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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: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:32PM

    by zafiro17 (234) on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:32PM (#108246) Homepage

    The shipping business operates on razor-thin margins these days, and companies like Maersk have been in economic downturn over the past decade, squeezed by the cheaper options of sketchy Asian companies who ship for less by skimping on safety etc. So if they've decided to invest in this kind of ship you can rest assured their lawyers, accountants, planners, and managers have studied the costs and benefits and decided it makes sense. There is enormous amount of trade going on between Asia and America, all of which docks on the USA's Pacific Coast. These are ships that are too large to go through the Panama Canal because they're intended to ever need to. Companies like Maersk can't afford to make a mistake. If they're ready to invest in this kind of ship then there must be a calculated advantage to doing so.

    As for measuring the ship's volume in bananas, WTF? Can I have that in Libraries of Congress or swimming pools, please?

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 21 2014, @03:23PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 21 2014, @03:23PM (#108263)

    Yeah you're right, we should always form opinions based on deference to authority because those in positions of authority can do no wrong and never have. What could possibly go wrong?

  • (Score: 2) by TK on Tuesday October 21 2014, @03:42PM

    by TK (2760) on Tuesday October 21 2014, @03:42PM (#108270)

    It would be much simpler to say that the new ship can transport 43 Olympic swimming pools full of bananas across 12,000 football fields and over 266 million Sydney Harbor's worth of ocean.

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