Total Weight: 1.45 BILLION lbs
Maximum Speed: 30 km/h
Length: 1504 ft
Typical Cargo Value: 122 million USD
The Seawise Giant (aka: The Happy Giant, The Jahre Viking, Knock Nevis, & Mont ) is the largest moving object ever produced. Get this: the Seawise Giant is the only ship that was not allowed to sail in the English Channel because officials thought it could cause minor flooding. Ditto for the Panama and Suez canals. This mega ship was designed to carry oil, but if you wanted, it could carry 9.6 million 150 lb illegal immigrants.
It’s a testament to modern technology that this beast only needed a crew of 35 at sea. Since the ship is nearly half a kilometre long, the crew used bicycles to travel along the length. More impressively though, the entire orgy of high strength steel that is the Seawise Giant was moved by one 30 foot diameter propeller that weighed nearly 100,000 lbs. That’s the same weight as a Boeing 737 jetliner!
Maybe you think the top speed of 30 km/h is on the slow side. Even at this speed, the Seawise Giant would take 8.7 kilometres to stop. That is an incomprehensible amount of momentum. How many of you have heard that the space shuttle combined with the solid rocket boosters was the most powerful machine on the planet? Wrong. Even when the space shuttle is travelling at 4000 km/h the Seawise Giant has twice the momentum travelling at 30 km/h. What other cool things could you do with that kind of energy? You could launch a Meerkat and expect the pieces of it to land on Mars in about 32 seconds.
During the Gulf-War, the Seawise giant was attacked and sunk. Luckily though some badass company decided to salvage and sell this masterpiece of engineering. The ship was bought and used as an offshore storage container before being finally beached and scrapped this year. Who would have thought a ship longer then the Empire State Building would be impracticable to operate? Remember kids, bigger is always cooler but not always smarter.
Big things rock!
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