The “why?” was fine, the suggested answer was rude.
Not entirely related, about halfway down the page here is an account of how them moved a 203 foot iron ship to inland Lake Winnipausakee in New Hampshire, in 1940. Essentially, they cut it up into 20 pieces, shipped it by rail, and welded it back together.
You’re gonna need a smaller boat.
[/Chief Brody]
You are right to be dubious. The Hindenburg (largest airship every to fly), at over 800’ long and with a volume of over 7 million cubic ft carried a payload of around 15,000 lbs. The size and cost of something with a payload over 300 times as large would be formidable.
Sorry this is wrong. About 25,000 would be accurate. Gettin’ old, memory failing.
New materials, new engineering would allow the application of a greater percentage of the lift to the payload.
According to the formulae in **British Airships: Past, Present and Future ** by George Whale, 1,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gives us a gross lift at one atmosphere of 70 pounds.
Our hypothetical 25,000 ton vessel would need only ::lightning fast calculation:: 71,428,571 cubic feet of hydrogen to counteract its mass. Given advances in materials science, I feel confident in saying that this would mean a fleet of no more than thirty Hindenberg-sized lifters.
This would look rather like the collection of airships tethered together to carry the containment vessel of the alien mutagenic virus that was released over New York in the late 1940s.
2,500 tons x 2,000 #/Ton = 5,000,000 #
5,000,000 # / 7.481 #/Gal = 668,359 Gal
668,359 Gal / 8.336 Gal/CuFt = 80,177 CuFt
Assume 30 Ft draft leaves 2,672 SqFt surface area.
Assume 65 Ft beam leaves :smack: 41 ft length
One of the calculators HP11C/me made a mistake.
Mea Culpa, sorry about that.
Took me a while to figure out what the suggested answer actually meant. So I agree with you – it could have been more tactfully phrased.
So instead of a 300-fold increase in capacity, you’re proposing only a 10-fold jump. That’s a lot more reasonable. But it would still be an unprecedented advance in the state of the art, and so likely attended by enormous difficulties and staggering cost. And you’d be left with a fleet that shared all the drawbacks of airships: costly to operate, slow, vulnerable to weather, short of ground infrastructure, etc.
While the industry necessary to develop, construct & test these is ramping up and assembling its funding, I say we truck the necessary materials to the intended destination and build a new barge.
Since we are thinking a little outside the box here, how about this idea:
Fabricate a real big rubber ball that can be disassembled into two parts. Fill one of the parts with water. Lift your barge up and put it in the water. Stick on the other half of the ball. Then just roll your barge where you want to go. We could call this, umm, roll-a-barging?
OK, I need to go and take my medication now.
That’s a cool idea. Although seeing as the barge has to displace its own weight in water, you’ve at least doubled the amount of mass that has to be moved. Tripled if you count the weight of the sphere itself. Given the stresses, I don’t think rubber is going to do the job for the ball – you’d probably need the material that Ringworlds are made of.
Sloshing would be a problem – every try steering a canoe filled with water?
And the local citizenry might possibly object to a 600 foot Unstoppable Ball of Death rolling erratically through the countryside.
However, the biggest obstacle would be acquiring enough hamsters to motivate the ball and then teaching them all to swim.
You don’t need dirigibles, just balloons. The barge can be pulled along by surface vehicles (tractors, bulldozers, crane trucks). Ignoring the mass of the balloon skin material, you’d need a hundred balloons, each 140 ft in diameter.
OK, that doesn’t sound all that feasible either, but it’s better than a fleet of dirigibles.
“Displacement” is the amount of water it would displace if you put it into a container full of water. But the displaced water doesn’t have to stay in the container. It doesn’t even need to be there in the first place - just put the ship in a dry tight-fitting container, and fill the gap with water.
That said, I just can’t imagine the rubber ball working. The water would want to pool at the bottom and expand the ball. The rubber has to be tight enough to counteract this water pressure.
I’m not sure I agree with you. In order not to be sitting on the bottom of the ball and causing friction, the barge has to be floating. Ergo, there has to be at least enough water in the sphere for it to displace.
Really, at this point, I’m leaning towards beaching the barge and waiting for continental drift to move it to wherever it’s going.
Hey, don’t you go dissing my 600ft Unstoppable Ball of Death idea. All you and scr4 have come up with as objections are minor nitpicks. I will use some sort of extra thick super strength miracle rubber. As for the hamsters, I will soon come up with a less outrageous idea for providing motive force. <cough> 50 Foot Bionic Hamsters <cough>
Great! I think we might have a winner.
By the way, has anyone seen our guest Mert-Sekert? It would be nice is he/she stopped by to fill us in with more details or at least tell us how we’re doing.
I used to live near Lake Michigan when I was a child, and I always saw a constrant stream of boats being transported by the means of trailers; of course, the boats weren’t as large as the one I created in my question. What I really wanted to know mankind has the proper tools to transport a large vessel across a wide thatch of land without completely disassembling it, or if this was even feasible. Not over mountains or any rough terrain, and just enough land that would make a canal improbable.
Please ignore the errors and lack of information. I’m running late for work.
Hi Mert-Sekert, thanks for the note.
Given the research I and others have come up with (minor7flat5’s link was really cool), I think that it is feasible, but not practical. Mankind can do a lot of very amazing things. But it would definitely take a lot of effort to transport a 2500 ton vessel any sort of distance. In your exercise, does the weight include the cargo?
It really depends on if you are considering a one-time transport or a multi-use plan. From a practical standpoint, railroad cars work very well as a proven commodity for multi-use transport of cargo. If the exercise is more a matter of getting the vessel to a certain point (one-time trip such as a boat to a remote lake) this needs to be handled in the design stage of the vessel in question. Construct it so that it can be hauled in manageable chunks - all part of the beauty of engineering.
Slightly related story - I read once about the effort involved in hauling a paddle wheeler to Lake Tahoe. (Found a bit of a link.) They had to strip it down, plot the route to be able to get past bridges and overhead wires, etc. and get through a tunnel near the lake. For the tunnel work they had to conduct a very accurate survey, model it in a computer and check the fit electronically before they got the permit. I think they had just a few inches of clearance. Granted this example deals more with a tight fit instead of a large load (the boat weighs 100 tons), but it gives an idea of the planning necessary.
Here’s a picture of the U-505 being moved across Lake Shore Drive to its final home as an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It has been awhile since I have been to the exhibit (although look forward to its newly remodeled home due to open soon) but IIRC it took ~8 hours to move it all of a block or two (you can see the museum in the picture).
In the picture you can see it was quite an undertaking. Granted they were probably being extra careful with a museum piece than one might be with a barge but still a LOT of work and it is smaller than the barge being mentioned.
Stats:
Displacement: ~1200 tons
Length: ~252 feet
Beam: ~22 feet
Height: ~31 feet
The answers so far have been great, and I want to thank everyone for replying. I’ve haunted the SDMB for over a year without posting or replying, and I’ve seen how generous with information and ideas the members can be. So thanks again. 