fill up his planes at a profit.
In fact, at current market caps, you could very well go ahead and buy the whole damn shipyard instead [1]. And its next-door neighbor in Geoje, Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world (even accounting for its recent merger with Samsung Engineering) [2]. With the right multiples, you could even end up with enough chump change to get yourself another Minecraft or something.
I have a feeling something is not quite right here.
Well, you don't get 450 million potential users with a shipyard. Currently users are in high demand, so supply-and-demand, and prices. You know, black magic, they say.
If they can monetize 10% of whatsapp users for 100 usd per year, that's 4.5 billion, so that 20 billion will come back soon. Just the .99 USD App Store yearly fee nets them probably enough to run the thing.
Also, opportunity cost, grabbing those sweet-sweet innocent users from the table before others, probably worth something too.
What is amazing is the cost: Just $185 million. A brand new 747 costs $350 million. At the end of the day it does something simple. It holds stuff and floats while engines push it.
It's not really fair to compare a ship to an airplane. What happens if all the engines on this ship stall? You wait a week or so before someone arrives with new engines. In a plane you fall down.
I imagine this is just a big, hollow piece of steel with propellers in the back and room for as many containers as possible.
> Only 15 crew live on the ship when it is at sea, and their living quarters make up the tower that sits under the bridge.
Compare this to a 747, which is designed to transport 350 people through the air.
That's the point being made. These are enormously expensive for something conceptually quite simple. A large part of that is probably the sheer size of the triple E. The original 747 is less than a meter longer than the width of the ship. And if you could squeeze the 747 in there (cut off a bit of the nose perhaps) you could fit more than 5 of them wingtip-to-wingtip in the length of the ship.
hookers 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.
When finished, 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.
The 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.
Really? 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?
Nuclear 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.
To 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.
Near 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.
Using 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"
Those things don't fail like that. When you're looking at big projects it seems you should delegate more and more money as you go closer to the control, but it turns out you can't affect the reliability of those measurably with large sums of money: a specialized joystick isn't guaranteed to last a ton more than your avg gamer one. But it should make sense to also make a specialized computer, usb connection, ... It's easy to see the optimal is really the consumer grade stuff, you can just replace broken parts, quite differently from say a satellite, where once it's broken it's done.
These ships also have an electronics engineer aboard to take care of such stuff. That's aside from the usual team of marine engineers handling the heavy equipment. In this context, the electronics engineer handles everything from the office equipment to the deck cranes. The engineering team handles the actual engines. They kinda step on each other handling the smaller equipment around the engines (steam plants, pumps, etc -- yes they have steam plants).
And they have excellent machine shops. I expect a consumer joystick to be a) simple to fix and b) cheap and small, so plenty of spares on board.
I 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).
Using 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.
I'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.
70 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadHowever, 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
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).
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
[1]: http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/prel...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=660isW3W95g
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.
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.
http://marine.man.eu/applications/container
How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
It's quite unpleasant stuff but you have to remember to factor in just how much stuff its moving across the planet.
This illustrated to me that directors of finance companies can make multi billion deals and yet only few people knew about it... There was no teams working on it, bunch of risk management people trying to figure if this is worth it. Just one guy encouraged by few of his employees...
Aircraft leasing is a well-defined, finite market with most of the commonly-leased aircraft types having well-understood risk characteristics, and the lessors can and invariably do buy reputable independent opinions on market lease rates, residual values and empirical data on market activity (they can buy them by contacting me, actually :-) ) In many respects it's more risky to throw a large team at building a model to come up with a contrarian view.
Needless to say, the airline will throw far more people at trying to ensure they can keep up with the lease repayments and bills from actually operating the aircraft and there are quite a few lawyers and technical consultants involved in the final signoff and aircraft redelivery. Similarly, some teams involved in supply chain management and business development at Maersk must have spent a vast amount of time figuring out the logistics of filling larger ships in future, which based on how little time the last generation of "biggest ships ever" stayed in service is a much bigger gamble than most airlines will ever make.
things you could buy instead of whatsapp
In this case, 100 of these ships.
I have a feeling something is not quite right here.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind...
If they can monetize 10% of whatsapp users for 100 usd per year, that's 4.5 billion, so that 20 billion will come back soon. Just the .99 USD App Store yearly fee nets them probably enough to run the thing.
Also, opportunity cost, grabbing those sweet-sweet innocent users from the table before others, probably worth something too.
It's scary how big these numbers are, how little difference we can perceive of them behind our screens. Probably the best way is via images like these: https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&saf...
And I'm sure the Rapa Nui down in Easter Island also had some kind of self-consistent story to tell themselves too.
Has any mobile user ever been monetized for $100/year, on any software ever...?
I imagine this is just a big, hollow piece of steel with propellers in the back and room for as many containers as possible.
> Only 15 crew live on the ship when it is at sea, and their living quarters make up the tower that sits under the bridge.
Compare this to a 747, which is designed to transport 350 people through the air.
(I couldn't get to the original; I suppose the site is attracting an entirely deserved flood of attention.)
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.
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.
Though the idea of losing my steering on account of a joystick or USB fault ... is a bit terrifying.
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"
Knowing that they've built the ship to operate using these devices tells me that they have trust in them.
These ships also have an electronics engineer aboard to take care of such stuff. That's aside from the usual team of marine engineers handling the heavy equipment. In this context, the electronics engineer handles everything from the office equipment to the deck cranes. The engineering team handles the actual engines. They kinda step on each other handling the smaller equipment around the engines (steam plants, pumps, etc -- yes they have steam plants).
And they have excellent machine shops. I expect a consumer joystick to be a) simple to fix and b) cheap and small, so plenty of spares on board.
Source: sailed aboard oil tankers.
http://www.infomarine.net/marine-accidents/119997-27-injured...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406975
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/...
or is that what the pylons on the side are there for?
Talk about huge!
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f...