I was working as a Second Officer on one of the other storage tankers anchored off Larak Island at that time. Fortunately, our vessel was not attacked that day. Experiencing the near vicinity explosion shock waves and subsequently witnessing events unfold that day and the following week still stays with me to this day, almost 33 year on.
I hope that what happened doesn't affect your life too much and you have a good life now, thank you for sharing your experience and hugs for the future x
@@naturelovingfroggy6348 Thank you - Yes, life has been good for me for which I am extremely grateful. Having subsequently progressed through the ranks to Captain, taking my first command of a VLCC in 1996, I came to work ashore for the same company a few years later and still do to this day. Cheers !
i was not alive during that time. infact this is my first time hearing about it. And the fact that i am studying sea fairing exites me and scares me at the same time.
For the recovery of a ship this size, they may well have sent in divers, sealed up flooded compartments and pumped them out, letting physics do the hard work. There's an interesting series by Drachinifel on the recovery of damaged ships from Pearl Harbour where they used a number of techniques.
There was a drydock in India they recovered this way. But they didn't even pump them out, they just dove down and brought up all the hatches, modified them with air fittings and long pipes to stick down into the chambers, reinstalled with new thick foam gaskets, and used a bunch of firehoses and a big aircompressor. Just displaced all the water out of the chambers that way, and as it rose up and the air expanded, it would easily escape the same tube as the water so no worries of overpressure. There were a couple leaking pipes that they had to cut off and put plugs into but it went pretty much flawlessly.
That'd make sense, especially considering most of the flooding was due to fire control not a hole, so realistically much of the water could just be pumped out assuming it wasn't over the deck which I'm gonna guess it wasn't, I haven't found any evidence either way with the exception of a photo that claims to be her but is lying (you can tell by the bridge with the photo being just a single I support on each side while the giant was a IY YI shape) so yeah that'd be my best guess
Commercial airliners do the same thing. They can actually fly closer to Mach .9 on the new Boeing and airbus jets, but flying at Mach .75 is much more economical
"Using airbags or inner-tubes ... that are then filled with oxygen" they're just filled with air. Refined oxygen is expensive and that would be a HUGE waste to fill lift bags with oxygen.
In all actuality, they use compressed air to fill them like a balloon. Check out Adventures With Purpose Channel. The use them all the time. Mostly with vehicles, but also the odd yacht or too. Fair warning, the vehicles aren't always empty, but those are covered and the Police are called. They have also found their fair share of guns as well.
Mistakes like this creep in when you have researchers and editors that know where to find information but don't understand much about how anything works. And this channel is under so much pressure to produce they don't waste time fact checking for mistakes. They've figured you don't lose viewers for inaccuracies on RUclips. Simon is good at waffling his way through stuff that barely hangs together in terms of accuracy. But as a result there is now a whole group of viewers who assume giant bags of oxygen to raise a ship are a normal thing. btw calling air oxygen seems to be a common translation mistake from Chinese to English - you see it a lot on websites like aliexpress.. so perhaps this channel has outsourced its research to a place in China..?
@@richardb4313 I'd say it even increases the youtube interaction magic due to the comments on the error. Which is a bit stupid but that's how youtube works.
I would wager there are nearly enough 8 story tall ships afloat to completely cover a state the size of Virginia. Toss in fishing trolers, run abouts, tugs and recreational vehicles and its easy to see how this could cause some rise in the sea level. It does make one wonder exactly how much water is being displaced by the worlds ships..
@@redneckhippiefreak Maybe there are estimates of the combined tonnage of ships in the world, and estimates of ocean mass. Add them together and maybe use existing water prediction models made about global warming to estimate the change in water levels. My guess is that it would still be miniscule. I mean imagine viewing a large ship from a plane on a clear day over the ocean and the ship looks insignificant. But would still be interesting to know. Maybe someone enjoys math more than me and can figure it out
It's just utterly staggering that something this big can sail across the oceans in all weathers. Engineers fascinate me. Awesome video as ever, thank you to the team.
You have no idea just how badly everything about that ship has been ruined for me by my favorite radio show, Bob and Tom. Wanna laugh and curl up in a ball of cringe listen to the song Rectum of Ella Fitzgerald
It's all about the container ship now; they're the new ocean-going giants. Maybe do a show about the Maersk Triple-E ships or one of their even larger counterparts? Thanks for the vid, I've been wanting you guys to do one about oil tankers for a long time, It's too bad we don't know more about this tanker here...
@@Resolute-lead5 Your logic is flawed. Largest container vessels don't go to too many ports. Just the hubs that can accommodate them. Gas carriers didn't grow in size in more than 12 years so there is something limiting their growth. Plus there are only 14 of those Q-max ships. In the same time largest container ship's capacity grew from some 15000TEU to almost 25000TEU and there are almost 80 of them over 20000TEU already in use.
My dad was the Captain of the seawise giant not long before it was bombed, and was for a few years I believe. They tried to get him to take it on that trip but had just retired.
I worked at a shipyard that jumboized 5 U.S. Navy fleet oilers, adding a 108 foot mid-body to each. Probably the coolest thing I've ever seen was the front half of a huge tanker floating in the middle of the Mississippi river while we floated the middle section into the drydock before bringing it back in to mate it all together again. Fun times.
I have a running habit, when talking to my GF, of setting up bait-and-switch jokes that basically rely on me fooling her into thinking that I’m NOT about to mention Knock Nevis, but then, once her guard is sufficiently down, ambushing her with a Knock Nevis fact. She now finds this genuinely funny, if a bit irritating. She’s the one. (“She” being my GF, not the figurative nautical “she” referring to a vessel, such as - for example - the superlatively huge Japan-built, Singapore-flagged ULCC tanker MV Knock Nev-)
Japan: *Builds the largest class of battleship in history. Both operational vessels destroyed by aircraft.* Also Japan: *Builds the largest civilian ship of any type in history. Also destroyed by aircraft.* Yeah, that scans.
@@allexro1381 Bismark - displacement: 50,000 tons; primary cannons: 8 x 15" guns Yamato class - displacement: 72,000 tons; primary cannons: 9 x 18"(!!!) guns. Japan does not fuck around when it comes to making giant ships. Yamato was easily the largest and most heavily armed battleship class in history. Even the four completed American Iowa class battleships are larger than Bismark, at 57,000 tons full load and armed with 9 x 16" guns. The European naval theater wasn't conducive to massive surface warfare the way that was expected in the Pacific, and prior to the war the size of capital ships was restricted by treaties. Most of the European belligerents were too occupied by having the war right on their doorstep to dedicate resources and time to the engineering and construction of capital ships that exceeded the treaty limitations, while America and Japan were free to build up their respective navies for several more years, more or less unhindered. (The Iowa class, for example didn't even begin construction until after the Bismark was launched, and had no ships in active commission until after the Bismark was *destroyed*.) The Bismark class was however probably the largest of the European battleships, though technically the Bismark's sister ship, Tirpitz was about 2000 tons heavier than the Bismark itself. The Tirpitz is also probably the ship you were thinking of. Bismark was scuttled by the Germans after extensive shelling and torpedo attacks, and sunk in the Atlantic due west of France. Tirpitz on the other hand was destroyed by an intensive bombing raid while anchored up in Norway. Tirpitz was hit by at least two of the ridiculous 12,000lbs Tallboy bombs (one of which was a dud, but still dropped straight through the armored deck,) and took enough hits to one side that she rapidly flooded and listed over, even though it was assumed that she was in water too shallow to actually sink in. Though the Bismark class was certainly an iconic battleship, by far the most effective part of the German Navy was their fleet of U-boats. (To the point where Karl Dönitz, the senior submarine officer, was eventually made grand admiral of the entire Germany Navy, and Hitler named Dönitz to be the head of the German state following his own suicide. During the end stages of the war, Hitler was so dissatisfied with with his surface fleet that he intended to have everything other than his submarines broken up for scrap, and had to be talked out of it by Dönitz.) Both Japan and the US built battleships of unprecedented proportions, but also found that aircraft carriers were simply more effective in the broad open ocean engagements where battleships would be thought to be most dominant. Also, the Yamato's 18" guns are just *stupid*; nothing else exists, other than "guns" that are designed to shoot projectiles into space, that is this large, (Project HARP, in fact, only used 16" guns.)
@@allexro1381 To put it simply, Bismark was big, Yamato was bigger. The Germans might have gotten around to building an even bigger battleship had Dönitz not manage to impress Hitler so much with U-Boats early on. At the end of the day the Yamato was just in a league of its own in terms of scale and firepower, which makes the way Japan mishandled it during the war (they missed a few golden chances to fully deploy at times it could have done a lot of good and then finally did fully deploy it too late in the war on a fools errand of a mission that never had a hope of being successful) all the more tragic in a way its use was utterly wasted.
You might be interested in looking into Shell's FLNG "Prelude". Its a floating natural Gas liquifier plant thats ankered off the Australien Coast. While a bit lighter than the seawise giant, prelude is actually slightly longer and wider.
My very vague and suspect recollection is that this ship was conceived as an effective hedge against the Suez Canal being closed for a long period of time due to Middle East type stuff, like the various Israel-Arab wars of the 60's and early 70's.
Right, early 70's also saw the first middle east oil pricing war and I want to say embargo. I remember prices went way up and in various parts of N.A. oil shortages. Most of N.A.'s oil came from off shore at the time if memory serves.
I sailed on a number of so called super tankers..(VLCC) in the late sixties, seventies. They were equipped with a Suez locker and a massive light at the bow... behind a water tight door.. these ships could go through the canal light ship but not loaded as the draft was too great. As it was I never got to sail through the canal at that time ...to much political unrest...so we had to travel all the way around Africa..
Here's a subject for Mega Projects. The coastal defenses built by Holland from the post 1952 floods until their completion 60 plus years later. The whole of that region of Europe and inland has been massively transformed, all the way to the Czech Republic and beyond. If you still there from the UK in a small boat you see it in all its glory. Floods control in Europe that the poor Chinese dream of! Love your work Andrew
The size of the anchor just makes me shake my head in disbelief ...yea i'd have it my back garden and phone all my friends ....come and see what a just bought myself of E-Bay
Esso Northumbria was a troubled and bad ship that made for a sombering shanty. However id definitely kill to hear The Dreadnoughts do a song about this tanker too
You know Simon, I've watched every video you've ever made and typically, you share things about which I was familiar with in at least passing but this was something I have never even remotely heard of, so for that i thank you
If humans ever successfully begin mining in space, it's easy to imagine gigantic cargo carriers like this plying their way between worlds. Probably crewed only by robots. But otherwise perhaps a lot like the Nostromo's cargo in Alien. It was towing a mining platform BACK to Earth, which makes no sense, but it could have been cargo instead. And it would be so much like this ship. Maybe we will live long enough to do that.
This comment is dumb... if this never sunk and was scrapped then it still would’ve been the largest ship to have been made but not the largest shipwreck. This comments sarcasm relies on all ships sinking at some point in their life.
I was one of the mooring masters when she was the Knock Nevis. You really noticed her huge size when another ULCC was berthed on her stern, typically a 340m long ship tied up less than 60m from this 420m long ship.
Fascinating, that was one hell of a ship, though I would think the raising of this ship from the depths would've merited it's own video if it weren't for the alleged lack of detail on said operation.
The Freedom Ship you mentioned would be a good Megaproject, if they decide to complete it. It's over 4000 feet long and has 100 diesel engines of 4,000 hp each. It will have a capacity of 60,000 people and cost over $10 billion.
I recall reading a kid's book about submarines published sometime in the 70's or 80's. They hypothesized that, with the increasing size and quantities of ships on the ocean, we'd soon be creating mega subs for passenger and cargo transport so the entire volume of the ocean could be used for navigation. Odd, but a sign of how people figured the future would be.
@@ColdBrewLobster I was on a passenger airliner out of Dubai. The plane had to land shortly after it took off, and we sat on the tarmac for about 3-4 hours we weren't allowed off and they didn't give us much information. Then we got refuelled and headed out again. We came fairly close to it (like about 30-40 km) but you could see the flames on the deck even then and this huge huge bank of thick black smoke going almost straight up for miles. It looked like an entire city was on fire. They told us that we were in no danger, but wouldn't tell us what had happened (no inflight internet) It wasn't until we made a scheduled stop-over in Singapore before we saw on the news that it was in fact a huge ship on fire.
The violin music at 8:38 sounds just like music from 2001's Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura game. I loved that game. The story was fun and the music hypnotic and beautiful.
At 4.07 he's talking about displacement as being the weight of water the vessel can "replace"? I think you mean "displace" Simon old chap. Love the vids though keep it up.
The last sentence was a little redundant "the largest self propelled man made object created by humans ever" is he implying lizard people are making bigger self propelled objects?
Was in Dubai Drydock in Feb 2002 on a VLCC and the then Jahre Viking was in dry dock next to us. She was enormous and the Engineroom was vast. What a vessel she was.
There's an amusing Jeremy Clarkson video where he visits the engune room, here: ruclips.net/video/WX2HFVHbo18/видео.html . Unfortunately, being Clarkson, he's also embarrassingly rude to the Indian captain.
@@rogerstone3068 yes I remember the Clarkson series watched it when I first came out in the late 90s. Think it was called extreme machines or something like that. But the ship herself was impressive.
Weld or fix to the hull, below the waterline, large water filled lifting pontoons. Then slowly displace the water with compressed air. These could also be combined with additional lifting slings of inflatable floats connected under the hull with steel cables. Also pumping out the ballast tanks would help as as well.
7:59 -> Air, not oxygen. For vessels of this size bags are usually too small/not strong enough. Either they pumped out water from intact compartments, or they added additional compartments (metal boxes, that can be filled with air) to the outside. Although that is a bit more of a common thing in the latest decades.
I just watched a video on the Seawise Giant by a channel call Historsea, it's amazing how similar it was to this one! I think the 2 biggest differences are you use metric measurement while they chose imperial and your video is 2 years old and theirs is a month old.
One day, Simon shall build the Seawise Giant 2 and fill its vast holds to the brim with harddrives, to backup his RUclips empire and protect his life's work from those fearing his coming dominion over the world.
But what about the shell prelude FLNG. It sailed to its destination measuring in at 488 meters and 74 meters wide. That should be the largest moving object man ever created.
there's norwegian gas platforms that get towed into position, some are over a million tones, like Troll A and Gluufaks C both are double the weight of prelude (~1.5million tons) but the Prelude actually looks like a ship, and it would dwarf the Seawise Giant.
Mega Project idea: The "Mining and Chemical Combine" in Zheleznogorsk, Russia. A Plutonium production plant. The entire facility was built 200 meters into the mountain, and contains 3 Nuclear Reactors (Basically the same design as РБМК, like in Chernobyl),1 АД and 2 АДЭ (АДЭ-2 provided power and heating to the workers city, Zheleznogorsk). The facility has its own railway and electric locomotive. Now the Plutonium production is stopped (since 95'), and the reactors were shut down. Now they produce MOX fuel for fast liquid metal Reactors (for now, БН-800).
True. The most powerful is the Saturn Five rocket main stage at 160 million horsepower. Each of the 5 engines produced 500 tons of thrust. They under ran them to take care of a vibration problem.
Agree Sadam Hussain publicly on tv tore up the treaty of navigation of the "Shat Al Arab" waterway and ordered his forces into iran in order to secure a suitable buffer on the Iranian bank.
Not sure about the accuracy of the comment at 5.20. I was on the Settebello anchored in that area (Sept 1986-Feb 1987) and was not aware of any nearby oil platforms. Iran had moved operations to the Straits of Hormuz after facilities had been attacked and destroyed on Siri Island. There were two 'floating' terminals consisting of several ships each. One was for crude (which the Seawise Giant was part of) and the other was for refined, which the Settebello was part of. I think both ships were the respective 'mother' ships in each group. Representatives from the National Iranian Oil Company were based permanently on my ship. We were told the Iraqi fighter jets would not be able to reach us as they did not have the capability to refuel mid-air. Well, they did reach and attacked for the first time in early January 1987, destroying two ships in the refined floating terminal. Don't know about the crude one.
The Freedom Ship had been under discussion for more than 15 years. Is it going to be built, considering how COVID-19 ruined the reputation of cruise ships?
Yeah, I think we probably hit peak size for oil tankers. But every other ship category can keep getting bigger. Although I have to wonder if there is a size tipping point; where building a large ship would get so expensive, that it would actually be cheaper to put a floating railway bridge between Alaska and Mongolia?
LOL!! Who would've thought that the largest ship to ever exist, would become the largest ship to ever sink when it sunk. Ah yes the floor is made of floor.
I have a suggestion for a story. The Homestead Works of U. S. Steel. The history of the Homestead Works is very interesting. Carnegie got Homestead Works in slick move. The famous Homestead Strike, and the Johonstown Flood.
Video idea- I am not sure which channel this would be best for but, How are clean rooms made? I know they are vital for making super sensitive technology and the idea is not a speck of dust can be in them. How can they tell once a building has been picked/built etc that it is clean enough? Construction is messy, installing large machines is as well, there must be something special at first right?
In the future, possibly by the end of the century, rising sea-levels will make the technology of super-large floating things an essential element of urban planning.
@@atodaso1668 One clue to an argument without merit is the lead with an accusational insult. The premise "nothings (sic) happened" is proven false by data. Besides, you are so bound up with your false narratives that you fail to recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of my comment.
Just a correction to the facts mentioned in this video: at 5 minute time stamp it was noted that the Iran-Iraq war was started by the Iranian invasion of Iraq, which is inherently incorrect. The war was started by Iraq invading Iran, which I a well documented historical fact. Love the videos created in this channel but I felt it was very important to submit this correction. Thanks for all the hard work!
I used to go to Singapore on business up until the early 2000s. I would go down to where Bugis street/square used to be and hire a boatman to take me on tours of the harbor. I point at some ship that looked interesting and he'd go where I pointed. It was really cool! For $30 sing, he'd just go wherever I pointed! We went past a lot of huge ships! Some Russian, and others from all different countries. These boats were big, man but nothing like the boat highlighted here! I miss Singapore a lot! It has changed so much since I was last there! Mmmm, Tiger Beer, Tiger Prawns.... aglglhhlell...
Yeah what a weird error to make in the script. It would just be "air". It just shows you how few people who talk about things for a living... actually know what they're talking about. A tad unnerving the more I think about it.
I was working as a Second Officer on one of the other storage tankers anchored off Larak Island at that time. Fortunately, our vessel was not attacked that day. Experiencing the near vicinity explosion shock waves and subsequently witnessing events unfold that day and the following week still stays with me to this day, almost 33 year on.
I remember when it happened, and I believe that’s when the Reagan administration told Iraq that bad things are fixin to happen.
I hope that what happened doesn't affect your life too much and you have a good life now, thank you for sharing your experience and hugs for the future x
@@naturelovingfroggy6348 Thank you - Yes, life has been good for me for which I am extremely grateful. Having subsequently progressed through the ranks to Captain, taking my first command of a VLCC in 1996, I came to work ashore for the same company a few years later and still do to this day. Cheers !
I would read your book.
i was not alive during that time. infact this is my first time hearing about it. And the fact that i am studying sea fairing exites me and scares me at the same time.
I spent 17 months at a stretch sailing on this beauty. She was known as Jahre Viking then.
Did she show any signs of having spent a year under water?
@@darthrex354 There were many evident hull and main deck deformations which were visible due to the bombing/fire during the war
@@darthrex354 gu jai
@@darthrex354 gu jai
@@chillout700028 Was she a good ship?
Seawise: *gets sunk*
Seawise: “I didn’t hear no bell”
For the recovery of a ship this size, they may well have sent in divers, sealed up flooded compartments and pumped them out, letting physics do the hard work. There's an interesting series by Drachinifel on the recovery of damaged ships from Pearl Harbour where they used a number of techniques.
There was a drydock in India they recovered this way. But they didn't even pump them out, they just dove down and brought up all the hatches, modified them with air fittings and long pipes to stick down into the chambers, reinstalled with new thick foam gaskets, and used a bunch of firehoses and a big aircompressor. Just displaced all the water out of the chambers that way, and as it rose up and the air expanded, it would easily escape the same tube as the water so no worries of overpressure.
There were a couple leaking pipes that they had to cut off and put plugs into but it went pretty much flawlessly.
That'd make sense, especially considering most of the flooding was due to fire control not a hole, so realistically much of the water could just be pumped out assuming it wasn't over the deck which I'm gonna guess it wasn't, I haven't found any evidence either way with the exception of a photo that claims to be her but is lying (you can tell by the bridge with the photo being just a single I support on each side while the giant was a IY YI shape) so yeah that'd be my best guess
That's how they are all refloated; there's nothing unique about the size.
1:25 - Chapter 1 - Construction
3:15 - Chapter 2 - The giant emerges
5:05 - Chapter 3 - The sinking of a giant
7:10 - Chapter 4 - The 2nd coming
8:45 - Chapter 5 - The final act
10:20 - Chapter 6 - Salvage & legacy
- Chapter 7 -
top comment
Giant freight ships generally also sail slowly because it's more cost effective to do so in terms of fuel. It actually makes them more "green".
Commercial airliners do the same thing. They can actually fly closer to Mach .9 on the new Boeing and airbus jets, but flying at Mach .75 is much more economical
That's a process called slow-steaming. Saves a bunch of money in maintenance as well since you're not pushing the drivetrain to the max all the time.
@@deanchur Bollocks~!
i bet the titanic wish they had done that lol
"green" lol
"Using airbags or inner-tubes ... that are then filled with oxygen" they're just filled with air. Refined oxygen is expensive and that would be a HUGE waste to fill lift bags with oxygen.
In all actuality, they use compressed air to fill them like a balloon. Check out Adventures With Purpose Channel. The use them all the time. Mostly with vehicles, but also the odd yacht or too. Fair warning, the vehicles aren't always empty, but those are covered and the Police are called. They have also found their fair share of guns as well.
Mistakes like this creep in when you have researchers and editors that know where to find information but don't understand much about how anything works. And this channel is under so much pressure to produce they don't waste time fact checking for mistakes. They've figured you don't lose viewers for inaccuracies on RUclips. Simon is good at waffling his way through stuff that barely hangs together in terms of accuracy. But as a result there is now a whole group of viewers who assume giant bags of oxygen to raise a ship are a normal thing. btw calling air oxygen seems to be a common translation mistake from Chinese to English - you see it a lot on websites like aliexpress.. so perhaps this channel has outsourced its research to a place in China..?
@@richardb4313 I'd say it even increases the youtube interaction magic due to the comments on the error. Which is a bit stupid but that's how youtube works.
Yes Chris. Thankyou Chris.
It would also be an extreme fire hazard!
This ship is singularly responsible for sea level rise LOL
: Double Entendre :
Technically all ships are.
I would wager there are nearly enough 8 story tall ships afloat to completely cover a state the size of Virginia. Toss in fishing trolers, run abouts, tugs and recreational vehicles and its easy to see how this could cause some rise in the sea level. It does make one wonder exactly how much water is being displaced by the worlds ships..
@@redneckhippiefreak Maybe there are estimates of the combined tonnage of ships in the world, and estimates of ocean mass. Add them together and maybe use existing water prediction models made about global warming to estimate the change in water levels.
My guess is that it would still be miniscule. I mean imagine viewing a large ship from a plane on a clear day over the ocean and the ship looks insignificant.
But would still be interesting to know. Maybe someone enjoys math more than me and can figure it out
@@Hamring True, even the state of Hawaii is easily overlooked in the ocean.
Simon you're such a great presenter you made me shed a tear over the death of a cargo ship.
It's just utterly staggering that something this big can sail across the oceans in all weathers. Engineers fascinate me. Awesome video as ever, thank you to the team.
The Edmund Fitzgerald could be a fun one. It was big for the lakes at one point... maybe a side project.
Agree. Side project.
Cool song, sad, but cool
You have no idea just how badly everything about that ship has been ruined for me by my favorite radio show, Bob and Tom. Wanna laugh and curl up in a ball of cringe listen to the song Rectum of Ella Fitzgerald
Yes good idea
It was literally the Queen of the Lakes: the title for the biggest fucking ship on the lakes at the time
It's all about the container ship now; they're the new ocean-going giants. Maybe do a show about the Maersk Triple-E ships or one of their even larger counterparts? Thanks for the vid, I've been wanting you guys to do one about oil tankers for a long time, It's too bad we don't know more about this tanker here...
LNG LPG is the future, container ships are too hectic, too many ports
@@Resolute-lead5 Your logic is flawed. Largest container vessels don't go to too many ports. Just the hubs that can accommodate them.
Gas carriers didn't grow in size in more than 12 years so there is something limiting their growth. Plus there are only 14 of those Q-max ships.
In the same time largest container ship's capacity grew from some 15000TEU to almost 25000TEU and there are almost 80 of them over 20000TEU already in use.
The ship shipping ships shipping shipping shipping ships are pretty cool.
Container ships are limited in size so they fit through Suez canal.
@@siddharthkapadia7674 tell that to the evergreen
this guy is gonna do a project on unblocking the suez canal one day after it is fixed
Simon Whistler might be a pathological workaholic.
This guy looks like Vsauce
Bsauce
OK great! The clock is now ticking :)
The clock is ticking...
"the largest self-propelled man-made object that humans have ever created."
Well now ... I'm happy that humans created that man-made object.
AGAIN aliens don't get the credit they deserve for their hard work
@@lycossurfer8851 shhh ... those aren't aliens ... they are undocumented extraterrestrials.
also, Smoldering inferno's?
Some women were also involved in making this man-made object.
@@mirzaahmed6589 Women extraterrestrials? I think I saw a movie about that once ... maybe twice.
My dad was the Captain of the seawise giant not long before it was bombed, and was for a few years I believe. They tried to get him to take it on that trip but had just retired.
1974: Seawise Giant
2021: Sideways Giant
"This is the story of a ship,
who displaced a river and drowned the whole world."
"and while she looked so wide in photographs,
I absolutely loved her when she sailed."
@@kdiddy244 @kylesanders -- I did not expect a Nine Days reference in the comments for this video, but I am absolutely here for it. Very well done.
@@kdiddy244 with the solid assist. nice!
zerofcks Ever Given just blocked a canal and seems determined to double the costs of goods for the whole world. ✌️
I worked at a shipyard that jumboized 5 U.S. Navy fleet oilers, adding a 108 foot mid-body to each. Probably the coolest thing I've ever seen was the front half of a huge tanker floating in the middle of the Mississippi river while we floated the middle section into the drydock before bringing it back in to mate it all together again. Fun times.
Avondale?
@@DowntownDeuce2 That's the place. Was there from 1990-2002
@@eherrmann01 you may have been part of the crew that did the firefighter training for USS New York commissioning .
@@DowntownDeuce2 I was there at that time, but wasn't part of the firefighter training.
Has a US citizen, I am grateful for the work you guys put into defense. Avondale had sense of pride in their work back in the day
I have a running habit, when talking to my GF, of setting up bait-and-switch jokes that basically rely on me fooling her into thinking that I’m NOT about to mention Knock Nevis, but then, once her guard is sufficiently down, ambushing her with a Knock Nevis fact. She now finds this genuinely funny, if a bit irritating. She’s the one. (“She” being my GF, not the figurative nautical “she” referring to a vessel, such as - for example - the superlatively huge Japan-built, Singapore-flagged ULCC tanker MV Knock Nev-)
Japan: *Builds the largest class of battleship in history. Both operational vessels destroyed by aircraft.*
Also Japan: *Builds the largest civilian ship of any type in history. Also destroyed by aircraft.*
Yeah, that scans.
that's crazy:)) but not Germany built the biggest battleship? BISMARK? Or i'm wrong..and was bombed in Scandinavian Part of Sea/Ocean?
@@allexro1381 nope , it's the yamato
@@allexro1381
Bismark - displacement: 50,000 tons; primary cannons: 8 x 15" guns
Yamato class - displacement: 72,000 tons; primary cannons: 9 x 18"(!!!) guns.
Japan does not fuck around when it comes to making giant ships. Yamato was easily the largest and most heavily armed battleship class in history.
Even the four completed American Iowa class battleships are larger than Bismark, at 57,000 tons full load and armed with 9 x 16" guns. The European naval theater wasn't conducive to massive surface warfare the way that was expected in the Pacific, and prior to the war the size of capital ships was restricted by treaties. Most of the European belligerents were too occupied by having the war right on their doorstep to dedicate resources and time to the engineering and construction of capital ships that exceeded the treaty limitations, while America and Japan were free to build up their respective navies for several more years, more or less unhindered. (The Iowa class, for example didn't even begin construction until after the Bismark was launched, and had no ships in active commission until after the Bismark was *destroyed*.)
The Bismark class was however probably the largest of the European battleships, though technically the Bismark's sister ship, Tirpitz was about 2000 tons heavier than the Bismark itself. The Tirpitz is also probably the ship you were thinking of. Bismark was scuttled by the Germans after extensive shelling and torpedo attacks, and sunk in the Atlantic due west of France. Tirpitz on the other hand was destroyed by an intensive bombing raid while anchored up in Norway. Tirpitz was hit by at least two of the ridiculous 12,000lbs Tallboy bombs (one of which was a dud, but still dropped straight through the armored deck,) and took enough hits to one side that she rapidly flooded and listed over, even though it was assumed that she was in water too shallow to actually sink in.
Though the Bismark class was certainly an iconic battleship, by far the most effective part of the German Navy was their fleet of U-boats. (To the point where Karl Dönitz, the senior submarine officer, was eventually made grand admiral of the entire Germany Navy, and Hitler named Dönitz to be the head of the German state following his own suicide. During the end stages of the war, Hitler was so dissatisfied with with his surface fleet that he intended to have everything other than his submarines broken up for scrap, and had to be talked out of it by Dönitz.) Both Japan and the US built battleships of unprecedented proportions, but also found that aircraft carriers were simply more effective in the broad open ocean engagements where battleships would be thought to be most dominant.
Also, the Yamato's 18" guns are just *stupid*; nothing else exists, other than "guns" that are designed to shoot projectiles into space, that is this large, (Project HARP, in fact, only used 16" guns.)
@@allexro1381 To put it simply, Bismark was big, Yamato was bigger. The Germans might have gotten around to building an even bigger battleship had Dönitz not manage to impress Hitler so much with U-Boats early on.
At the end of the day the Yamato was just in a league of its own in terms of scale and firepower, which makes the way Japan mishandled it during the war (they missed a few golden chances to fully deploy at times it could have done a lot of good and then finally did fully deploy it too late in the war on a fools errand of a mission that never had a hope of being successful) all the more tragic in a way its use was utterly wasted.
@@allexro1381 bismark was the largest in europe but then when its out numbered 10 to 1, it kinda doesn't matter
You might be interested in looking into Shell's FLNG "Prelude". Its a floating natural Gas liquifier plant thats ankered off the Australien Coast. While a bit lighter than the seawise giant, prelude is actually slightly longer and wider.
You should create a news channel. This is how the news should be explained. No bias. No opinion
My very vague and suspect recollection is that this ship was conceived as an effective hedge against the Suez Canal being closed for a long period of time due to Middle East type stuff, like the various Israel-Arab wars of the 60's and early 70's.
Right, early 70's also saw the first middle east oil pricing war and I want to say embargo. I remember prices went way up and in various parts of N.A. oil shortages. Most of N.A.'s oil came from off shore at the time if memory serves.
I sailed on a number of so called super tankers..(VLCC) in the late sixties, seventies. They were equipped with a Suez locker and a massive light at the bow... behind a water tight door.. these ships could go through the canal light ship but not loaded as the draft was too great. As it was I never got to sail through the canal at that time ...to much political unrest...so we had to travel all the way around Africa..
I had heard of both Seawise Giant and Jahre Viking, but until I saw this video I did not know they were one and the same. Nicely done.
I only recognised the name Knock Nevis and also didn't know it was the same ship.
Who else is here after that ship beached itself into the side of the Suez Canal, completely blocking the _entire_ canal? XD
lmao.
28 March 2021, The Ever Given was finally freed from the sandy edges of the canal and sent on its way.
Yes, but not because of it.
You messed your ships up mate
Here's a subject for Mega Projects.
The coastal defenses built by Holland from the post 1952 floods until their completion 60 plus years later. The whole of that region of Europe and inland has been massively transformed, all the way to the Czech Republic and beyond. If you still there from the UK in a small boat you see it in all its glory. Floods control in Europe that the poor Chinese dream of!
Love your work
Andrew
The size of the anchor just makes me shake my head in disbelief ...yea i'd have it my back garden and phone all my friends ....come and see what a just bought myself of E-Bay
Me too
Buy it now price of $500...... buyer to arrange freight :D
I was already fascinated with this ship before this video but WOW I am impressed with how much I learned.
Other way around with the Iran-Iraq war, it was an Iraqi invasion not an Iranian invasion - Still a great video!
I thought I misheard him.
It is the Iran-Iraq war. It has no bearing on who invaded who.
He did misstate who invaded though.
How else can we make Iran look evil though if we don’t falsely attribute aggression to them! You are mucking up the plans!
@@BeatsbyVegas Or maybe he just got two countries with one letter different confused...
Prelude FLNG is technically a barge, not a ship - but it's 100ft longer than the Seawise Giant. Probably worth it's own story.
and the pioneering spirit is heavier and it can lift really heavy stuff as in 24200 tons
Hi Simon, thanks for the years long content you have been creating. I enjoy to listen to your videos while working!
How _Esso Northumbria_ got a sea shanty about her, and this absolutely unit hasn't is beyond me.
Esso Northumbria was a troubled and bad ship that made for a sombering shanty. However id definitely kill to hear The Dreadnoughts do a song about this tanker too
You know Simon, I've watched every video you've ever made and typically, you share things about which I was familiar with in at least passing but this was something I have never even remotely heard of, so for that i thank you
If humans ever successfully begin mining in space, it's easy to imagine gigantic cargo carriers like this plying their way between worlds. Probably crewed only by robots. But otherwise perhaps a lot like the Nostromo's cargo in Alien. It was towing a mining platform BACK to Earth, which makes no sense, but it could have been cargo instead. And it would be so much like this ship. Maybe we will live long enough to do that.
Your ambitions truly leave me baffled
"The Captain" Marion 6360 strip mining shovel would make for a neat side project video. Largest ever built.
I was on a ship waiting to enter the dry dock that Seawise Giant vacated after its stretching.
Building this thing is one thing (I remember it as a kid).. but raising it was next level.
Largest ship ever made was the Largest ship ever sunk, who'd of thought
also,Smallest ship ever made was the Smallest ship ever sunk.Thank me later
This comment is dumb... if this never sunk and was scrapped then it still would’ve been the largest ship to have been made but not the largest shipwreck. This comments sarcasm relies on all ships sinking at some point in their life.
Who'd've thought indeed.
Yeah, my thought exactly
I was one of the mooring masters when she was the Knock Nevis. You really noticed her huge size when another ULCC was berthed on her stern, typically a 340m long ship tied up less than 60m from this 420m long ship.
Fascinating, that was one hell of a ship, though I would think the raising of this ship from the depths would've merited it's own video if it weren't for the alleged lack of detail on said operation.
Amongst all the videos available on RUclips about Seawise Giant, this video gets the details most accurate of them all
The Freedom Ship you mentioned would be a good Megaproject, if they decide to complete it. It's over 4000 feet long and has 100 diesel engines of 4,000 hp each. It will have a capacity of 60,000 people and cost over $10 billion.
That ship has been in development for over 20 years. I doubt it'll ever be done.
Its a side project at best.
Those data sound like the pinnacle of absolute MADNESS!!😮😮👎👎
Hai Paul. I have a question. Is ´feet´ the same length as ´foot´?
@@Kirovets7011 yes foot and feet are the same
Thanks .. great video. Jeremy Clarkson did a piece on this ship a few years back - at that time it carried the ‘Jahre Viking’ name. Worth a look.
Well at least the front never fell off.
Of course it didn't. It was designed not to.
Yeah, it would have been a lot of work to tow something that big outside the environment.
I'll always remember it as the Knock Nevis, by far the coolest name it ever had.
I recall reading a kid's book about submarines published sometime in the 70's or 80's. They hypothesized that, with the increasing size and quantities of ships on the ocean, we'd soon be creating mega subs for passenger and cargo transport so the entire volume of the ocean could be used for navigation. Odd, but a sign of how people figured the future would be.
I suggested this a while back and now it's been made. One very happy MegaProjects fan 😁
I saw it burning--I just happened to be in a passenger plane when it was hit. 12 year old me had no idea what I was watching.
What had you traveling through the area and how was the fire/war handled from your perspective?
@@ColdBrewLobster I was on a passenger airliner out of Dubai. The plane had to land shortly after it took off, and we sat on the tarmac for about 3-4 hours we weren't allowed off and they didn't give us much information. Then we got refuelled and headed out again. We came fairly close to it (like about 30-40 km) but you could see the flames on the deck even then and this huge huge bank of thick black smoke going almost straight up for miles. It looked like an entire city was on fire. They told us that we were in no danger, but wouldn't tell us what had happened (no inflight internet) It wasn't until we made a scheduled stop-over in Singapore before we saw on the news that it was in fact a huge ship on fire.
@@CaptainCalculus Thank you very much for your story, Cap'n.
This tub was a titan of the seas. So big and enduring that it survived Davy Jones' Locker.
Fun random fact: I used to work for Sumitomo.... that is all. Please continue with your day!
The violin music at 8:38 sounds just like music from 2001's Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura game. I loved that game. The story was fun and the music hypnotic and beautiful.
At 4.07 he's talking about displacement as being the weight of water the vessel can "replace"? I think you mean "displace" Simon old chap. Love the vids though keep it up.
He did it again..there I was just minding my own business and now I'm learning about super tankers..
The last sentence was a little redundant "the largest self propelled man made object created by humans ever" is he implying lizard people are making bigger self propelled objects?
Don't doubt our reptilian overlords.
I’m mean also said floating ship, like what other type is there?
Allegedly
Ask Hilary
@@electi0neering 1 airships 2 ships so poorly designed they wont float 3 townships
Was in Dubai Drydock in Feb 2002 on a VLCC and the then Jahre Viking was in dry dock next to us. She was enormous and the Engineroom was vast. What a vessel she was.
There's an amusing Jeremy Clarkson video where he visits the engune room, here: ruclips.net/video/WX2HFVHbo18/видео.html . Unfortunately, being Clarkson, he's also embarrassingly rude to the Indian captain.
@@rogerstone3068 yes I remember the Clarkson series watched it when I first came out in the late 90s. Think it was called extreme machines or something like that. But the ship herself was impressive.
After watching this fascinating video I have to ask “What the hell was that fuzzy critter that jumped across the screen @ 7:23?”
I saw that too! Looked too big for a rabbit but what ever it was, that sucker could really jump high!
Weld or fix to the hull, below the waterline, large water filled lifting pontoons.
Then slowly displace the water with compressed air.
These could also be combined with additional lifting slings of inflatable floats connected under the hull with steel cables.
Also pumping out the ballast tanks would help as as well.
Please do a megaproject in Curiosity and Perseverance
2:39 you should cover the Steward J Cort. Ship was built as Stubby with a line where to cut painted on the hull.
The current measure of power is Clarksons. eg: It has a thousand Clarksons.
There's a difference between measuring power and measuring _POWEEEEEEERRRR_
So we mesure the power with some jeremy Clarkson ?
10 standard units of power is equivalent to one Clarkson.
@@elias_xp95 regardless of whether they are Imperial or metric.
7:59 -> Air, not oxygen.
For vessels of this size bags are usually too small/not strong enough. Either they pumped out water from intact compartments, or they added additional compartments (metal boxes, that can be filled with air) to the outside. Although that is a bit more of a common thing in the latest decades.
Imagine an oil leak from that thing
I was just thinking man are they lucky that thing wasn't full when it sank
well hopefully most of it burned off.
Fr tho
I just watched a video on the Seawise Giant by a channel call Historsea, it's amazing how similar it was to this one! I think the 2 biggest differences are you use metric measurement while they chose imperial and your video is 2 years old and theirs is a month old.
One day, Simon shall build the Seawise Giant 2 and fill its vast holds to the brim with harddrives, to backup his RUclips empire and protect his life's work from those fearing his coming dominion over the world.
But what about the shell prelude FLNG. It sailed to its destination measuring in at 488 meters and 74 meters wide. That should be the largest moving object man ever created.
there's norwegian gas platforms that get towed into position, some are over a million tones, like Troll A and Gluufaks C both are double the weight of prelude (~1.5million tons) but the Prelude actually looks like a ship, and it would dwarf the Seawise Giant.
The Freedom ship would be a good option for a video.
8:32 ...$74.5 million? ... It way too CHEAP than I thought
"...the largest self propelled vessel that HUMANS have ever created". Does Simon know something we don't ?
Mega Project idea: The "Mining and Chemical Combine" in Zheleznogorsk, Russia. A Plutonium production plant. The entire facility was built 200 meters into the mountain, and contains 3 Nuclear Reactors (Basically the same design as РБМК, like in Chernobyl),1 АД and 2 АДЭ (АДЭ-2 provided power and heating to the workers city, Zheleznogorsk). The facility has its own railway and electric locomotive.
Now the Plutonium production is stopped (since 95'), and the reactors were shut down. Now they produce MOX fuel for fast liquid metal Reactors (for now, БН-800).
" ... filled with oxygen ... "? Interesting. 7:55
Most likely 21% oxygen.
@@tinysim Until they kill more trees, yes.
BIG THUMBS UP FOR THAT ONE ! FANTASTIC STORY ! And perfectly professionally presented .
Gee I appreciate these .
"the largest self-propelled man-made object made by humans"
The most interesting natural thing created by nature,the largest gas cloud made of gas.
the question following that sentence is: What are those larger self-propelled man-made objects NOT made by humans?
True. The most powerful is the Saturn Five rocket main stage at 160 million horsepower. Each of the 5 engines produced 500 tons of thrust. They under ran them to take care of a vibration problem.
I would really like to see a video on the Esso Northumbria, which at the time was the largest vessel produced by Britain at the time.
The Iran Iraq war was actually started by Iraq not Iran.
Agree Sadam Hussain publicly on tv tore up the treaty of navigation of the "Shat Al Arab" waterway and ordered his forces into iran in order to secure a suitable buffer on the Iranian bank.
They always spread Israeli propaganda but this was just another level...
@@drpk6514 "Everything I don't like is Jewish propaganda"
Not sure about the accuracy of the comment at 5.20.
I was on the Settebello anchored in that area (Sept 1986-Feb 1987) and was not aware of any nearby oil platforms. Iran had moved operations to the Straits of Hormuz after facilities had been attacked and destroyed on Siri Island.
There were two 'floating' terminals consisting of several ships each. One was for crude (which the Seawise Giant was part of) and the other was for refined, which the Settebello was part of. I think both ships were the respective 'mother' ships in each group. Representatives from the National Iranian Oil Company were based permanently on my ship.
We were told the Iraqi fighter jets would not be able to reach us as they did not have the capability to refuel mid-air.
Well, they did reach and attacked for the first time in early January 1987, destroying two ships in the refined floating terminal. Don't know about the crude one.
The Freedom Ship had been under discussion for more than 15 years. Is it going to be built, considering how COVID-19 ruined the reputation of cruise ships?
@@marioferreira7605 They're also floating petri dishes, even when there isn't a global pandemic.
That giant Indian ship scrap yard sounds like it could be a Megaproject of it's own.
Damn this ship is like the second coming of jesus 😂😂
Yeah, I think we probably hit peak size for oil tankers. But every other ship category can keep getting bigger. Although I have to wonder if there is a size tipping point; where building a large ship would get so expensive, that it would actually be cheaper to put a floating railway bridge between Alaska and Mongolia?
LOL!! Who would've thought that the largest ship to ever exist, would become the largest ship to ever sink when it sunk.
Ah yes the floor is made of floor.
I have a suggestion for a story. The Homestead Works of U. S. Steel. The history of the Homestead Works is very interesting. Carnegie got Homestead Works in slick move. The famous Homestead Strike, and the Johonstown Flood.
We really could have used this vessel during a zombie apocalypse.
The raising of the ship should be a mega project unto itself!
uh Iran did not invade Iraq, it was the other way around.
They actually went back and forth taking a retaking each other's territory along their border
@@The-Logic-Wizard Iraq invaded first and started the war. Thats the point
@@MossadDid911 what an interesting username
Video idea- I am not sure which channel this would be best for but, How are clean rooms made? I know they are vital for making super sensitive technology and the idea is not a speck of dust can be in them. How can they tell once a building has been picked/built etc that it is clean enough? Construction is messy, installing large machines is as well, there must be something special at first right?
Imagine if this gets stuck instead of rhe Evergiven
No crappy advert. I like it 👍
In the future, possibly by the end of the century, rising sea-levels will make the technology of super-large floating things an essential element of urban planning.
You're hysterical. They have been saying we are going underwater for 40 years, nothings happened.
@@atodaso1668 One clue to an argument without merit is the lead with an accusational insult. The premise "nothings (sic) happened" is proven false by data. Besides, you are so bound up with your false narratives that you fail to recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of my comment.
Just a correction to the facts mentioned in this video: at 5 minute time stamp it was noted that the Iran-Iraq war was started by the Iranian invasion of Iraq, which is inherently incorrect. The war was started by Iraq invading Iran, which I a well documented historical fact.
Love the videos created in this channel but I felt it was very important to submit this correction.
Thanks for all the hard work!
All this technology and still no cure to male balding.
😂🤣
LOL
I saw Knock Nevis in Dubai Dry Docks in 2004. It was damn huge.
Not gonna lie, I keep reading it as Samwise Gamgee.
I really did enjoy that video - thx. You're great.
First. Love all your channels Simon! And got my coworker into your podcasts!
Second?
I used to go to Singapore on business up until the early 2000s. I would go down to where Bugis street/square used to be and hire a boatman to take me on tours of the harbor. I point at some ship that looked interesting and he'd go where I pointed. It was really cool! For $30 sing, he'd just go wherever I pointed!
We went past a lot of huge ships! Some Russian, and others from all different countries.
These boats were big, man but nothing like the boat highlighted here!
I miss Singapore a lot! It has changed so much since I was last there!
Mmmm, Tiger Beer, Tiger Prawns.... aglglhhlell...
Yeah you are right, hi how are you...?
@@jeremyleerenner5603 I just saw your reply!
Retired, and doing well!
I hope you are too!
5:06 is a mistake. Iraq started the war by invading Iran.
What I thought.
Excellent video as always as Simon
The flotation bags would surely not be filled with OXYGEN?!
Yeah what a weird error to make in the script. It would just be "air". It just shows you how few people who talk about things for a living... actually know what they're talking about. A tad unnerving the more I think about it.
To be fair, these videos, while I do enjoy them, are often riddled with errors.
@@Azivegu I still learn plenty, but yeah.
sounds extravagant
I'd love to see that beaching video!!!!
Simon had to have meant the Iraqi Invasion of Iran. Strange mistake to make.