Hornbein said:
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.