Attending Lloyd’s Register’s recent Technology Days, from which you emerge after each session feeling bruised and battered by the sheer brilliance of what is going on at the coal face of maritime research, and in my case at least, a feeling of inadequacy.
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Maybe it is the time of year for throwing grand pianos around, but not the passengers aboard a large cruise ship in the Eastern Mediterranean who were seriously alarmed by the weather just before Christmas.
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Naval Architects and Master Mariners know all about permeability, just like they are educated about the effect of compartmentation on damage stability, even though the new probabilistic regime makes it so fiendishly complicated that only three people on earth understand the formulae.
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Many of us, perhaps sceptical to a fault about the veracity of the arguments of the global warmists, believe that given a bit of time and brain power, cleaner, greener, and more efficient ships will emerge to negate the need for all this proposed trading in carbon, or the ruinous taxes being discussed currently in Cancun.
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If you are really quite old, you will remember “low powered steamers”. These were ships, typically owned by parsimonious tramp operators, which were fitted with such a miserably small and low powered engines that they were barely able to make their way against adverse weather. In my rather ancient copy of Ocean Passages for the World 1923 ( handed down – I’m not that old), special routes are provide for this category of ship, which seems only slightly less-burdened by her vulnerability to wind and weather than the sailing ships, which have their own section in this useful volume.
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A memorable description of how a ship is planned, designed and built is in "The Building of the Ship", written by a poet named Longfellow in the late 1840s:
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What can you employ a containership for, if charterers are reluctant to take your ocean greyhound to transport boxes around the world.
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It is called crying for the moon, or more bluntly, asking for something that just isn’t going to happen. What shipowner would not like clever, more advanced ships, but also lighter, so that their engines are not pushing around enormous quantities of steel that isn’t earning them any money?
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At a Posidonia presentation by one of the leading classification societies, it was noted that the uncertain legal and legislative climate in the United States would generate a real need for a legally prescribed and elaborate risk management structure, plus government oversight, for shipping companies as well as offshore oil drillers doing business in the US.
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It might seem strange that in 2010 we have seen a sudden interest in the concept of a nuclear powered merchant ship.
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