Some Big Ships That Are Not Small Ships.

Our Gallic comrade has rightly lauded the supergianticovast Freedom of the Seas, with a completely mind-bonkeringly DWT of 158,000, and has raised within me the curious question of which is the biggest ship afloat.

Speaking in my official capacity as the First Sea Lord, I am constrained to agree that that is one big ass motherfucking ship, the biggest
passenger ship in history (including the new, slightly smaller but rather beautiful Queen Mary II, pictured left. Big enough that you wonder if they know something we don't. For example, Royal Carribean is also building a much bigger ship, at Aker Yards in Finland, a program modestly titled PROJECT GENESIS, delivering 2009, which if memory serves will accidently regenerate Spock from the dead.

Still, there is one motherfuckingly supergigantomeganormous ship (going here by the Lloyd's standard ship registry classification), a ship over half a million tons (loaded) : the Jahre Viking, built in 1975 - 350 meters LONG, 564,0000 tons. (Her 260K tonnage at left is dry weight.) Metric!

(Nice photo deposit of cargo ships here.)

Noteworthy: apparently gross registered tonnage and displacement are considerably different: the new Project Genesis, 43% larger than the Freedom of the Seas, will displace about the same tonnage as the Carl Vinson: 100,000 to 97,000. At 1,180 feet long, 154 feet wide at water level and 240 feet high (eep!), it will be, um, large.

Speaking of the USS Carl Vinson, I once raced her - as a passenger, preferring to leave the actual operation of the vessel to her captain in this instance, in the car ferry from Bremerton - we both left at the same moment. The ferry, no 97 pound weakling herself, "won," reaching the channel a little ahead. (I recall using this as an opening to chat up a sexy young naval nuclear plant design engineer, who was thinking of shifting her specialty to something more stable. That was not, apparantly, me. )