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Never Sea Land brings us the largest engine ever built:

The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine is the most powerful and most efficient prime-mover in the world today. The Aioi Works of Japan’s Diesel United, Ltd built the first engines and is where some of these pictures were taken.

It is available in 6 through 14 cylinder versions, all are inline engines. These engines were designed primarily for very large container ships. Ship owners like a single engine/single propeller design and the new generation of larger container ships needed a bigger engine to propel them.

The cylinder bore is just under 38″ and the stroke is just over 98″.

The largest piston in the world!

More Enormous Piston Rods.

“DU-Sulzer 12RT A96C” translated to “One large MFD”

How it works. [Continue Reading →]

Ever wonder how graphic designers create cutaway illistrations of ship?  Khulsey.com clues us into the secrets HERE. Once you learn about the process click HERE to see close up images of the final product!

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”;

MarineLog brings us info on the new Heavy Lift design by SeaMetric International. The Twin Marine Lifter will consist of 2 DP class 3 heavy transport vessels with a dwt capacity of 25.000 tonnes. They will have accommodations for 41, a helideck, and will be capable of submersion to -20 meters. When used as a heavy lift vessel the two ships will merge and the unit to be transported will be brought in to straddle the two units creating one monster heavy lift ship.

Offshore Shipping Online tells us: [Continue Reading →]

 

 Heavy Lift Ship - Twin Marine Lifter: 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 →]

Our friend Richard Rodriguez pointed us to these paintings as seen on the Dark Roasted Blend blog. We have covered this story recently so if you are asking “Why are these ships painted this way?” visit our previous post HERE.

“A Convoy”, 1918, by Herbert Barnard John Everett:

(image credit: nmm.ac.uk)

“Dazzle Ship in Drydock” by Edward Wadsworth, 1919:

L. Campbell Taylor drew “Mauretania” with a checkerboard pattern:

(image credit: Jim and Jamie Richter)

“Dockyard, Portsmouth” by J.D.Fergusson, 1918:

Continue Reading…

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…

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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.