Nuke the thing. Crater fills with water. Continue.
Sort of like blowing up a dead, beached whale? :) p.s. if that doesn't ring a bell with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
Yes, exactly like that, which I had been thinking of. :)
Is that ship still stuck?
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#442I 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…
Exactly. I'm guessing weeks rather than days, and maybe more than that. The best I can come up with is heavy lift helicopters to at least remove the front most containers to relieve some of the pressure but even that would be an enormous operation. Anything else would require major construction especially if it is to reach more than just the first four or five rows which is likely not going to be enough. https://en.w…
The helicopter itself is 30 tons, leaving you 30. But 60 is the max takeoff weight. The max weight it is actually designed to operate at when carrying the maximum load is about 55 tons. With 30 for the helicopter itself, that leaves 25 tons for the load.
A container can be up to 33 tons loaded, so the heaviest will be beyond that helicopter (at least of you don't want to push it past its safe limits).
I assume that the heaviest containers are on the bottom of the stack, and that most containers aren't near the limit, so it could probably unload a substantial number of them.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pictures I've seen completely hide the ship's bulbous bow. It juts out seemingly like 50 feet from the front of the bow that you can see. It looks like all of that is wedged in the sand
Bingo. It's long, fat, and like the pharaohs ... buried in Egypt.
Snip snip.
Just cut the tip off.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#444Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if so, now you've got a handful of containers on the sand and a giant ship stuck in the canal.
Sure. Just guessing that taking weight off of the end that's marooned in the sand might help. Edit. Okay "ends".
> Just guessing that taking weight off of the end that's marooned in the sand might help.
It is crosswise and in the banks on both sides.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#446It will be weeks before this ship is free. Fuel and oil can be pumped out but that only makes up a fraction of the total weight of the vessel. Containers can be unloaded but again the lightest will be at the top so a significant number will need to be removed to make a big enough difference. And unloading them will be a slow process. You can maybe unload a few per hour with helicopters. There doesn't exist any infras…
> Again the infrastructure to do this rapidly doesn't exist. The UAE used several sand-vacuuming ships to build their artificial islands, wouldn't those do the job?
The dredging for that project was done by a Belgian and a Dutch company, and I don't think they left their ships and equipment there afterwards.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is requi…
If I estimated right, the fuel is a few percent of the total mass (maybe around 5%). Not the most encouraging result.
If it was floating, raising it out of the water by 5% would not be insignificant, and help relieve some of the forces holding it in place.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#448Earlier 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…
Add another 40,000 tonnes for the empty containers, then probably that again for whatever is in them. Plus probably another 10,000 tonnes for fuel.
Really it may be conservative to say another 100,000 tonnes for all the stuff other than the 200,000 tonnes of the ship itself.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#449It's probably gonna be stuck for a while. I'd suggest that all other ships get started on the scenic detour. Set course for Cape of Good Hope.
Re: Is that ship still stuck?
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, there are no watertight gates anywhere near. Filling in the entire canal is unrealistic.
I'm not saying the entire canal. Surround the boat, make a dam somehow. Concrete is dry in 24-48 hours. Sand and wooden poles could be enough. Some ideas on the how, could be found in this video, on how they created a bridge in the middle ages: https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk I'm pretty sure engineers could find better/faster solutions than what I'm proposing.
Lot of heavy containers that aren’t being used at the moment.