There is a difference between building a ship on land - in a shipyard - and later sliding it into the water — and servicing one in a drydock (where the ship is driven in under power (her own, or tugs or other assistance), the water drained, the ship serviced and the ship later refloated.
CAUTION. The links below are to fairly large jpegs.
Here are Two pictures illustrating the options. THIS ONE OF A SHIPYARD shows several ships being built on dry land.
These are called newbuilds.
THIS ONE OF A DRYDOCK shows one ship in the drydock, and another waiting. Those two cruiseships are each very large - 1,020 feet and approx 138,000 tons. Filling and/or draining a drydock of that size typically takes two days. It is done slowly to ensure that stresses on the hull are properly distributed as cradles are added and/or removed.
There are several facilities in the world big enough for the large ships, including one in Mississippi (used by a lot of naval vessels) and several in Europe (Finland where the pics were taken), Germany and France. However, given the fact that there are more mega ships than drydocks to handle them… booking the drydocks is planned well in advance, years in fact, and involves a lot of planning.
Since I work for a company which owns 29 mega ships, I will refrain from discussing brand names, but if you are any good, you can figure out which company from the pics…
ROTFLMAO… that is too funny! Please tell me it’s Photoshop and not real… :eek:
As for my company, if you were a customer, I could promise you royal treatment, like a celebrity in fact…
[Seriously, I’m new here - MODS… what is the policy on this sort of thing?? I want to stay in the rules – professional credentials versus plug – and I don’t want to plug anything here, it is not necessary.]
I suppose one reason would be if you need to start building another ship as soon as possible (basically if you’re expansing your fleet or replacing hulls in a hurry for some reason). Thus, you park the newly-floated ship into a dock nearby to finish building all the stuff it DOESN’T need for purposes of floating on the water, and you start building the next ship without having to wait to finish the first one. I’m not sure if it’s possible to push a ship back ON to a slipway (I’ve honestly been curious about that for years) but I imagine it’s pretty tricky to nigh-impossible.
IIRC, the Bismark was built in the half-on-land fashion. Hull and lower bits built, slid into the water, it’s weight being announced as being within treaty limits, and then the superstructure and such being built, pushing the weight limit a good bit over the limit. :rolleyes:
Oh, and because I thought of this after hitting “Submit Reply”, I’ve read that many larger ships use lifeboats for moving people and materiel between the ship and shore (or other ships, if needed) whenever docking the ship isn’t practical. This is no doubt also a handy way to make sure you don’t have leaky lifeboats (which, as anyone who has seen Muppet Treasure Island knows, can be a very dangerous thing to have in an emergency )
While I wouldn’t put it past the yard workers to have some fun :rolleyes: … those lifeboats are probably just being lowered off the second ship so they can be lifted into the yard for painting/maintenance etc. As for a sense of scale, you might be interested to know that each of those little bumblebees carries 150 people.
Sorry to correct myself… .after actually studying the pic a bit more… it looks like the ship has just come out of drydock - and the lifeboats are being driven to “mama” to be reloaded AFTER having been serviced. The giveaway is that the paint on each of the lifeboats is bright… they tend to fade in the sun over time.
On a cruise vacation in the Caribbean, one of our ports (Grand Cayman) was a “tendered” port. Two of the lifeboats were used as passenger tenders. One of the tenders was the lifeboat that me and my family were assigned to. I always wondered what we were to do if the ship were in distress while my lifeboat was running taxi duty. I would go to my muster station, but no lifeboat would be there. :eek:
Drum God… no problem at all. Tendering is only done within a VERY close distance to shore… at Georgetown, Grand Cayman it probaby takes the tender less than 10 minutes to get to the dock. That same tender, under emergency circumstances, would return to get you in a VERY short time. You would be directed to a new muster station on Deck One (or whatever deck you use to embark the tender) rather than up on Deck X where the lifeboat was stored.
If we can sort out (or just ignore for the moment) the issues of jargon, submarines are constructed in this fashion, too. I’ve seen several of them under construction at Electric Boat in Groton. But as noted, laying the keel is a totally separate thing from getting an already built ship out of the water. Electric Boat calls their hull construction areas “graving docks.”
Strangely enough, when I went home for lunch today, Modern Marvels was on. In this episode, they were showing the construction of one of the Navy’s newest Arleigh Burke class destroyers. It was being built at Bath Iron Works. They showed the old inclined slipways and mentioned that they don’t use them anymore because sometimes ships capsize when launched this way. :eek: The modern marvel way to do it is to build the ship on shore and then trolley it out onto a floating drydock. The drydock is then floated out into the Kennebunk river and lowered to allow the destroyer to float free. The difficult river navigation out to the Atlantic then begins.
Yes, the anchorage was quite close to Georgetown. We boarded the tender down on deck one, just above the water line. That was the only time in the trip that I started to get a bit seasick, as we were crammed into a boat that was bobbing like a cork next to a MUCH bigger boat. I tried to imagine what it would be like in a true emergency, but, as I understand it, the lifeboat wouldn’t be in the water, but still hanging on the davits.
During the initial muster drill on the first day, we were all standing under the lifeboat at our muster station. We were to stand shoulder to shoulder, taking up no more area than the space directly under the boat. The lifeboat officer was having trouble getting cooperation from one of the passengers. The officer thumped (his own) chest and said “I know where my seat is on that lifeboat!! Do you have a seat!!!” Got my attention. :eek:
No, we missed it. I’ve heard that it is spectacular and, if we ever go again, I’ll make sure it’s on our itinerary. Instead, we enjoyed relaxing on the beach. We were astounded at the prospect of walking into water you could see through. Here in Texas, the seawater is so murky you can’t see your feet even if you’re just ankle deep. The water was so clear it was breathtaking.
There is much dispute about it, because all of the images available of the ship contain jpeg artifacts that some people have argued are remnants of photoshop tweaking, however, there was a thread about it here a while back and someone or other looked it up in the international registry; there is indeed a ship of that name, so it seems reasonable to accept that this is it.
That it is a dead or dying method I certainly wouldn’t dispute; the last one I recall witnessing was actually a sideways slide into the water and it created a massive wave that swamped the dock one the opposite side (where there were standing lots of spectators). Don’t remember the name of the ship though.
I just checked the Equasis shipping database. There is indeed a Hong Kong flagged crude oil carrier named Titan Uranus. The IMO number matches as well.
