Gone in 70 seconds

March 21, 2013 8:27 PM

Let's build a ship - Timelapse builds the world's largest ship in 70 seconds Building the world's largest ship - the Maersk Tripple E
posted by mattoxic (47 comments total)

Wow...for comparison, the ship that can carry oil rigs, Blue Marlin, is "only" 712 x 138 feet compared to the Maersk Triple E at 1,312 x 194 feet. Blue Marlin can carry 76,000 tons vs. the Triple E's 165,000...that's a lot of goods...
posted by pravit at 8:40 PM on March 21

And I thought Liberty ships were impressive. 98 days to build. 50 percent reduction in CO2 emissions per container. Dodgy website.
posted by wilful at 8:48 PM on March 21 [1 favorite]

That's one big rolling crane they're using to build that big ship.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 8:49 PM on March 21 [3 favorites]

Used to be that the "world's largest ship" was one or another oil tanker. Now it's a container ship?

It's a sign of the times.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:51 PM on March 21

18 000 TEUs.

Two-thirds of the emissions reduction is by going at a speed of 20 kts, not 25 kts. 3g Co2/tonne/km.

Still impressed.
posted by wilful at 8:55 PM on March 21

Used to be that the "world's largest ship" was one or another oil tanker. Now it's a container ship?

That's a lot of iPhone 5s and Samsung TVs
posted by mattoxic at 8:56 PM on March 21

We're gonna need a bigger.... ah forget it.
posted by Trochanter at 8:58 PM on March 21 [7 favorites]

Used to be that the "world's largest ship" was one or another oil tanker. Now it's a container ship?

Well, we get oil from Canada now, we can just build a pipeline.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 8:59 PM on March 21 [1 favorite]

And they're SuezMax!
posted by wilful at 9:00 PM on March 21

Used to be that the "world's largest ship" was one or another oil tanker. Now it's a container ship?

The world's biggest ships were once all oil tankers, that's true. But the interesting thing is that those ships are still the biggest ever built, yet they've all since been scrapped. This ship wins by default.
posted by Jehan at 9:03 PM on March 21 [8 favorites]

If you love boat building, this thread on the wooden boat forum is really what you want to spend the next six hours reading. I am in fact not joking.
posted by Quonab at 9:04 PM on March 21 [5 favorites]

Well that was easy! Look at it go. It's like a 3D printer for ships!
posted by bicyclefish at 9:43 PM on March 21 [1 favorite]

Wow. Too deep to use any port in the Americas.
posted by pahalial at 10:03 PM on March 21

I think this is near where stavrosthewonderchicken lives. Another Canadian connection: I think I saw a show about this shipyard narrated by the wonderful Barbara Budd.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:16 PM on March 21

Looks pretty straightforward.
posted by lostburner at 10:58 PM on March 21

These must be pretty high up the research tree.
posted by Hicksu at 11:03 PM on March 21 [4 favorites]

Anyone know why they pull it out of dry dock when it's only halfway built? Was it sitting in a canal and those other ships just needed to get by?
posted by orme at 11:42 PM on March 21

A YouTube link, in case Vimeo causes you as many headaches as it causes me.
posted by jiawen at 11:56 PM on March 21 [1 favorite]

Pretty cool, though I'd like to watch those craned-in sections being built, too.

I went on the Boeing factory tour in Everett, WA last year, and they were all "We can build a 777 in twenty days!" or whatever it is. And I was like, well, yeah, but whole sections of the plane are being built in all corners of the planet, and being flown to Everett in an even bigger plane. The twenty days you're talking about is what it takes to bolt the sections together, hook up the wiring, hang the engines, and paint it. I always thought it would be more impressive if you added it all together and said "All the parts added together take 10,000 8-hour shifts. Our supply chain means we can turn all those 80,000 hours into a finished plane every twenty days."

That's the impressive part of global supply chains, in my opinion.
posted by OHSnap at 11:57 PM on March 21 [7 favorites]

Anyone know why they pull it out of dry dock when it's only halfway built? Was it sitting in a canal and those other ships just needed to get by?

It looks like the 2 other ships were also in dry dock being built or worked on, so yeah when they were both done they needed to get the ship out of the way.

These megaproject videos always make me wonder: are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working? I know the engineering involved and money at stake make it highly unlikely, but have there been big boats that don't maneuver correctly, or planes that don't fly, or buildings and bridges that don't stay up? Less 787 battery problems and more Tacoma Narrows.
posted by edeezy at 12:21 AM on March 22

And because why not, the (apparently) largest Lego ship ever.
posted by jiawen at 12:27 AM on March 22 [2 favorites]

That was very cool.
posted by sharpener at 1:18 AM on March 22

These megaproject videos always make me wonder: are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working?

I worked with a couple of bright sparks once that sold their fluid (airfoils and such) modelling software to Daewoo who apart from building shitful cars - build ships. These chaps were telling me that the whole ship is built in software model form, and each and every component is stressed, sourced, tested, costed and operated before a rivet is riveted. So as far as ships are concerned - the don't build these
posted by mattoxic at 1:53 AM on March 22

are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working?

Titanic?
posted by wilful at 2:12 AM on March 22

Titanic

Palmers? Lets hope he's on it.
posted by mattoxic at 2:15 AM on March 22

The Maersk Tripple E will call here (Gothenburg) sometime this fall; gonna be fun to see if the tour boats will offer trips there.
posted by monocultured at 2:39 AM on March 22

A ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:48 AM on March 22 [3 favorites]

A video on this page on the site shows the structure, engines and propellers, but they messed up how the propellers propel, one is going backwards.
posted by flif at 2:51 AM on March 22

These megaproject videos always make me wonder: are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working? I know the engineering involved and money at stake make it highly unlikely, but have there been big boats that don't maneuver correctly, or planes that don't fly, or buildings and bridges that don't stay up?

The closest I can think of to the kind of mega-project failure you are looking for in the last 25 years or so is North Korea's colossal Ryugyong Hotel. For the decade and a half that it sat as a rusted-out concrete shell it was a symbol of poor design and planning. Despite North Korea's recent efforts to at least make the exterior presentable, the hotel will probably never function as originally intended.

On a much smaller scale, in the US the collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkway is widely used as an engineering study of how, despite the best of intentions, design errors can lead to unexpected failures.
posted by RichardP at 3:25 AM on March 22

but have there been big boats that don't maneuver correctly, or planes that don't fly, or buildings and bridges that don't stay up?

I dunno -- Challenger and Columbia? Size of project, and criticality, alone are no guarantees of success. List of structural failures and collapses.

If you look into books about engineering failures and ethical conundrums, such as the books of Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, e.g. Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail, there's a wealth of material to study. There's also Henry Petroski, e.g. To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. The Challenger launch decision has been extensively studied as an instance of process gone awry, and the Citigroup Center engineering crisis is a famous example of a built structure that turned out to have a vulnerability, which was mitigated before it could take anyone's lives. There have been posts about these topics here you can look for.
posted by dhartung at 4:01 AM on March 22 [3 favorites]

It's an historical engineering fuckup, but the Vasa is a good example of how not to build a ship...
posted by kalimac at 4:11 AM on March 22 [3 favorites]

You can also search for things labeled boondoggles, most of which are public works projects that simply went way over initial cost estimates, like the Big Dig (Central Artery Project) in Boston. Although the Mid-America Airport is a good example of completely useless construction (I think it currently has a few flights a week, but sat open, operational, but unused for several years). Maybe a good example of what you're looking for is the Ocean Tower (Leaning Tower of South Padre), which developed such a settling problem (on a barrier island, duh) that it had to be imploded before anybody moved in. Watch that whole video; the color commentary is priceless.
posted by dhartung at 4:13 AM on March 22

> I think this is near where stavrosthewonderchicken lives.

I don't know and I can't watch the video right now (Where does it say the ship is being built?)

I was on a bus tour of South Korea last fall. The highway into Ulsan brought us past an auto finishing plant to our left and its vast parking lot to our right. Drivers were loading cars into a vehicle freighter on the other side of the lot that was literally larger than we could take in through our bus windows. A couple kilometers along we passed dry docks where smaller ships -- but still difficult to view because of their size -- were getting built or repaired.

At our destination in Ulgi Park, we got to stand on a rocky outcropping and see a kilometers-long queue of ships on the horizon, waiting their turn to get loaded with cars, unloaded with goods, or arrive at dry dock. I've visited shipping ports before but I'd never seen anything like the scale of the operations going on there.
posted by ardgedee at 5:21 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

I think the Berling Brandenburg Airport would probably qualify as megaproject that hasn't worked out. I can't find a sttory link right now, but I remember reading that the HVAC system, designed to evacuate smoke in case of a fire, collapsed upon its first test.
posted by vansly at 5:47 AM on March 22

this thread on the wooden boat forum is really what you want to spend the next six hours reading.

I managed to pry my eyes away from the screen after two hours, but only because I have urgent work to do. Wow, what a ride!
posted by hat_eater at 5:57 AM on March 22

are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working?

The Ryugyong Hotel.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:44 AM on March 22

I want to watch the tilt-shifted version make little ships.
posted by ceribus peribus at 7:16 AM on March 22

The Spruce Goose is the canonical "big engineering project that didn't work" in airplane-land, I would think.
posted by louie at 8:26 AM on March 22

Really? True, it was no longer needed when it was completed and its only flight was in ground effect, but why was it a failure from the engineering point of view?
posted by hat_eater at 9:08 AM on March 22

I think the closest thing the aviation world has to the Tacoma Narrows bridge is the De Havilland Comet, in that it was not a commercial or political failure and that it brought into focus entirely new engineering problems, bridge aerodynamics in the case of Tacoma Narrows and metal fatigue in the case of the Comet.
posted by Authorized User at 9:12 AM on March 22

pravit bit of apples and oranges here as Blue Marlin does it on a sigle lift operation and containers are loaded individually. Not withstanding Maersk Triple E is very impressive.
Dockwise have pushed the single lift envelope again with the Vanguard at 902 ft x 229ft. Further revolutionary this semi submersible has an open bow and stern similar to that of an Aircraft carrier.
posted by adamvasco at 9:33 AM on March 22

A ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships.

Shouldn't that be "A ship shipping ship shipping ship shipping ships"? Because "shipping ships" is just redundant, no?
posted by yoink at 9:42 AM on March 22

I've visited shipping ports before but I'd never seen anything like the scale of the operations going on there.

See, this is where Big Data isn't really doing anything for me.
posted by sneebler at 9:46 AM on March 22

I don't think the Denver International Airport's fancy baggage system ever worked right, and it was something of a big deal when it was in development.
posted by ckape at 10:07 AM on March 22

Really? True, it was no longer needed when it was completed and its only flight was in ground effect, but why was it a failure from the engineering point of view?

Failure to align the function to the business needs. Its a classic.
posted by mattoxic at 3:12 PM on March 22

The Hindenburg is an excellent example of an engineering disaster.
posted by double block and bleed at 9:59 AM on March 23

Are there any good examples of big projects getting built and just not working?
Architect Norman Foster's £18.2M Millenium wobbly bridge in London, Closed 2 days after opening to be re-engineered.
posted by adamvasco at 11:07 AM on March 24