Hi All

I was researching supertanker power comsumption and came across this...

Largest Diesel in the World

...and the RTA96 is a BIG mother too. Scroll down the page and there's a pic of technicians standing next to individual cams! It's also super-efficient by dint of its immense heat-capacity - 51.7% fuel-heat to mechanical power conversion. Only combined cycle gas turbines get higher - though typically at 3 times the power output.

Still compared with a rocket it's not so impressive - its power is only 80 MW. She burns only 3.6 kg/sec...

Space relevance? Just another cool machine? No. I was fiddling around with global power figures and supplying it via SPS. Supertankers add maybe ~ $0.02/gallon to fuel costs. I was wondering just how much fuel they use and how much they carry per year. A few gigatons of fuel gets shuffled around the world each year which seems kind of wasteful and yet is absolutely vital. The biggest supertanker is the "Knock Nevis" and it displaces over 600,000 tons with a full load, and has a dead-weight of over 500,000 (!) I often wonder if we'll ever have super-tankers between the planets haulling megatons of volatiles etc. For example terraforming Venus would take about 3,000,000 tons/second of hydrogen over 300 years to combine with all the CO2 - that's 6 supertanker loads a second.

Adam

PS The "Knock Nevis" carries 650,000 m^3 of crude or 4.1 million barrels. So she masses about a million tons with a full load. And she's pushed around by a single (!) RTA96.