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28-458: Engines for motorships were developed during the 1890s, and by the early 20th century, motorships began to cross the waters. The first diesel-powered motorships were launched in 1903: the Russian Vandal (the first equipped with diesel-electric transmission) and French Petite-Pierre . There is disagreement over which of the two was the first. This article about a type of ship or boat

56-566: A 1,800-mile route from the lower Volga to Saint Petersburg and Finland . The canals of the Volga–Baltic Waterway dictated use of relatively small barges, making use of steam engines uneconomical. Diesel engine seemed a natural choice. Hagelin believed that reversing the engine and regulating its speed could be done with an electrical transmission, and contracted Swedish ASEA to test the electrical drive system. Hagelin then recruited naval architect Johny Johnson of Gothenburg to design

84-466: A barge. There was no way up, only down-- down to the category of coal hulks ... Having strong solid bottoms ... they could handle the great weight of bulk coal which filled their holds. It was a grimy, untidy, unglamorous end for any vessel which had seen the glory days." The famed clipper Red Jacket ended her days as a coaling hulk in the Cape Verde Islands. One by one these old Champions of

112-614: A bore of 290 mm and stroke of 430 mm. They ran at a constant 240 rpm, and the electrical transmission, controlled by a tram -like lever, varied propeller speed from 30 to 300 rpm. The hull was built at Sormovo shipyard in Nizhny Novgorod and towed to Saint Petersburg for the final assembly. Its size (244.5 × 31¾ × 8 feet) was tailored to the canals of the North rather than the Volga. Named Vandal , it commenced commercial operation in

140-501: A database of known hulk assemblages in England. They identified 199 separate hulk assemblages ranging in size from two vessels to over 80. Several of the largest former oil tankers have been converted to floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) units, effectively very large floating oil storage tanks. Knock Nevis , by some measures the largest ship ever built, served in this capacity from 2004 until 2010. In 2009 and 2010, two of

168-406: A functional ship. For this role, the hulk is often extensively modified to improve living conditions. Receiving hulks and prison hulks are specialized types of accommodation hulks. During World War II, purpose-built barracks ships were used in this role. A receiving ship is a ship used in harbour to house newly recruited sailors before they are assigned to a ship's crew. During the wars of

196-558: A stuck up parvenu tug. Ever and anon as if to emphasize her newly acquired importance, the tug would bury the old-time square-rigged beauty in a cloud of filthy smoke. Imagine the feelings of an ex-Cape Horner under such conditions! There should have been a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Old Clippers . Everybody who knows anything about ships, knows that they have feelings just the same as anybody else. Hulks were used in pairs during salvage operations. By passing heavy cables under

224-553: A wreck and connecting them to two hulks, a wreck could be raised using the lifting force of the tide or by changing the buoyancy of the hulks. A hulk assemblage (sometimes known as a ship graveyard ) is where more than one vessel has been hulked in the same location. A project by Museum of London Archaeology (with the Thames Discovery Programme and the Nautical Archaeology Society ) and in 2012 created

252-421: Is "hulked" to convert it to a hulk. The verb was also applied to crews of Royal Navy ships in dock, who were sent to the receiving ship for accommodation, or "hulked". Hulks have a variety of uses such as housing, prisons, salvage pontoons, gambling sites, naval training, or cargo storage. In the age of sail , many hulls served longer as hulks than they did as functional ships. Wooden ships were often hulked when

280-465: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Vandal (tanker) Vandal was a river tanker designed by Karl Hagelin and Johny Johnson for Branobel . Russian Vandal and French Petite-Pierre , launched in 1903, were the world's first diesel-powered ships (sources disagree over which of the two, Vandal or Petite-Pierre , was the first ). Vandal was the first equipped with fully functional diesel-electric transmission . In

308-501: The American Revolution prevented the sending of convicts to North America. Instead, increasingly large numbers of British convicts were held aboard hulks in the major seaports and landed ashore in daylight hours for manual labour such as harbor dredging. From 1786, prison hulks were also used as temporary gaols (jails) for convicts being transported to Australia . A powder hulk was a hulk used to store gunpowder . The hulk

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336-423: The hulk was moored in Nizhny Novgorod until the 1970s. The new ships attracted public and professional interest and brought in new orders. Plant payroll expanded to more than a thousand men, but growth brought in management problems. Rolf Nobel, Ludwig Nobel Jr. and Hagelin split with Emanuel over the future of diesel-powered shipping. Hagelin's proposal to convert existing steam-powered fleet to diesel engines

364-548: The 1890s oil industry searched for an economical oil-burning engine, and the solution was found by German engineer Rudolph Diesel . Diesel marketed his technology to oil barons around the world; in February 1898 he granted exclusive licenses to build his engines in Sweden and Russia to Emanuel Nobel of the Nobel family . The Russian licence cost Nobel 800,000 marks in cash and stock of

392-472: The 18th and 19th century, almost every nation's navy suffered from a lack of volunteers and had to rely on some form of forced recruitment. The receiving ship partly solved the problem of unwilling recruits escaping; it was difficult to get off the ship without being detected, and most seamen of the era did not know how to swim. Receiving ships were typically older vessels that could still be kept afloat, but were obsolete or no longer seaworthy. The practice

420-472: The Royal Navy had standardised sheer hulk crew numbers to comprise a Boatswain , mate and six seamen, with larger numbers coming aboard only when the sheers were in use. An accommodation hulk is a hulk used as housing, generally when there is a lack of quarters available ashore. An operational ship may be used for accommodation, but a hulk can accommodate more personnel than the same hull would accommodate as

448-474: The Royal Navy in the 1690s, and persisted in Britain until the early nineteenth century. Most sheer hulks were decommissioned warships; Chatham , built in 1694, was the first of only three purpose-built vessels. There were at least six sheer hulks in service in Britain at any time throughout the 1700s. The concept spread to France in the 1740s with the commissioning of a sheer hulk at the port of Rochefort. By 1807

476-573: The Seas disappeared. The Young America was last seen lying off Gibraltar as a coal hulk; and that superb old greyhound of the ocean, the Flying Cloud suffered a similar ignominious ending. She was not even spared the humiliation of concealing her tragic end from the eyes of her former envious rivals, but was condemned to end her days as a New Haven scow towed up the Sound with a load of brick and concrete behind

504-457: The base of a hulk's lower masts or beam, supported from the top of those masts. Blocks and tackle were then used in such tasks as placing or removing the lower masts of a vessel under construction or repair. These lower masts were the largest and most massive single timbers aboard a ship, and erecting them without the assistance of either a sheer hulk or land-based masting sheer was extremely difficult. The concept of sheer hulks originated with

532-403: The company fleet that reached 315 vessels in 1915. Hulk (ship) A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea. Hulk may be used to describe a ship that has been launched but not completed, an abandoned wreck or shell, or to refer to a ship whose propulsion system is no longer maintained or has been removed altogether. The word hulk also may be used as a verb: a ship

560-548: The four TI-class supertankers , then the largest ships afloat, TI Asia and TI Africa , were converted to FPSOs. A vessel's hulking may not be its final use. Scuttling as a blockship , breakwater , artificial reef , or recreational dive site may await. Some are repurposed, for example as a gambling ship ; others are restored and put to new uses, such as a museum ship . Some even return revitalised to sea. When lumber schooner Johanna Smith , "one of only two Pacific Coast steam schooners to be powered by steam turbines,"

588-434: The hull structure became too old and weak to withstand the stresses of sailing. More recently, ships have been hulked when they become obsolete or when they become uneconomical to operate. A sheer hulk (or shear hulk ) was used in shipbuilding and repair as a floating crane in the days of sailing ships , primarily to place the lower masts of a ship under construction or repair. Booms known as sheers were attached to

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616-515: The newly founded Russian Diesel Company. The Saint Petersburg engine plant was a quick success; it started with diesel-powered industrial pumps for oil pipelines and soon grabbed the mass market for flour mill engines. It produced more diesel engines than any other concern in the world. In 1902 Karl Hagelin, "a veteran of the Volga and sometime visionary", suggesting mating diesel engines to river barges. He envisioned direct shipment of oil through

644-535: The ship. Johnson placed the diesel engine and electric generator in the middle, and the electric motors in the stern, driving the propellers directly. The holds were separated by longitudinal (rather than transverse) bulkheads running the length of the ship, a feature that became common on ocean-going tankers. The ship's power plant of three 120hp diesel engines was built in Sweden by Swedish Diesel (Aktiebolaget Diesels Motorer) and ASEA. Each engine had three cylinders with

672-448: The spring of 1903. Vandal was accidentally damaged on its maiden voyage, repaired and served on the Volga route for ten years. The larger Sarmat , with four 180 h.p. engines, was launched next summer. Unlike Vandal , Sarmat' s engines could be coupled to the propellers directly, bypassing the electrical drive and saving up to 15% of engine power that would be otherwise lost in the electric transmission. Sarmat operated until 1923;

700-477: Was a floating warehouse which could be moved as needed to simplify the transfer of gunpowder to warships. Its location, away from land, also reduced the possible damage from an explosion. Service as a coal hulk was usually, but not always, a ship's last. Of the fate of the fast and elegant clipper ships , William L. Carothers wrote, "Clippers functioned well as barges ; their fine ends made for little resistance when under tow ... The ultimate degradation awaited

728-820: Was a hulk used as a floating prison . They were used extensively in Great Britain , the Royal Navy producing a steady supply of ships too worn-out to use in combat, but still afloat. Their widespread use was a result of the large number of French sailors captured during the Seven Years' War , and continued throughout the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary Wars a half-century later. By 1814, there were eighteen prison hulks operating at Portsmouth, sixteen at Plymouth and ten at Chatham. Prison hulks were also convenient for holding civilian prisoners, commencing in Britain in 1776 when

756-422: Was especially common in the age of wooden ships, since the old hulls would remain afloat for many years in relatively still waters after they had become too weak to withstand the rigors of the open ocean. Receiving ships often served as floating hospitals as many were assigned in locations without shore-based station hospitals. Often the afloat surgeon would take up station on the receiving ship. A prison hulk

784-562: Was rejected by Emanuel. Hagelin quit, and accepted the post of Swedish consul general in Saint Petersburg. In 1907 Hagelin and Johnson designed a 4,500-ton tanker, and again Emanuel Nobel rejected the proposal. The inventors sold their blueprints to Merkulyev Brothers of Kolomna who built the world's first true seagoing diesel-powered tanker, Mysl , in 1908. This, at last, compelled Emanuel to grant Hagelin sweeping rights to modernize

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