At 399.99 m (1,312.3 ft) long and 61.5 m (202 ft) wide, MSC Tessa can handle over 240,000 tons of cargo. She is the first ship to break this mark and the first to carry over 24,000 containers.
Interestingly, the length and width are about the same as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of previous record holders in the field dating back to the 2011 Triple-E Maersk containership and beyond. And when that succeeds, perhaps by MSC Irina or MSC Loreto, if both were ordered by the same customer, these ships would carry hundreds more containers, but they wouldn’t be physically bigger. is not.
CSSC
There is no size limit at the manufacturing stage. The largest ship in history, Seawise Her Giant Her Supertanker is 458.45 m (1,504.1 ft) long and 68.6 m (225.07 ft) wide and was built in the late 70s. Incidentally, the Giant was sunk by the Iraqi Air Force in 1988, after which she underwent a major salvage and repair to be recommissioned by 1991, after which she remained in service in some form until the end of 2009. I was.
However, container ships are different from supertankers, which carry cargo with large hoses. Dock facilities tend to place upper size limits on machines such as the MSC Tessa, and current limits are dwarfed until a useful number of ports around the world build onshore infrastructure to cope with the larger ones. It’s likely that these things will remain about the same size as they get.
So as gross tonnage and container capacity increase, optimizing ship design to pack more stuff on board becomes a major issue. It’s particularly impressive to see the shipbuilder succeed in expanding capacity by a hair less than 34% after 12 years at the top.
CSSC
MSC Tessa is, as the numbers suggest, focused on efficiency. The company’s main innovation in this regard is the bubble-based drag-reducing “air lubrication” system, which CSSC claims reduces energy consumption and therefore emissions by as much as 4%. But it’s still a marine diesel, with no proven viable replacement at this stage, so it’s unlikely we’ll see anything close to these behemoths in a zero-emissions world.
MSC expects three more like it by August, and CSSC says a second of the four has already completed sea trials. The four ships cost MSC about $600 million in total, according to Offshore Energy.
See MSC Tessa in action (and under construction) in the video below.
MSC Tessa, the world’s largest container ship
Source: CSSC
