Most Massive Freely Moving Object Ever Built?

[Hornbein]

What is the most massive freely moving object ever built by man? That is, things like drawbridges aren't freely moving.

I suspect that it could be the battleship Yamoto, but can't get the info. Ships are measured in deadweight tonnage, which means something like their carrying capacity. Lightweight ships with high volume have the most deadweight tonnage. I want to know sheer mass.

 

[dipole]

Yea well when those ships are full of cargo then their mass isn't very light weight.

Trains can also be miles long and when full of cargo must weigh and awful lot.

 

[rootone]

I'd say it has to be a ship of some kind.
Might not be a military vessel though, some of the biggest oil tankers and other cargo ships are gigantic.
http://www.wonderslist.com/top-10-biggest-ships/

 

[Hornbein]

I want the MOST MASSIVE object. Not the object that can carry the most mass.

 

[dipole]

Well it's probably almost definitely Gigantor.

 

[dipole]

Or maybe Michio Kaku's ego.

 

[rootone]

I want the MOST MASSIVE object. Not the object that can carry the most mass.

I know, but the biggest one described in that link (FLNG), apparently needed 260,000 tonnes of steel just to construct it, that's not it's weight when operating.

 

[russ_watters]

I want the MOST MASSIVE object. Not the object that can carry the most mass.

A supertanker's gross tonnage is the total, which is what it is carrying plus its empty weight. I'm not sure why you don't think that's a useful answer to your question.

 

[jack476]

Or maybe Michio Kaku's ego.

2 questions:

1.) Who's Michio Kaku?
2.) What did he do to rouse the ire of the Physics Forums community? Because I see him getting hated on like all the time.

OT: I guess it depends on what is meant by "largest" and by "freely moving". If by largest moving machine you mean the most possible mass, then no question it would be a fully-loaded supertanker. But in terms of dry weight, their mass would be challenged by a very large train, although one could also dispute that as those are put together by many individual cars rather than being a single machine.

The submarine cables that connect across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans float some distance above the seafloor and thus are arguably "freely-moving", and win for sheer length as they can be thousands of miles in length.

Or maybe you mean most massive freely-moving solid object, in which case I think it would be the 730-ton "mass damper" ().

 

[Hornbein]

A supertanker's gross tonnage is the total, which is what it is carrying plus its empty weight. I'm not sure why you don't think that's a useful answer to your question.

When someone asks you your weight do you include whatever you are carrying?

 

[Hornbein]

2 questions:

1.) Who's Michio Kaku?
2.) What did he do to rouse the ire of the Physics Forums community? Because I see him getting hated on like all the time.

().

Today I was trying to learn about how quantum computation works. I resorted to a Kaku video. He knew less than I do and was spreading horse manure.

He said computer companies were going to quantum computing in order to get a greater density of storage. This is completely false. Quantum computers are inferior to ordinary in all respects other than for solving a rather specialized set of problems that never arise for the everyday computer user.

 

[Silicon Waffle]

[...]
He said computer companies were going to quantum computing in order to get a greater density of storage. This is completely false. Quantum computers are inferior to ordinary in all respects other than for solving a rather specialized set of problems that never arise for the everyday computer user.

I totally agree. This and its contemporaries such as Grid, DNA Computing and Computing With Words via Fuzzy Logics I admit are like big inflated balloons or dead ends created by dreamers.

 

[SteamKing]

What is the most massive freely moving object ever built by man? That is, things like drawbridges aren't freely moving.

I suspect that it could be the battleship Yamoto, but can't get the info. Ships are measured in deadweight tonnage, which means something like their carrying capacity. Lightweight ships with high volume have the most deadweight tonnage. I want to know sheer mass.

Well, you do need the correct name of the Yamato if you want to find information about her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato

Naval vessels are measured by their displacement tonnage, since deadweight tonnage has little meaning for such vessels. The Yamato, while displacing a massive 70,527 long tons full load, is no longer the most massive naval vessel ever constructed. That title belongs to the US nuclear carriers of the Nimitz class:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier

These vessels can have a full load displacement of over 104,000 long tons, easily beating the comparable figure for the Yamato (and they're faster, to boot).

Super tankers are the most massive ships by total displacement tonnage (which includes cargo):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_longest_ships

The largest and longest tanker ever built had a total displacement of more than 650,000 metric tons and a length of more than 450 meters.

FWIW, the terms gross tonnage and net tonnage don't refer to the mass or displacement of a vessel. These tonnages roughly measure the cargo-carrying capacity of a vessel by its internal volume. The old standard was that an internal volume of 100 cubic feet = 1 gross ton, but newer international tonnage conventions don't rely on such simple equivalents any longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnage

Passenger and cruise ship lines advertise the sizes of their vessel by typically using the gross tonnage figure, rather than displacement or deadweight. The deadweight capacity of a typical passenger vessel is relatively small in comparison with its total displacement, since the passenger vessel is designed to carry only her passengers, their luggage, provisions, etc. Because there is no simple equivalence between gross tonnage and displacement tonnage, it takes some digging to find out the displacements of most cruise vessels.

 

[Vanadium 50]

This and its contemporaries such as Grid, DNA Computing and Computing With Words via Fuzzy Logics I admit are like big inflated balloons or dead ends created by dreamers.

You do realize that the LHC Computing Grid provides billions of cpu-hours per year to the LHC experiments? That if it were a single computer, it would be approximately the 4th largest in the world?

 

[russ_watters]

When someone asks you your weight do you include whatever you are carrying?

It depends on the context. Clothes are often included, as are any other gear if you are boarding a plane. The difficulty here to me is because large machines exist solely for the purpose of carrying things, to not include what they are carrying just seems odd. Heck, in many cases, they can't not be carrying something because they might tip over, so if they don't have cargo, they must have ballast. Would you at least include a ship's own fuel?

But hey, it's your thread and I really don't know what the point of this is.

 

[Vanadium 50]

But hey, it's your thread and I really don't know what the point of this is.

It might not be a bad idea to get the ground rules in advance. Otherwise it's going to be "How about this?" "Nope - doesn't count." "OK, how about this?" "Nope - doesn't count."

 

[PhotonSSBM]

Why hasn't anybody brought up someone's mother yet?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Why hasn't anybody brought up someone's mother yet?

Two sailors are in the brig. One says to the other, "what are you in for?"
"Just following orders."
'What orders?"
"If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, lift it, and if it's too big to lift, paint it."
"So what's the problem?"
"I painted the admiral's wife."

 

[SteamKing]

Why hasn't anybody brought up someone's mother yet?

Cuz not everybody's mother is a whale.

 

[PhotonSSBM]

Cuz not everybody's mother is a whale.

The set of all whale moms is nonempty. Quite the opposite actually. Therefore the joke stands as consistent.

 

[256bits]

Yea well when those ships are full of cargo then their mass isn't very light weight.

Trains can also be miles long and when full of cargo must weigh and awful lot.

Mile long train about 100 cars at 100 tons each ( 50 tons of cargo per car + tare = 50 ton ) = 10, 000 ton

Need about a train load of trains to unload a cargo ship.

 

[SteamKing]

Mile long train about 100 cars at 100 tons each ( 50 tons of cargo per car + tare = 50 ton ) = 10, 000 ton

Need about a train load of trains to unload a cargo ship.

Puny.

Here is a list of the largest container vessels (by capacity of 20-foot equivalent units (TEU):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships

The vessels with the largest capacity can carry up to 19,224 TEU. If you laid out that many containers end to end, not trying to account for rail couplings, etc., the ship's cargo would stretch 19,224 × 20 / 5280 = 72.82 miles (45.25 km). Each TEU can hold up to about 20 tons of cargo.

A typical train with 100 cars might have been able to load the cargo from an old-style break bulk vessel 50-odd years ago, but it would take dozens of trains to handle just one container cargo from one container vessel nowadays.

 

[256bits]

but it would take dozens of trains to handle just one container cargo from one container vessel nowadays.

I did say a "trainload of trains" - just didn't actually know how many. ( How come there is no "thumbs up" smilie? )
I like the followup.
PS: 72.82 miles is closer to a 100 km than 45.

 

[SteamKing]

I did say a "trainload of trains" - just didn't actually know how many. ( How come there is no "thumbs up" smilie? )
I like the followup.
PS: 72.82 miles is closer to a 100 km than 45.

Yeah, you right. It's about 116 km.

 

[rootone]

I guess what actually happens with the arrival of one of those gigantic container ships at a port is that the containers are taken into local storage as quick;y as possible so the ship can be used again.
Distribution of the offloaded containers is another ball game.

 

[phinds]

Puny by the standards of a container ship but for a land-based self-propelled machine, this is pretty impressive:

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/segmental-bridge-machine-china-2015-10

and so is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter

 

[SteamKing]

Puny by the standards of a container ship but for a land-based self-propelled machine, this is pretty impressive:

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/segmental-bridge-machine-china-2015-10

and so is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter

I've seen one of the Crawlers up close, back in the days when it was carrying Saturn rockets.

It is an impressive machine on land, especially for one which doesn't run on rails.