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Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

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Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#671

Post by cozzyd »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #511
elif wrote: post #459

Weeks? My 0.02 is dig a bypass using dredges/pumps, then it's a 'days' problem. Of course it won't help this ship, but at least the canal functions.

Digging a bypass is not a days problem, that's a years problem. Everything about this problem is massive. The shipping lane of the Suez canal is 20 m deep and 77 m wide. The maximum ship length is 400 m, so the turning radius required to get into the bypass is literally miles long.

It would be a lot shorter to "just" dig a canal in front of the ship and park it in there forever, but would still probably take too long.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#672

Post by King-Aaron »

antidamage wrote: post #653
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…

Helicopters are a thing. And yeah, even completely empty with no fuel or ballast you will never see the bow out of the water like that. However it is more than capable of surviving being dragged along sand. It's just that they have nothing strong enough to drag it with. Eventually someone will stake some anchors into the ground and use an industrial winch, but that's where hull design starts to suck - there's no good…

How long do you think it would take to unload 20,000 40-foot containers via helicopter?

I'll start with my guess: A long time

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#673

Post by withinboredom »

rtkwe wrote: post #632
lhorie wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good example of how terrible people are at judging scale. Some numbers getting thrown around downthread say there's something to the tune of 10,000 40ft containers. To give a bit of a sense of perspective, that's like trying to clear out some 200 football fields worth of semi-trucks, except they are stacked, packed full of stuff, and have no gas or wheels. And all of them are perched atop a ship that…

For moving containers off the best bet would probably be heavy lift choppers, the ship is large enough you could have several working on it at once and then just drop them off nearby to be loaded onto barges or something. A huge undertaking but it any weight taken off the Evergreen is less digging they have to do and the time is so expensive. Also it's less middle of nowhere there's a pretty large airbase nearby it l…

Have you ever tried to stack containers before? Or had to airlift something via tow on a helicopter? You can do the latter (I watched it happen in the military), but the former isn’t happening from a helicopter, not into a floating barge anyway.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#674

Post by nwallin »

VRay wrote: post #542
dragontamer wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how do you clean up 220,000 tons of debris? Turns out: the container ship __itself__ is the easiest way to move all of that debris out. And its already packed and loaded.

you just have to blow it up REALLY HARD Like that old Mythbusters episode where they blow up a car twice I think the Earth could use just ONE MORE nuclear crater..

I think you've overestimating how much stuff an explosion removes, as opposed to breaks. Explosions are very good at making a functional thing not function anymore, but they're not as good as you think they are at evacuating an area.

Look at the aftermath of the Beirut explosion. The metal frame of the building the explosion happened in is still lying there.

The blast radius of an explosion scales with the cube root of the energy of the explosion. So if you want to make the hole twice as big, you need eight times as much explosives. To create a hole the size of a large container ship, you'll need a nuke. A pretty big one too. The Ever Given is 400m long, the crater left by the Trinity test (22kt) was 390m across.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#676

Post by jahewson »

ineedasername wrote: post #563

Every question with a binary answer should have its own website like this. I would, in particular, like a website for every room in my house with the question "are my car keys in this room?" Then I would create an rss feed of each site and subscribe to them.

That’s an O(n) car key search, if you instead asked the question “are my car keys in this half of the house?” you could perform a binary search O(log n).

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#677

Post by Izkata »

lisper wrote: post #195
Izkata wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I wonder... Let's assume it was possible. Would the force of lifting that much mass be enough to shift the earth in a measurable way? (I'm assuming it would be a lot stronger lifting it into the air than what floating on the water produces, but have no idea what the math would be)

F=ma no matter what, so if things aren't accelerating, the force isn't changing, it's just being transferred to the earth by other means. In this case, it would be through the air rather than the water.

It is as it's lifted though, right?

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#678

Post by austhrow743 »

adflux wrote: post #155
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…

Love the armchair engineers who think they're gonna solve this better than billion dollar companies

Why didn't anyone think of this before? Internet commenting is over folks. This guy realised its not productive.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#679

Post by IgorPartola »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #422
nicbou wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about using a really, really long lever?

Hah that would be incredible. Build something so long that a small child in China steps on it and WHOOSH out goes the ship thousands and thousands of miles away! We'll use the peak of Mt. Everest as the fulcrum!

With levers you trade force for time. How long would a lever like that take to complete its arc?
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