The world's biggest ship - for 53 days

BBC ^ | 8 January 2015 | Justin Parkinson

[moose07]

The world's largest container ship, the Globe, is docking in Britain for the first time as it continues its maiden voyage. But how vast and powerful is it and how long until it's superseded?

Size

The Globe is more than 400m (1,312ft) long, the equivalent of eight Olympic-size swimming pools. It is 56.8m (186ft) wide and 73m (240ft) high, its gross tonnage is 186,000 - the equivalent of 14,500 London buses, according to the Port of Felixstowe, where it arrived on Wednesday.

But the record-breaking aspect of the Globe, owned by Shanghai-based China Shipping Container Lines and built in South Korea, is its capacity. It can carry 19,100 standard 20ft containers. That's estimated to be enough space for 156 million pairs of shoes, 300 million tablet computers or 900 million standard tins of baked beans.

Laid end-to-end, the maximum number of containers on board would stretch for 72 miles, the distance between Felixstowe and London, or Birmingham and Manchester.

"You would feel dwarfed by the Globe," says Damian Brett, container expert at Lloyd's List shipping publication. "It's like an office block lying on its side. It's a huge beast."

[central_va]

This will make product much more affordable to U.S. consumers while ensuring that labor unions are strangled the same way they've been strangling U.S. businesses for decades.

Change your screen name to Benedict Arnold.

For the record, in the USA, the amount of manufacturing that is done by Unionized Labor is 10%. The overwhelming majority of off shored manufacturing jobs were non union in the first place. The amount "saved" by off shoring to slave labor camps is abut 3-5 cents on the dollar. For that saving we pay for social unrest, welfare and malaise. Another benefit, to our enemies, is our defense infrastructures been degraded, without a manufacturing base we become a toothless tiger.

Oh by the way, EVERY single founding father was a protectionist. To a a man.

[SamAdams76]

There's really no need to keep manufacturing in the U.S. It can be done much more cheaply overseas with low skill labor. Why would you want to increase prices to American consumers? Just so certain people can hang onto dead-end jobs on a manufacturing line?

Time to move out of the Industrial Age and into the Information Age.