What is the Worlds Largest Ship?
The largest ship ever built is the Knock Nevis, a supertanker 458 meters (1504 ft) in length and 69 m (226 ft) in width. Its dry weight is 564,763 tonnes, 647,955 tonnes when fully loaded with oil. Built between 1979 and 1981 in Oppama shipyard in Japan, this ship is larger and heavier than the Empire State Building on its side. For over a decade it has been the world’s largest ship by a significant margin, although its current function is only as an FSO (floating storage and offloading unit). When fully loaded, the Knock Nevis’ structure reaches 24.6 m (81 feet) underwater, so deep that it cannot navigate the English channel, much less the Panama and Suez canals. This also prevents it from docking at many of the world’s major ports. The Knock Nevis is more than twice than tonnage of the 2nd largest ship in the world, which weighs in at only 170,974 tons. At one point there were seven other ships with a tonnage over 500,000, but they have since all been scrapped. Knock Nevis is more th
The largest ship ever constructed was the Happy Giant, formerly called the Seawise Giant, with a deadweight tonnage (the weight of the ship without its load) of 622,571.5, a length of 1,504 feet (458 meters), and a beam (width) of 226 feet (69 meters). Attacked and damaged by Iraqi Mirage jets in the Persian Gulf on December 22, 1987, and again on May 14, 1988, the tanker is in the process of being repaired. The steam turbines are being replaced with a diesel engine, which will decrease the ship’s deadweight tonnage to about 420,000 long tons (one long ton is equal to 2,240 pounds). The largest ship of any kind currently in service is the tanker Hellas Fos, owned by the Bilinder Marine Corporation of Athens, Greece. Built in 1979, this steam turbine tanker has a deadweight tonnage of 611,832.5 and a gross registered tonnage of 254,583 (gross registered tonnage is…
The largest ship the world has ever seen is not a passenger liner or a battleship, but an oil tanker! The largest of the huge oil-carrying ships, called supertankers, is a French vessel that weighs more than half a million tons. The ship, the Pierre Guillaumat, is 1,359 feet long — more than a quarter of a mile, and can carry ov
