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posted by LaminatorX on Monday October 20 2014, @09:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-the-local-bulk-cruisers-mind-you dept.

Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

 
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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Monday October 20 2014, @10:29PM

    by tftp (806) on Monday October 20 2014, @10:29PM (#108004) Homepage

    Maybe people can live in it, like the float cities so popular in some sci fi.

    Owners of Jules Verne's Propeller Island did not need to worry about the economy. They could buy the best and not worry about where the money would come from. However in the real world a floating city would have to worry very much about the economy, as they have to buy food from earth-based farms. Perhaps fishing jobs would be available, or marine research, or some purely intellectual pursuits. But not much else - not with today's technology. People on a ship like that would have nothing to do. Even programmers would have hard time working there, due to slow, expensive and unreliable (in bad weather) satellite Internet. The best way to use one of such ships for living is by parking it at some pier forever.

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday October 20 2014, @10:48PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 20 2014, @10:48PM (#108009)

    If you wanted, you could float your little city down to a better pier. That's a nice bonus.

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