Subjects: Technology

This oil and gas pipelayer is as big as an aircraft carrier, 300m (984 foot) long with a state of the art on-board welding factory the size of four city blocks.

She’s the heavy weight champion! The most modern, most powerful multipurpose heavy-lift cargo carrier on Earth! Beluga Bremen is the world’s first multipurpose heavy lift cargo carrier that can hoist more than 1,400 tons of weight! Built by Bremen-based Beluga Shipping, Beluga Bremen is ready in May 2010 for her maiden voyage. It will be a major event since Bremen is the first of sixteen ships in Beluga’s latest generation of super heavy-lift P2 series carriers… the biggest most powerful heavy lifters in the shipping world.

USNS Robert E. Peary is the supply lifeline to task force (CTF-151) in the hot pirate zone of the Gulf of Aden. USNS Peary is a T-AKE 5 supply ship, one of the newest state-of-the-art ships built for 21st century naval warfare. T-AKE’s are the lifeline of the US Navy, allowing their warships to maintain a forward offensive presence in any hot zone anywhere in the world. Mighty Ships joins USNS Peary on active deployment in the hot zone of the Gulf of Aden replenishing a fleet of 20 warships.

To perform the world’s most dangerous job demands the support of the most technologically advanced ship in the world. On the frontline of exploring Earth’s final frontier, the sea floor, is a new breed of ship… the saturation dive support ship. The biggest, the best and the newest is Skandi Arctic. She’s the mother ship for aquanauts who work hundreds of meters below the surface on jobs considered, at least on this planet, the most dangerous in the world. Christened in 2009, Skandi is 157 meters long and the saturation dive habitat that sits on her stern is both state of the art and borderline science fiction.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s Superferry! Stena Britannica was designed to change the way people and things move. It’s a bold, exciting, 21st century gamble. At a cost of over a billion Canadian dollars, Stena Line, the largest ferry company in Europe, has merged a car carrier, passenger ferry, cargo transport and cruise ship into the largest, most luxurious, most technically advanced “super” ferry in the world. There is nothing else like her.

Queen Mary 2 is the biggest, most expensive ocean liner ever to set sail. She is a veritable city at sea, a marvel of both luxury and engineering, and is the fastest passenger ship in operation with engines powerful enough to light up a city of 250-thousand. But this queen is no lightweight, at 150-thousand tons she can still turn on a dime. Watch as Exploration Productions Inc. captures how the ship works and how the ship’s crew manages to guide this masterpiece of engineering across the turbulent waters of the North Atlantic, all while the 2600 fortunate passengers ride the seas for a luxurious voyage of a lifetime.

Marine research vessel G.O. SARS uses advanced technologies to travel north of the Arctic Circle in search of new life forms living in extreme conditions beside toxic subsea volcanoes and hydrothermal vents.

Africa Mercy is the world’s largest NGO hospital ship. She travels port to port in the world’s poorest regions providing medical care to people who may have never met a doctor or visited a hospital. 150m long and equipped with six state-of-the-art operating theatres, Africa Mercy can deliver medical care as good as any big city hospital in North America.

Cristóbal Colón, aka Christopher Columbus, the world’s newest, largest, hi-tech ocean dredger, like her historic namesake, heralds the beginning of a bold new era of ships that will make a global impact.

MV Fairplayer is the latest, biggest and strongest in a new class of heavy-lift mega-ships built to transport super-sized equipment. When her two gigantic onboard cranes – capable of lifting 900 tons each – get to work loading, it’s like watching a sci-fi movie about invading Transformers. It’s a high-risk event as MV Fairplayer loads up for her maiden mission, carrying enormous oil refinery machinery from Italy to a hurricane-ravaged port in Texas. There’s tension right off the top, because when the massive load hits the deck, the sudden weight can capsize the ship if her ballast tanks aren’t flooded at the exact same moment. MV Fairplayer must use her self-tilting system to do a delicate dance and maintain her balance as everything is loaded.