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Is that ship still stuck?

istheshipstillstuck.com

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Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #104
munk-a wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be amazed if the density of weight on the ship is such that an arbitrarily large fleet of Chinooks could actually safely accomplish this. And helicopters flying in a dense formation under strain is quite likely to result in a lot of really big problems.

The rotor wash beneath it all would be breathtaking.. and might blow all the water out of the canal. :)

Which makes me think - what about using all these choppers to blow the water in - and keep it there? :).

(I assume this is an equivalent problem to the lifting problem, as the extra pressure they'd be fighting would be that of the ship displacing water.)

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#272

Post by Zenst »

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…

> It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck.

My armchair engineering would dump a load of salt into the water to increase buoyancy of the ship long enough for the tugs to get some momentum with less effort than currently.

That would be my cheap try solution to help the tugs that have already hit there limit so why not change the physics and add a load of salt.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#275

Post by kergonath »

blhack wrote: post #107
leesec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?

There are 20,000 containers on the ship. Assuming you needed to remove 1/4 of those containers to get it to rise far enough to get off of the sand, you need to move 5000 containers. Assume that it takes 5 minute to connect a bridle to a container, hook it to a helicopter, and move it...and then also assume that the helicopters can run 24/7 and never have to refuel, that they can hot swap in pilots, and that there is…

We really are bad at dealing with large numbers. 20 000 does not seem that much when it’s just written that way. Even looking at the pictures, this is a lot of containers, but the efforts needed to get them out of that ship are hard to imagine.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#276

Post by simmerup »

bigfudge wrote: post #201
Tenoke wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does legitimately seem like you can do tremendous damage by derailing a few ships in the right spots. Bringing bombs or other small ships or something else seems doable for a terrorist organization on the face of it.

This is true more generally. When I lived in London and the IRA campaign was going on I never understood why they didn't just set fire to a few stolen vans on Euston road/City road/Waterloo bridge every morning rather than actually killing people. Would have been more effective.

What freedom fighter would throw away their life to cause a traffic jam?

And what government would cave to whats essentially a minor inconvenience

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#277

Post by prof-dr-ir »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #246
tiborsaas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the luxury of just throwing around ideas and not caring about the consequences (because nobody in power will read it). It's just fun to think about how you'd solve a problem like this. For example I'd try to attach a two Raptor engines to the ship and blow it back to the water :)

Or tear the ship apart :). Which makes me think - why not cut the ship in half? Two pieces will be easier to dislodge and tow away :).

in half? I would not go for less than nine pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ENOJBLVgjw

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#278

Post by olalonde »

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

That's how a lot of billion dollar companies got started.

Re: Is that ship still stuck?

#279

Post by laurent92 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
elihu wrote: post #62

I suppose I'll kick off the usual "why don't they just do X" thread. It seems to me that if they can't move it by any normal means, they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move. I could also a lot of plausible reasons why they wouldn't do that: - it wouldn't work (no equipment to move containers) - the ship's owner doesn't want to do that and no one has th…

> they could just start pushing cargo containers overboard and fish them out until it's light enough to move Light boats are less stable. One of the few that could make this situation worse would be the damn thing capsizing.

Yes. Unloading is a science, also, if you want to avoid capsizing. And the risk is increased because they don’t know on which sand the boat rests (it may be balanced at some point just by one bank + the pressure of the flow of water) and the tides add some random every 6 hrs.
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