Definitely an interesting design. In my eyes it looks like it should be unstable - I guess we're naturally inclined to think of curved parts of ships as being the underwater parts.
Under Cargo it simply says it is capable of carrying 7,000 cars in the cargo hold. It doesn't appear to be set up for shipping container cargo. It is possible that top-loaded shipping containers don't work well with the sails/airfoil that need to be above the ship.
That's certainly true, but I'm not sure that a car transport ship is designed to quickly submerge a burning car somewhere in the cargo hold until it exhausts its energy source, while staying afloat.
The key to the salvage effort not involving refloating is probably related to the loose tangled masses of vehicles it's carrying; the ones that already caused the ship to fall over.
Doing that for thousands of cars, at boarding and then at unboarding, looks like a huge logistics chalenge (even just thinking about changing every ship’s floor to allow for strapping) that has a pretty high cost that might exceed losing part of the cargo once in a blue moon.
Shipping cars in containers sized structures could be a more realistic approach perhaps.
> Those gangways look nice. They could make them look like normal jet bridges
Nod. And given the difference in duty cycle from supply ships and oil rigs, they might be mounted on the rig rather than the boat. Removing the "it has to fit folded up on the ship" constraint. And with luggage perhaps containerized onboard the ship, the containers would need to be transferred too.
We are going to have to think of a different way of accessing the cargo.
Cargo ships as currently built cede the entire middle section of the boat to cranes. Cranes they won't see until the end of their voyage, or the beginning of the next. The whole rest of the time you can't use the vertical axis for anything else.
Things that slide around tend to break loose in heavy weather, and boats don't stay afloat if the center of gravity moves too far, so sideways seems like a bad idea. I don't know what the solution is, exactly.
Thanks! So why are huge—ass container ships allowed to navigate underneath fragile public bridges with single points of failure? The not unlikely worst case is that the ship is out of control for some reason…
Random thought: Why don’t we see things like ship trains? With many linked smaller hulls being pulled by a single tug. Or something to that effect. Seems like a solution to that phenomenon.
> "Just purely the boat moving, even in a low sea state, it's hard to imagine that vehicle is going to stay vertical," Shotwell said. "That vehicle is big and tall, compared to the itty-bity-greater-than-a-football-field-size ship."
Is this a new development? This contradicts both a lot of things I read over the Internet (granted, those were not official SpaceX statements) and the apparently still ongoing plans to build a second barge.
Definitely an interesting design. In my eyes it looks like it should be unstable - I guess we're naturally inclined to think of curved parts of ships as being the underwater parts.
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