gCaptain.com

At times commercial interests and biological research align with stunning results. Today we look at projects underway that utilize technology employed by the oil exploration vessels to explore earth’s last frontier; the oceans.

Serpent Project is a collaboration between offshore industry companies and deep sea science interests. They tell us;

Working closely with key players in the oil and gas industry, the “Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology” project aims to make cutting-edge ROV technology and data more accessible to the world’s science community, share knowledge and progress deep-sea research. The program interacts with science and conservation groups globally to transparently communicate the project to the public, increasing the awareness of our fragile marine resources.

You can browse the entire video archive but Transocean, an oil exploration and drilling company, leads the way with 673 fascinating files. CLICK HERE for the files.

The offshore industry is not alone in their quest to document unusual marine species, the U.S. Coast Guard also contributes assets to exploratory efforts. Here are a few photos from the Census of Marine Life;

	The comb jelly Aulacoctena sp., collected by means of a remotely operated vehicle in the deep Arctic Canada Basin. Image by Kevin Raskoff, NOAA. Download full version.		Clione limacina, a pelagic snail. This specimen was collected from the deep Arctic Canada Basin with an ROV. Image by Kevin Raskoff, NOAA. Download full version.
	A jelly fish of the genus Crossota, collected from the deep Arctic Canada Basin with an ROV. Image by Kevin Raskoff, NOAA. Download full version.		Sea cucumbers such as this specimen dominated the fauna at the sea floor at several stations during the Hidden Ocean expedition. Image by Bodil Bluhm and Katrin Iken, NOAA. Download full version

You may find related images by visiting the group’s Marine Life Project Map

Finally BostonCaptain.com brings us the most interesting image of the month, an amazing video of a whale saying hello to an ROV team. The dive was performed by a Canyon Offshore vessel while inspecting subsea equipment in the Gulf of Mexico for the oil and gas industry. You can imagine their surprise when the visitor arrived.

 

 Whale Greets ROV Crew [0:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A vessel found in 700 AD, several centuries before the Vikings ruled Norway, the Oseberg ship from approximately 800 AD and the knarr from around year 1000 AD all have one thing in common; their rounded bows were the inspiration for Ulstein’s latest design, the x-bow container ship.

This design is not new, launched last year the Bourbon Orca was the first vessel launched with Ulstein’s revolutionary bow design. Now the company is set to incorporate this design into a new class of short-sea shipping vessels. A company press release: [Continue Reading →]

Shipspotting forum points us to Seven Marine’s photos of a recent heavy lift operation:

The FPSO Sevan Voyageur left Yantai Raffles Shipyard in China this morning. The FPSO is placed onboard a dry tow vessel and is on its way to the Keppel Verolme shipyard for topside hook-up and commissioning. FPSO Sevan Voyageur will be installed on the Shelley field in the central UK North Sea in 2008, under a five year contract with Oilexco North Sea Ltd.

Full sized photos HERE.

Some of you may remember a cartoon which appeared during World War I, a drawing showing an inquisitive stranger talking with the gateman at a railway crossing. The gate was painted with the usual black and white stripes, and lying on the river beyond the tracks was a steamer painted with similar markings. The stranger asked, “Why do they paint the stripes on the gate?” And the gateman answered, “Oh, that’s to make them more visible.”

And then the stranger asked, “Well, why do they paint the stripes on the vessel out there?” And the gateman replied, “Oh, that’s to make the ship less visible.”

-Everett Warner [paraphrased from his lecture notes]

A ships in costume, gCaptain brings you Razzle Dazzle; history’s most unusually painted ship. What is Razzle Dazzle? GoTouring.com tells us;

During World War I, the British and Americans faced a serious threat from German U-boats. All attempts to camouflage ships at sea had failed, as the appearance of the sea and sky are always changing. Any color scheme that was concealing in one situation was conspicuous in others. A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme that was derived from the artistic fashions of the time, particularly cubism. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship’s course. The British called this camouflage scheme “Dazzle Painting.” The Americans called it “Razzle Dazzle.”

Artists were enlisted to draw up the camouflage designs. Early in the war, designs were drawn for individual ships, with each ship having its own distinctive pattern. As the war progressed, standard patterns were devised and applied to large numbers of ships. Even the great passenger liners were camouflaged for the duration of the War.

It is unfortunate that there are no color photographs of these WWI ships. People who witnessed convoys of dazzle painted ships reported that the scene was quite dramatic. Imagine sailing across the North Atlantic surrounded by dozens of brightly painted ships, each in different colors and patterns. If you compare the colored drawing with the black and white photograph of the ship “War Clover”, you can get an idea of how much we are missing. Read More…

.

The problem confronting a submarine, once his prey has been sighted, resolves itself solely into estimating course and speed of the target, in order to determine how the approach to torpedo fire position should be made. The “dazzle” system of painting is based on this one consideration and that is, of rendering the problem confronting a submarine more difficult, confusing him as to how his approach shall be made and thereby adding in some degree to the safety of the vessel attacked.

U.S. Admiral William S. Sims (1917)

Painting by Wendell Tatley

Camopedia has this amazing information on the World War I design team assigned to the project;

ONE METHOD camoufleurs might have used (but did not, apparently) to generate a large number of unique dazzle schemes is the stencil method.

It is indebted to American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), sometimes called “the father of camouflage,” who (circa 1909) devised a clever, easy way for individuals to design their own camouflage, using cut-out silhouettes.

Whatever the surrounding, said Thayer, a person “has only to cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and look through this stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what costume from that viewpoint would most tend to conceal this figure.” However, the purpose of dazzle camouflage was confusion, not concealment, so, in the examples below, we have used the silhouette as a mask with which to “find” valuable dazzle designs in an abstract, geometric plan. In studies of human vision, Gestalt psychologists and others have investigated embedded figures or “puzzle pictures” (Wolfgang Köhler called them “camouflaged figures”) in which a simple shape has been adroitly hidden within a larger, more complex surrounding.

In pre-computer days, one could make arbitrary compositions in art by overlapping “systems” on layers of tracing paper, viewed on a light table. Today, it is ever so easy to do the same thing (and much more) by using the “layers” function in software such as Adobe Photoshop. This could have been useful as a way to generate dazzle designs, had all that been available in World War I.

This information is from gotouring.com and the amazing design site:

Camopedia

In London this week? Head over to one of gCaptain’s favorite places… the Imperial War Museum, for their exhibition on Dazzle (and other Camouflage):

If you are looking for more information on this topic be sure to read things magazine’s extensive ship camouflage links section.

USA Today tells us;

A decommissioned Air Force ship is being prepared at a Virginia shipyard to become a new habitat for marine life and an attraction for recreational divers in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

A $6 million project to turn the 524-foot-long General Hoyt S. Vandenberg into a reef is scheduled to culminate in the spring of 2008, with the vessel’s sinking in 140 feet of water about six miles south of Key West.

Retired in 1983, the Vandenberg floated for 24 years among ships in the U.S. Maritime Administration’s James River Naval Reserve Fleet at Fort Eustis, Va.

he Vandenberg began its nautical life in 1943 under a different name, the Gen. Harry S. Taylor, as a troop transport ship.

After participating in World War II, the Hungarian Revolution and the Cold War, it was overhauled to become a missile-tracking vessel in the Atlantic. When christened for that assignment, it became the Vandenberg, named after the former Air Force general and director of the Central Intelligence Group, predecessor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency. Read More…

 

Wired has an interesting article on portable emergency housing. Some of the ideas make use of shipping containers. The tell us;

One of the biggest obstacles to emergency-shelter design is finding the right balance between providing a temporary shelter like a tent and working to rebuild permanent homes.

“You can’t design for disaster after the fact,” notes Kate Stohr, co-founder of the nonprofit humanitarian design firm Architecture for Humanity. “Unless it’s strategically thought about in advance of disaster, these ideas don’t work.”Shipping containers, found in abundance all over the world, form the basis for the Future Shack, a self-contained, modular refugee-housing unit. It can be mass-produced with a minimum of materials and is easily stockpiled, making it a versatile emergency-housing unit.

You can find the slideshow and attached article HERE.

CLICK FOR INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION

With the recent LNG News I decided to get to work on some maritime visualizations. Above is a bubble graph I created representing the number of ships registered to each flag state.

CLICK FOR INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION

This graph is even more interesting, it shows the number of ships registered to each country by foreign owners. Notice the Flags of Convenience? Surprising that the U.S. has 51 flagged ships registered by foreigners.

Data is from the May 15th 2007 version of the CIA World Factbook.
Total number of ships registered worldwide: 33,222
Total number of foreign owned ships: 16,717.
More graphs of this data:

Merchant Marine - Rank Order (top chart): [Continue Reading →]

How is a cabin is built in this day of containerization and commodization? Remotely of course. Eurodam News, Holland America’s blog showcasing the shipyard activities around their latest new build project, brings us photos of the stateroom installation.

Of potential interest to readers of this blog the method shown here is very similar to how accommodation blocks are built aboard modern commercial ships. In conjuntion with this trend is the movement towards equality among crew members, which means the Captain’s cabin is often identical to that of the most junior crew member minus the extra rack. This is in stark contrast to my first ship, a Wrecks Act tanker built in Japan, which contained bunkrooms for junior crew members and a four room (day room, office, sitting room, cabin) suite for the Captain.

It’s also not only the cabin that is built remotely and installed on site. Often entire accommodation or specialty modules are built by separate companies and placed atop the hull, which itself is built in parts and transported within the shipyard (photo example). Examples include Transocean’s newest drillship the Clear Leader, Polar Tanker’s latest ships and the Semi-Submersible Development Driller II shown in this Leirvik modular fabrication brochure.

The titan of the industry, however, is Aker Yards’. Their cabin division produces over 9000 cabin and bathroom units annually. Cruise Critics gives us an inside look at their “Cabin Factory”;

In the tiny town of Piikkio, nestled in farm country some 20 kilometers from the shipbuilding city of Turku, Aker Yards Cabins has been building pre-designed cruise cabins for 20 years. Here, panels are assembled to make walls and ceilings. Toilets are installed and shower floors, made of hard plastic and designed to resemble colorful mosaic combinations, have been pre-made and are ready to be laid in bathrooms. Entire technical systems — each cabin has its own — are put in place. Telephones, mini-bars and even electric sockets (providing access to European and American currents), along with data ports, are all snugly outfitted into a vanity desk/wall unit that’s arrived from a furniture factory elsewhere in Finland.

Even the beds hang tightly from the walls.

If you’ve ever cruised on Royal Caribbean’s Radiance-, Voyager- or Freedom-class ships in anything but a huge suite, you’ve stayed in one of these prefabs.

To read more on Aker’s “cabin Factory” click here and for the instillation of these type of modular cabins click here. Photos of the final product can be found here.

Here’s video of Aker’s “Cabin Factory”;

Today Fred Fry linked to an interesting post containing photos, video and the stories behind some of the world’s largest iron graveyards. One of the more interesting entries is of the bay of nouadhibou, mauritania. Fogonazos tells us:

The Bay of Nouadhibou, seven miles south from the Mauritanian city, hides one the biggest ship cemeteries in the world. There are more than 300 wrecks around the harbor, resting for years and coming from all nations.

A brief walk through Google Maps will show you hundreds of skeletons piled here and there, at the biggest collection of rusty giant ships you could ever imagine.

However, there isn’t any magic or mystery in this squalid place. For years, Mauritanian harbor officers were so corrupt, that they let ships be discarded in the harbor in exchange of some cash. Discarding a ship is quite expensive for a company, so during the decades, lots of unwanted ships ended up in the harbor of Nouadibou. Read More…

Apparently some of these ships are inhabited by some of the less fortunate Mauritians Mauritanians.

For the original story and information on other interesting transportation graveyards CLICK HERE.

Links:

• Video of Nouadhibou Bay

The picture above, by Ship Spotter Frederik, is of the Elly Maersk. Along with her sister ships the Emma, Evelyn, Eleonora, Estelle and Ebba Maersk she is the largest Container Ship in the world and the last of these giants scheduled to be built. She is also equipped with the largest engine in the world. Marine Link tells us:

On August 25, 2007 Odense Steel Shipyard presented its latest newbuilding, an 11,000 TEU container vessel, for the A.P. Moller - Maersk Group.

Like her five predecessors, Elly Maersk will be part of the series of the world’s largest container vessels, and she will like her sister vessels set new standards for safety and environment. Environmentally friendly silicone paint covers the hull of the vessel below the waterline – reducing water resistance and cutting the vessel’s fuel consumption by 1,200 tons per year.

With its 14-cylinder Wärtsilä RT-flex diesel engine which develops 110,000 bhp, Elly Maersk will enter Maersk Line’s worldwide service after delivery. Read More…

We have mixed emotions regarding ships of this size but, like the rest of the world, are impressed and amazed by her sheer size.

Related links:

• Video of her Maiden Voyage
• Track the Elly Maersk
• More Photos
• Fire on the Emma Maersk
• Emma Maersk photos video