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Comment by danaos | Hacker News Reader

Uhhh it's in Wikipedia's "largest container ships" list! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...

...and as the article says, "Furthermore, some of the world's main waterways such as the Suez Canal and Singapore Strait also restrict the maximum dimensions of a ship that can pass through them.", which explains why the list consists of large fleets of ships all almost exactly the same size.

Much like Panamax being the largest ship size which can traverse the Panama canal, there's a corresponding Suezmax[1]. Sort of like the old story of the Space Shuttle's SRB size being dictated by old Roman road design, it's interesting how modern design is influenced by historical limitations we might not consider.

Not sure if that’s true. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4064/how-fair-is-t...

The Shuttle SRB design still was dictated at least in part by the segments being transported by rail - each individual segment could be only as heavy, wide and long as the cobined stretch of railway from the factory would allow.

It influences other rockets as well - for example the Proton:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family)

The long thin tanks you see mounted on the first stage are not drop tanks or additional boosters, its the tanks holding the first stage fuel, with the central core holding all the oxidzer.

Thats because the core stage is limitted in width by what you can ship to Bayokonur by rail, especialy IIRC one specific rail tunnel on the route. So they ship the core stage and the additional fuel tanks on separate rail cars and then bolt them in place on the cosmodrome.

In similar manner Falcon 9 is limitted to 3.9 m of width as that is the maximum you can ship over the US highway network without special care.

If you want to go bigger, you need special aircraft and barges, or build the thing in place like it is currently being done with the SpaceX Starhip.

One of the main roads near where I live is a Roman road. It's fascinating that the new buildings being built along it have their design constrained, in some way, by a decision made 2000 years ago.

2000 years? Think about how frequently we're hampered by limitations set 13.8 billion years ago...

Reminds me of this excellent old poem: https://poets.org/poem/calf-path

In 2016, Prokopowicz and Berg-Andreassen defined a container ship with a capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 TEU as a Very Large Container Ship (VLCS), while that with a capacity greater than 20,000 TEU as an Ultra Large Container Ship (ULCS)

They are gonna run out of larger adjectives pretty soon.

Just call Capcom.

“Super Container Ship II' Hyper Turbo Extra Special Champion Edition HD Remix”.

Btw, there's a similar conundrum with large telescope projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333391

Same with IC size. Started with SSI (Small Scale Integration) then MSI (Medium Scale Integration), LSI (Large Scale Integration) and finally VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) in the early 1980ies. There was some talk of ULSI (Ultra Large Scale Integration), but thankfully this never caught on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#ULSI,_WSI,_...

You forgot “Pro”, which is what makes a variant the bigger one.

I thought Pro meant remove all of the ports, and make it ultra thin

Removing all of the ports could really be a problem for a ship!

Nah, there's a dongle to connect to the dock without a port

Well, you see, the names I listed above are all actual ones used by Capcom.

Almost like a Samsung phone.

Large container ship 20 Ultra Plus 5G Fan edition

Samsung at least uses 1 qualifier per device. S21 Plus, S21 Ultra.

Apple's 12 Pro Max, though...

The phone gets so hot, it needs a fan?

Like the Nubia Red Magic phones you mean?

While it's not SI yet, they could still use Hella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella#SI_prefix

I'm all for Hella Container Ship

Now, hella is just a modifier. Hella Big Container Ship dwarfs Hella Small Excavator

Screen resolutions have not and they are way worse.

Ship sizes can just reuse that replacing “graphics array” with “container ship” e.g. Quad Size Extended Container Ship.

they just need to take a lead from astronomers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...

That's been the case for display resolutions for a while as well ... although most of them can probably be parsed by the regex [UWXVQ]+GA.

Well in frequency terminology they’ve still got Super Large, Extremely Large and Terrifically Large left!

Astronomers to the rescue!

https://xkcd.com/1294/

True, but it is hard to get the scale of some ships until a real world item people are familiar with is close enough for a comparison.

I remember driving up to one of the battleship memorials as a child and it just seemed like this big gray mountain at the end of the street.

Anyone knows why all those Korean, Swiss and Taiwanese ships are registered in Panama instead of their own country?

It's a system called registering a ship under a "flag of convenience" [1].

Covers lots of questionable business practices, from employment conditions/health and safety, to tax etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

Edited to add this (which I did not know, but think it interesting) from the Wikipedia article:

The modern practice of ships being registered in a foreign country [ie, a flag of convenience] began in the 1920s in the United States when shipowners seeking to serve alcohol to passengers during Prohibition registered their ships in Panama. Owners soon began to perceive advantages in terms of avoiding increased regulations and rising labor costs and continued to register their ships in Panama even after Prohibition ended.

Just another tax evasion scheme.

I'm surprised Docker is not on that list

>Uhhh it's in Wikipedia's "largest container ships" list!

Off-topic, but does anyone else find it odd to find fillers like "umm" and "uhh" to be typed out on sites like HN or reddit?

No it contributes to more natural conversation, illustrating the commenter’s thought process.

I didn’t think that “natural” conversation was an actual goal on HN. You see this particularly in the way that humour (among other things) is often downvoted and discouraged.

I upvote humour for this reason, and down vote posts that are anti-fun. Believing all writing should be dull is a characteristic of people who can't write well.

Should the process not be completed before you hit "submit". There is no need to simulate a live conversation.

Ummmm...no?

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