The Economics Of Ship Breaking
Or the realities of life on the beaches of Southwest Asia.
Maritime
A Small Pet Peeve, Naval Fire Control And Battleship Paintings
What is wrong with this picture?
The RMS Queen Mary
Starting it’s career about the same time as the Normandie, Cunard’s entry into the super liner competition had a much longer more illustrious career before ending up as a museum/hotel in Long Beach CA. That, in spite of a rather rocky construction and some thinking for a time that the ship would end up being scrapped in the slip before ever touching the water.
From Breakbulk To The Container
The shipping container, the vessels that carry them and the land vehicles that carry them represent a revolution in the way cargo gets moved across the world. The full impact of that revolution is still being felt. The one thing that is certain is, that like it or not the world is going to be more connected than it has ever been in history as getting stuff from point “A” to point “B” has never been cheaper. To understand the full impact of the revolution We need to start at the beginning.
The First Battle Of The Atlantic
It was far closer than it should have been. The modern submarine was a development of the boats invented by John Phillip Holland around the turn of the last century.
The Great Triumph And Tragic End Of France’s Greatest Ship, Normandie
In the 1930’s the French Line felt the need to augment the SS Paris and the SS Ile De France, the Line’s premier ships on the transatlantic ferry route. The line would commission the largest and perhaps the most beautiful ship that the nation of France would build up to the 1930’s. That ship would be Normandie.
Shifting Cargo Sinks Ships
A couple things showed up in my timelines today. First was this rather dramatic video of a large container ship rolling 40 degrees to one side in a noreaster in the North Atlantic.
Living At Sea
This showed up in my twitter timeline recently.
http://gizmodo.com/the-techno-islands-that-may-replace-the-maldives-1704872022
Now I don’t actually believe that the Maldives are being submerged by rising sea levels caused by global warming. Still the idea of repurposing old drilling platforms as seasteads is interesting. They might interesting places to live. Though living would be, by necessity, be confined in some ways. Larhe apartments and spaces are going to be rare, for instance.
http://www.seasteading.org/community/contests/design-contest-winners/
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/silicon-valley-letting-go-techie-island-fantasies/
https://reason.com/blog/2013/12/27/seasteading-new-nations-becomes-a-practi
Still there aren’t really any showstoppers. Huge ocean structure are already being fabricated for oil drilling and production. People live on them for long periods of time. It’s likely that offshore structures for various activities are going to get larger in the near future.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/building-the-largest-structures/
http://www.shell.com/about-us/major-projects/prelude-flng.html
Not just oil and gas, but mining as well
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/about-that-ocean-mining/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3240156.htm
New technologies are making possible to grow vegetables very efficiently.
http://weburbanist.com/2016/02/02/veggie-factory-worlds-first-vertical-farm-fully-run-by-robots/
People are also developing new ways to farm the ocean.
Who knows where it’s going to lead. Even without the supposed AGW catastrophe seasteading might become no different than any other minerals town. It might even move like the town in Gargantia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantia_on_the_Verdurous_Planet
http://www.fandompost.com/2014/07/04/gargantia-on-the-verdurous-planet-ova-gets-first-promo-images/
http://suisei-no-gargantia.wikia.com/wiki/Hideauze
With advancing genetic and regeneration technologies they might even reinvent themselves to better suit the ocean environment, though I doubt that they would turn themselves into giant space squids.
Living at sea has some exciting potentials and the possibility of a new kind of living. Only though if we create the fertile ground that lets pioneering like this happen. Otherwise we risk the kind of world like the one that Poul Anderson came up with in Orion Shall Rise.
The Viking Ship
Recently I ran into an old book about Viking ships dug up from burial mounds. It was a small book from the Viking Ship Museum. I don’t know how I got it. It may have come from one of my grandparents or from a book sale. Anyway I scanned a few pages.
These were remarkable finds back in the early 20th Century and greatly increased the knowledge of how the dragon ships went together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Ship_Museum_(Oslo)
http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/viking-ship-museum/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokstad_ship
Of course, since then, replica ships have been built using the old techniques and sailed. Sailing a vessel is the only way to understand how it functions and how well it does. You can’t sail an ancient artifact and having a real ship to replicate makes the whole thing possible. Here’s a stack of videos to watch.
The Lost Ships Of San Francisco
During the gold rush, the City Of San Francisco became something unique in the history of maritime commerce. It became the roach motel of maritime commerce. Ships sailed into the bay and never left.
The Arts Mechanical 