I like the idea of a crankcase you service by climbing down a ladder into it.
:eek:
Is there a hybrid version? 
Yeah, they did that in The Sand Pebbles, and we all know what happened to the Asian guy in the crankpit.
My recollection of ME 205 is pretty poor but I have to imagine that a basic diesel engine at that size has to be fantastically inefficient. There has to be a certain point where the expansion of the combustible material loses too much of it’s energy to heat and friction.
Inefficient?
My God man! With a name like Wartsila?
You can’t just throw a moniker like that on any old motor.
Oh, no!
There goes Tokyo!
Wartsila!
Sorry. :rolleyes:
Yes, but what does it DO?
According to the writeup on that webpage, it’s actually the most efficient engine in the world.
It’s exactly the other way around. The bigger they get, the less energy they lose as heat and friction.
Double all the dimensions, and the expansion volume is multiplied by 8 but all surface areas are multiplied by 4. Heat losses to the walls are therefore proportionally reduced. Sliding friction does not relate simply to contact area, but even if it did, the same logic would apply. Scaling up reduces the losses. It also helps that these things rev incredibly slowly, sometimes less than once a second.
Big diesels routinely get +40% thermodynamic efficiency, in the same ballpark as combined-cycle power stations. In fact, they are sometimes used in power stations. In another life, I investigated the failure of a gudgeon pin from a marine diesel used for power generation on a Scottish island. It was a couple of feet long, and weighed about the same as me…
Its amusing somehow that container ships now use something that looks like a scaled up car engine. If they can at least have burly men throwing big buckets of diesel into the engine, tradition can be saved.
From the link:
50% thermal efficiency is simply astonishing.
It’s a boat motor.
I am so putting one of those in my '86 AW11. Bet she’s got some torque.
“Look at the size of those head studs!”
I guess you don’t want to find yourself halfway up one of those ladders when they try starting it up.
I think there’s a kid in my neighborhood with one of these on his Honda Civic.
I just kinda wish the web page linked by the OP was in metric…
Say that to the Master and you’ll find yourself swimming shortly afterwards. It’s a ship motor.
More likely there’s one of these in your neighborhood with a kid’s Honda Civic in it.
I thought it was a ship engine. 
Well, I’d prefer engine to motor, but I was making a point about “boat” and didn’t want to confuse my own point.
Baby steps