Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#321

Post by sverhagen »

munk-a wrote: post #154
sixstringtheory wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a 20,000 container capacity, so if it's full and you could unload them at a rate of 1 per minute (assuming multiple choppers) it would take 2 weeks with no stopping, but I assume the frequency would be much lower than that so you're talking possibly months to unload even a fraction of them.

Also - it's quite possible it'd further beach itself during the unloading unless you replaced the mass in an easily removable manner... To which end I'd like to suggest self-launching lead trebuchets.

I understand this is all not realistic, but since we're just spitballing here, before I realized how many containers we're even talking about here, I had rather wondered if lifting off a lesser number of containers in the right place would be exactly right to shift the weight/balance for the ship to get unstuck.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#322

Post by nomy99 »

_Microft wrote: post #238
nine_k wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, there are no watertight gates anywhere near. Filling in the entire canal is unrealistic.

What if we could part the water at both sides of the ship? Would that suffice as makeshift gates? The Egyptians had a bad experience with that in the past though and lost a lot of gear and many men in an incident. Might be understandable if they didn’t want to do that again.

Let me call moses, hold on.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#323

Post by wongarsu »

fileeditview wrote: post #289
01100011 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you build a temporary barrier around the ship and the section of the canal, bring in some massive pumps, and temporarily raise the water level around the ship? Edit: Something like this https://www.hydrologicalsolutions.com/aqua-barrier-cofferdam...

I've had the exact same idea but the canal bank is very shallow.. so you would have to build around the whole ship (as you said). This also seems like a major undertaking. I am excited to see how they will solve the problem though!

If the bank is very shallow and mostly sand, maybe instead of building a damn all around the ship it would be easier to just dredge a new passage that goes around the stuck ship. After all the real problem isn't that the ship is run aground, it's that the canal is blocked for everyone else.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#324

Post by laurent92 »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #180
anigbrowl wrote: post #118

Needs a counter for ongoing cost. An experienced military logistics person I know estimated yesterday that the bill for this is up to about $40 billion already.

That might be the total value of impacted shipping, but nobody is going to get a $40 billion bill for this.

Do they have deadlines for delivery and late fees? I’ve heard a quarter of the worldwide cargo capacity will be delayed by this event, this could rise very fast.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#326

Post by xwdv »

blhack wrote: post #39

I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is. Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this. Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's real…

This ship is delaying $400 million dollars per hour in global trades.

It better not fucking take weeks.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#328

Post by _Microft »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #295
qbasic_forever wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh what about magnetism? Could we wrap the ship in wire and send so much current through that it repels against the Earth's magnetic field and shoots itself right into the atmosphere? Basically building a giant rail gun. Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible.

> Might need a small nuclear power plant or two to make it feasible. Amazingly, that's a severe underestimation. The force on a wire carrying current in a magnetic field is given by F = B*I*l, and to move it upwards that force needs to be at least equal to gravity, so equate to F = m*g. - Let's be generous and assume B = 100 uT = 100 * 10^-6 T. - Likewise, assume the ship is a rectangular box with sides of 400 m x 10…

The most important thing here is the magicness of the wire. The ship is 60m wide and 30m tall, that makes a circumference of 180m. 0.05m radius, 100000 windings, made of copper with a density of approx. 8900kg/m^3 gives a total mass of approx. 1.3*10^6 tons for the cable alone.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#329

Post by laurent92 »

munk-a wrote: post #11
cghendrix wrote: post #3

Wonder how the data for the actual position of the ship is obtained or if it’s estimated and just hard coded on to the map? I always love sites that are question in the domain with answers in the webpage as the main content.

This is one particular outlet[1] for that data but, AFAIK, all modern commercial vessels continuously report their location via satellite or, preferably, coastal AIS. That data is collected by something then APIs happen along with aggregation and probably more APIs and... after all that, the data is pretty widely available. Ship location isn't considered privileged security information which was a bit surprising to m…

> isn’t considered privileged information

Not only that, but Bloomberg terminals have the ship locations in real time because it impacts trading a lot: Petrol, ore, cereals, etc.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#330

Post by ryanmarsh »

This thread reminds me similar threads here and elsewhere when Deep Water Horizon’s well head was spewing hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks. The immense scale (depth, pressure, etc) and logistics (distance from shore, open ocean) exceeds everyone’s intuitive high-school grasp of physics. The ideas presented are laughable and immediately shot down by people armed with just a few facts (plenty again given the scale and logistics involved).

I’m eager to see what clever solution the engineers eventually pick.

Post reply on HN