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World's Largest Ship Floated For the First Time
Zothecula writes "A ship with a hull longer than the Empire State Building is tall has been floated out of dry dock in Geoje, South Korea. Measuring 488 m (1,601 ft) long and 74 m (243 ft) wide, the hull belongs to Shell's Prelude floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility, which upon completion will be the largest floating facility ever built."
As it has no motive power of its own (it has to be towed into position), it is not really a ship. But it is still a really cool feat of engineering, designed to ride out the typhoon season off the Australian coast and keep LNG production going for 25 years or so... ;)
However, Shell are apparently building an even bigger one as well. Maybe they are trying to have a ship that is longer than the Burj Khalifa?
....floats your boat.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion in the ocean....
Apparently, it *is* all about the size of the ship!
I'm cucurious what these types of floating superstructures do to the ecology around them. The environmental impact of their sheer existence in the water is potentially staggering.
I saw a documentary on them a couple of nights ago, and this shipyard is averaging a super-tanker every 3.5 days if you divide the number of super-tankers they will build this year. Absolutely stunning the technology, skills, planning and productivity that they are managing there. This wouldn't be achievable in a western country thanks to unions and the terrible productivity and project overruns that come with western societies.
This is what you can build when you have real money, a real business model and a real plan instead of just a fantasy of a libertarian utopia.
Read the news
It is a large ship compared to humans, compared to an ocean, it is a speck.
And, if necessary, easy enough to avoid:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-Trimmer/dp/0870334336
It is world largest, unless it will steered onto riffs and sink, like Costa Concordia. Then something world-bigger will be needed to get that wreck out.
Call me when they levitate that thing.
$235 GBP for a paperback? WTF!?!?! This ought to come with a portable emergency beacon or at least a toaster.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Commenter specifically said the area around it, not the whole ocean.
You don't bed down subsea apparatus, anchor the largest floating structure in the world, start offloading shuttle tankers full of LNG and transport supplies and crew for such a installtion without affecting the surrounding ecology in some way.
I for one welcome the curiosity of the original post over your off-topic twitter-bashing and (hopefully) deliberate misinterpretation of the commenter's point.
Are there any emission or pollution laws that are enforceable when you're on international seas?
Well, at least they could have used the next best length unit, football fields. But, no, they would not use something so familiar to us and readily imaginable by all of us as the lengths football fields. True, I concede, using how many skyscrapers it would dwarf once you image it standing on its end or how big a building it could enclose in its shell, etc would somewhat ameliorate the use of such abstruse exotic and non standard units as meters.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It is cyclone season.
Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason this monster has to be one big long vessel? Could it still serve it's purpose if it was, say, a bunch of shorter hulls "lashed together in a rough-hewn manner"?
I'm pretty sure that the world's largest ship has floated before.
IQ below room temperature.
Not sure what range you are talking about? Could be really good, could be not so good, could be really bad.
70 degrees Fahrenheit
21 degrees Celsius
294 degrees Kelvin
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
engineers are not as highly respected in Korean society as they are in say, American society.
Wow. Talk about damning with faint praise.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Meh, tell me when it sinks. Now that is a news story.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I was sent a video of this happening at work yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/v/TrBSi405Ous?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata#
The time lapse makes it look kinda like stop-motion, but it is pretty cool to see something that big start to move.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Although it might not have been the reason for not including a way of moving on its own, as an anti piracy ploy, this might have merit. One of the first things that pirates do when capturing a ship is to move it to a frindly port. Without engines, it is much more difficult to do that. The pirates would have to take over not just the barge-supertanker but at the same time take over the tug. If more than one tugboat is needed to move the barge the pirates problems become much harder because they will have to take over more than one tugboat.
Isn't that true regardless of when or what? The first ship ever was floated for the first time at one point, the Titanic was floated for the first time at one point (you can't sink if you didn't first float), the first aircraft carrier was floated the first time, etc.
and a location that includes some of the largest storms the planet can muster. What could possibly go wrong?
"I'm king of the worrrlllddd!..."
Table-ized A.I.
When I used to work at Shell back when this thing was just a twinkle in some engineers eye...the plan was to use the cold deep seawater as a heat sink to save energy for the liquefaction of the gas. It appears in their latest press release that this is still part of the design. http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/investor/news-and-library/2013/shell-floats-hull-for-worlds-largest-floating-facility.html
The real concern was how to fit an LNG plant into a vessel. Here it fits into 1/4 of the area required for the same size plant located onshore. At 600,000 tonnes fully loaded, they probably did not have the capacity for a self-propulsion power plant, plus for most of its life it has no need for self-propulsion since the mooring equipment will control its positioning.
That's totally worth it. Read the reviews:
on finding about the existence of this book I immediately set off to purchase it. I, and my family, have been plagued by issues and tragedy from Huge Ship related incidents and I thought this would, finally, bring them to an end. Unfortunately as I approached the only local bookshop that had not sold out of this essential tome the shop was destroyed by a huge ship that came out of nowhere; If only the people that ran the bookshop had made time to read this book their livelihood could have been saved. I still live in despair but hope that others were able to access this book before too much damage was done to their lives.