
Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the water [video] - bookofjoe
https://vimeo.com/348147095
======
Animats
Usually, heavy-lift ships are used for moving damaged ships, or oil platforms
and other non-ship marine loads. Here's the USS Fitzgerald being loaded onto a
heavy-lift ship after a collision.[1] The USS Cole on a heavy-lift ship after
a bombing.[2] The USS McCain on a heavy lift ship after a collision.[3]

All this is to replace four bearings in the Carnival Vista's azipods, the
steerable propulsion units. The ship is only three years old, and if they have
to replace all the bearings, there must be some design or manufacturing
problem.

This is costing $50 million. The azipods were built by ASEA Brown Boveri.[4]
Is this covered under warranty? This looks bad for ABB.

Here's what an azipod looks like during manufacture.[5] Bearing replacement is
clearly a major job.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AalbxJtlLBE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AalbxJtlLBE)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixHPB8rGX9E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixHPB8rGX9E)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjqBV3cdAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjqBV3cdAo)
[4] [https://new.abb.com/marine/systems-and-
solutions/azipod](https://new.abb.com/marine/systems-and-solutions/azipod) [5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvHb4XTkC0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvHb4XTkC0A)

~~~
cardiffspaceman
> _Is this covered under warranty?_

According to one of the links I cited earlier [1] Royal Caribbean won $65
million from Rolls Royce concerning RR's Mermaid thrusters which are very
similar to Azipods, on the Celebrity Lines' 4 Millenium-class ships. And
Cunard subsidiary of Carnival won $24 million for Queen Mary II's Mermaids. I
think the warranty is more of a contract issue.

In newer builds the bearings may be more accessible.

[1] [https://www.travelweekly.com/Cruise-Travel/Insights/Vista-
ju...](https://www.travelweekly.com/Cruise-Travel/Insights/Vista-just-latest-
example-of-azipod-blues)

~~~
Animats
It's a hard problem. The bearings that rotate the azipods are huge, carry the
entire propulsive force of the ship as an angled side load on the bearing, are
below the water line, and are holding something that goes through the hull.
Look at one of those things, think about the stresses, and wince.

Bearings with huge side loads are rarely used, because they wear badly.
Ordinary ship screws are on a straight shaft through the stern, with a thrust
bearing and seal. Far simpler, and solved a century ago. On the other hand, if
you haven't solved the bearing and seal problems of propulsion pods, you
shouldn't be selling propulsion pods.

"Ship early, ship often" gives you a terrible reputation in the heavy
machinery business. There was once a saying in the railroad equipment business
- "Never buy equipment from somebody in a better climate than yours." The good
railway equipment manufacturers were in upstate New York, and over-designed
everything. Which is what you want when a snowplow has to force the ice off
the tracks, and devices in the trackway need to survive that. That's why you
see railroad equipment packaged in half inch thick cast iron boxes.[1] That's
from General Railway Signal in Rochester, NY.

[1]
[https://www.trainboard.com/railimages/data/541/sintonswitch....](https://www.trainboard.com/railimages/data/541/sintonswitch.jpg)

~~~
cardiffspaceman
I hadn't thought about the load on the strut that the pod hangs from.

When in working order, cruise ships can spin slowly in place so that all the
passengers can see some scenery (e.g. the glacier at the head of an Alaskan
fjord) from their own balconies. And they drive up to the dock without the aid
of tugboats. But pods aren't the enabling technology for this maneuverability,
bow thrusters, screws and rudders can do it, too.

I think the fuel efficiency is the tempting advantage of azimuth pods.

------
rollulus
Every time I see engineering projects like this semi-submersible, where
massive teams work multiple years to deliver a highly complex project that has
never been built before, I feel that the field of software engineering is
immature and mostly a joke.

If every IT project with an equivalent number of man hours as this ship would
produce a physical artifact like this, the sea would be full with abandoned
Frankenstein ships, and not a many would actually function. I’m glad that
software is invisible, mostly.

~~~
Iv
I oscillate between that feeling and the realization that in software, you
usually stay on a layer without never really minding the numerous layers under
yours, that work flawlessly despite huge complexity.

Transistors don't misfire, CPUs don't miss an operation, firmware invisibly
and reliably handle all the internal packets of the motherboard, the screen
refreshes millions of pixels every 16 ms. All of this relies on the work of
thousands if not millions of people who have never meet each other but whose
piece of work communicate flawlessly with each other.

~~~
jmts
As an embedded software engineer, my only response to this is that sometimes
I'm surprised anything works at all. Bugs in silicon do exist. Often there's
nothing a supplier can do about it. Either you find a different part or find a
workaround at a higher level.

~~~
avip
In the grand scheme of things, things that work (s.a life) are an
unexplainable outlier.

~~~
candiodari
Even for life one wonders. If you look at life's history. Life gets created,
gets to the point where we pretty much have modern bacteria, single celled
organisms. That took somewhere between 100 and 300 million years. They
conquered the planet and ...

And then _nothing_. There was variation in the cells, sure, but not really all
that much (also we can't really tell). As far as we can tell no multicellular
life, no great advances, nothing, other than continued existence. No spreading
further. No evolution towards more complexity. Muddling along at best. Total
pause at worst.

900 million years of it. Maybe more.

Why ?

~~~
avip
Agreed. For a ~2.5 billion years project, the deliverable is not that
impressive.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
But the fact that you're here, conversing on something worldwide is _insane_.

------
neic
This lift was due the large dry dock in Freeport, Bahamas being unavailable
after an accident with Oasis Of The Seas.

Oasis Of The Seas was over the capacity of the dry dock, but was still docked.
It was not lifted completely out of the water.

The dry dock broke under the ships weight causing the walls of the dry dock to
collapse onto the ship. A crane collapsed onto the stern. Remarkably it didn't
capsize. There where some non-life-threatening injuries.

[http://www.tribune242.com/news/2019/apr/01/injuries-after-
oa...](http://www.tribune242.com/news/2019/apr/01/injuries-after-oasis-seas-
accident-gb-shipyard/)

------
dmalvarado
I know it's supposed to be basic, but it still blows my mind that those two
things still weigh less than the water they displace...

~~~
pacificmint
> weigh less than the water they displace...

Well, they weigh exactly the same as the water they displace. :)

But I know what you mean. I think the cause is that we intuitively
underestimate the weight of water. Probably because we normally deal with it
in small amounts only. But water is pretty heavy.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> But water is pretty heavy.

A 20 gallon fish tank, which is a pretty small fish tank (1'x2'x1.25' or 2.5
cubic feet), weights 167 pounds - so about as much as a person.

~~~
foota
Aren't people 70 water by mass?

~~~
phyzome
Yeah. And you can approximate many common materials as weighing "close enough"
to water, if you're doing back of the envelope calculations. Organisms in
general, food, building materials. Oil is about 90% the density of water.
Plastic and wood probably vary from 50% to 130%. Metal and rock are obviously
heavier, so throw in a multiplier.

It's great because you can just convert grams to milliliters or cubic
centimeters (water is 1g/mL) and fudge it as necessary.

------
ccostes
The scale of this is so hard to comprehend. Seeing the people standing on the
dry-dock below the ship, its just mind-blowing to see how massive both of
these things are.

------
remarkEon
How strong do those pumps need to be to drain the ballast tanks and raise the
ship after she’s got her new cargo on deck? I’m having trouble wrapping my
head around how all this would work. Any Merchant Marines out there?

~~~
dt5702
Naval architect here. As other commenters have noted the size of the pumps
isn’t really the issue here - you can have as many as you want it really
depends on the time you have available.

For me, the cool things about this are the size of the installed power and the
stability problem in having one submerged object with multiple half empty
ballast tanks lift up another object with multiple tanks.

The BOKA Vanguard has an installed power of 27000kW, split between two main
diesels and two auxiliaries. This is slightly more than a Los Angeles class
nuclear submarine, which goes much faster (perhaps 2x according to wiki)
underwater - very much a different resistance problem. There are two 35 tonne
and 65 tonne generators/engines. These are not small pieces of equipment.
That’s what gets me about these ships - they are on another level of huge.

The stability problem is a significant challenge. You can see in the video
that they did it on a flat day. Being able to coordinate the pumping of
multiple ballast tanks to make sure that both ships remain upright is another
cool thing here. Look up the “free surface effect” if you want to learn about
that particular challenge.

Sources; various Wikipedia pages and Wärtsilä technical sheets.

~~~
seminatl
Why do marine engines weigh so much for that power? An airplane uses ~100MW
(depending on how you want to calculate it) but obviously its engines don't
have a combined weight of 200 tonne.

~~~
perlgeek
Aircraft engines are designed to be light, and sacrifice low cost and the
ability to burn cheap diesel fuel for that.

Ship engines are the way round: their weight doesn't matter much, but it
matters that they use the cheapest fuel possible.

~~~
pjc50
Exactly. In fact, for some applications GE are using modified aircraft
turbines on ships:
[https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/eng/lm2500.htm](https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/eng/lm2500.htm)

Those are for military use, where speed matters but money is basically
unlimited.

~~~
rkangel
Money is unlimited, but fuel efficiency isn't just about money for the
military. More fuel usage means more supply lines. That's less of an issue for
navies than armies but still important.

------
W-Stool
This ladies and gentlemen is what engineering is sometimes about - making
something that seems at first look impossible, possible.

~~~
JshWright
I'm also struck by the engineering that has gone into videography drones over
the past decade. No one would have bothered to make this video 10 years ago,
but thanks to the various technology advances (batteries, motors, flight
controllers, etc) we now have an easy and "cheap" way to view stuff like this
from amazing perspectives that wouldn't have been practical in the past.

------
phyzome
I find it interesting that a ship can both float in the water and sit on the
bottom of its hull. It has to be built for two very different patterns of
mechanical stress!

~~~
Retric
If you watch a boat in rough seas they need to be far stronger than a building
across a much wider range of stresses. So, it probably starts close to being
able to stand up like this just by default. Ex: [https://rare.us/rare-
news/caught-on-video/new-footage-shows-...](https://rare.us/rare-news/caught-
on-video/new-footage-shows-giant-waves-crashing-into-a-cruise-ship-while-a-
passenger-is-looking-out-the-window/)

PS: Less seriously, the cruise liner has lifeboats making it it a boatboat.
([https://xkcd.com/2043/](https://xkcd.com/2043/)) Making this a boatboatboat
for when you want to ship the ship shipping your boats in a boat via ship on a
ship shipping. This lets you boat around on your boat on a boat on a boat.

------
gherkinnn
There’s something disturbing about a large underwater structure lurking in the
deep. I’m happy the bed emerged. Put me at ease.

~~~
asadlionpk
[https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/](https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/)

------
journalctl
Stuff like this really puts my work into perspective. It makes my hardest
problems seem like trivialities compared to _lifting a cruise ship out of the
ocean_.

~~~
sansnomme
And yet your average engineer (barring oil and gas) in the marine industry
will never earn as much as a software engineer.

~~~
killjoywashere
I employee a number of high caliber software engineers (MS and PhD level
folks). I'm pretty sure there's a balance between interestingness and pay. If
you are an eningeer in adtech, you should reasonably expect to get paid in
gold bars. We should make it expensive for companies to be in that business.
If you are solving cancer, lifting giant boats, or going to Mars, then you
have a much more interesting problem to work on.

Should we pay those folks more? Sure? But they like doing the work. Perhaps we
should also demand _far_ higher salaries from adtech companies. Like, $10M
annual.

~~~
TulliusCicero
On the other hand, engineers working at self driving cars at Waymo earn much
more than engineers making CRUD apps at random non-tech companies.

The pay discrepancy has nothing to do with interestingness. It's just that
total demand for software engineers is extremely high -- programming has
become almost like accounting in that virtually every business that's not very
small needs some -- and there are a good number of massively profitable tech
and tech-oriented companies that can and must compete for strong coding
talent.

------
haser_au
Incredible machines. Similarly, this one lifting an oil platform;

[https://youtu.be/DjD2QSJyqso?t=203](https://youtu.be/DjD2QSJyqso?t=203)

------
yason
This is what I call _real_ engineering. Of course, being a mere software
engineer (or so they tell me) I can't but point to the recursive version:
[https://cdn2.kontraband.com/uploads/image/2019/2/22/preview_...](https://cdn2.kontraband.com/uploads/image/2019/2/22/preview_a4f62493.jpeg)

------
omosubi
Wow that's amazing - how do they keep the cruiseliner from toppling over? Just
the weight of the hull?

~~~
rtkwe
The ship they're lifting? It's pretty flat bottomed so they can just build a
small cradle under the ship. There's also some tall yellow support (or maybe
access to the interior?) structures on one side in the video.

------
alexhutcheson
If you find this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Taking of
K-129"[1], which tells the story of a CIA project to lift a damaged Russian
sub off the deep-ocean floor in the early 70's. It's a really great
engineering and project management story.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XVHYDPR](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XVHYDPR)

------
bookofjoe
>One of the assets acquired through Dockwise helped Boskalis “push back
boundaries” in 2018 according to Mr Berdowski; he is referring to the
technically challenging, record-setting dry transport of the floating
production storage and offloading (FPSO) P-67 from China to Brasil. Weighing a
record 90,000 tonnes, the FPSO was transported by the semi-submersible heavy-
lift vessel Boka Vanguard, formerly Dockwise Vanguard. With a deadweight
capacity of 117,000 tonnes, the Boka Vanguard has a “bowless design” to
accommodate offshore structures or vessels that might overhang the bow or
stern of the vessel.

[https://www.rivieramm.com/opinion/opinion/after-
acquisitions...](https://www.rivieramm.com/opinion/opinion/after-acquisitions-
boskalis-turns-to-subsea-wind-53949)

------
cryptozeus
This is great, would love to find more information on what kind of software
they use on these ships. No way that was happening manually. Some kind guided
software would be best suited for this. Also how long it took them to lift the
cruiseliner ?

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> No way that was happening manually.

Why do you say that?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
When all you have is a hammer...

------
trollied
That's amazing. I love watching things like this.

Any idea how much it costs to hire such a ship?

------
saagarjha
The image on the top is quite misleading: like an iceberg, 90% of the ship is
underwater in that photo. The real thing is about as big as the cruise ship;
watch the video to get an actual sense of how large it is.

------
whoisburbansky
So what exactly is the point of this? Is it more efficient to have the ship be
tugged this way than to have it move under its own power?

~~~
Taniwha
the local dry-dock is no longer available, they needed to fix something broken
in one of the ship's impellers

~~~
whoisburbansky
Oh that makes so much more sense, thank you!

------
joering2
Recently Vimeo became a number one house for me in terms of videos. Its
constant ads that you cannot stop or skip that least somewhat of 45 seconds
(!) steers me away from YouTube. And quality on Vimeo never disappoints, I
mean has there even been low quality vid on Vimeo?

~~~
khazhoux
I found a very effective way of eliminating ads completely.
[https://www.youtube.com/premium](https://www.youtube.com/premium)

It turns out I can use some of the money I make in _my_ work, to pay other
people for _their_ work.

~~~
xfitm3
I also eliminate ads completely using ublock. Not everything is vis a vis. If
youtube was a bastion of free speech and didn't demonetize controversial
creators then I would consider supporting them.

------
tonylemesmer
Would it be foolish to use this as a safer way of docking large ships in
difficult to navigate ports? You could automate everything about it. Have a
series of these ship moving barges moving on a predefined virtual track.

~~~
sheep-a
Not foolish but costly, very costly. The infrastructure required for that
level of automation is no joke, and you have to run and maintain lots of ships
to ship the ships...

------
jiveturkey
that's cool. what happens when the BOKA Vanguard itself requires service?? and
when THAT ship requires service!?

reminds me of those super-heavy tow trucks, that tow semi trucks, busses,
other max-weight vehicles. but i wonder how THAT vehicle gets towed when it
breaks down. i guess they don't, i guess they get airlifted.

------
stedaniels
Can anyone else see the waterslide up on the tower next to the bridge?

------
thunderbong
Rarely nowadays, does the jaw drop!

------
mkoryak
but why do they want to do this?

Its not like they can move that cruise ship anywhere it couldn't have gone on
its own.

~~~
Arbalest
Time is money. A cruise ship not carrying passengers is not making money.

Presumably it was more cost effective to use this than to travel to a dry dock
wherever that is. The article this was switched over from did say it was
fairly far from a dry dock capable of taking it in.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> Time is money. A cruise ship not carrying passengers is not making money.

Time is especially money because money isn't free. When you are a company, you
are generally expected to pay for your money: either interest on your loan, or
profits to your shareholders (directly through dividends or indirectly through
the higher stock price that comes from being a more valuable business).

This cruise ship probably has a mortgage.

