Also. What do you anchor them with? You need the winch to pull the boat, not the crane.
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So it sounds like all they need to do is borrow one really big excavator from Germany. Simple!
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[Ring Ring]
A: Hello, Germany? Itās Egypt. Can we borrow your giant excavator thingy?
B: Sure.
A: Great! How soon can you get it here?
B: Depends, how soon are you going to get that canal open so we can ship it?
A: ā¦dammit!
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Iām thinking the winches would be from the opposite shore. Pull the front part of the ship back toward the center of the canal, at the same time do the same for the back of the boat. The torsion forces would be fierce, and the hull probably only wants to be yarfed at the waterlineā¦
They probably donāt want to spill the containers off the deck, either. Just not a lot of slack in that system at all!
[ETA Sam Sam gets it]
Letās say you get the cables and winches long and strong enough to do the job. You still have to anchor them in the ground securely enough that when you turn the winch on it drags the 200,000 tonne vessel toward itself rather than pulling the winch toward the ship.
āSnow anchorsā trying to find traction on the surface of the surrounding dirt/sand arenāt gonna do it, youād have to sink some pilings deep into the ground to give yourself a secure enough spot to pull from. Not an insurmountable engineering challenge but not one you could pull off in a matter of days either.
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Wow, for a bunch of nerds everyoneās really lacking in the gray matter department. You just anchor the winch with another winch of course. Or a boat.
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All the way down!
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Yeah, my biggest concern with the winch idea is that youād want to pull from the waterline, not the desert surface.
But the advantage of cables is that you can use a lot of them in combination, rather than special building a single super strong one.
Itās true that the Egyptians have impressive examples of moving massive objects by using large numbers of ropes, so the concept is sound.
(Edited phrasing after considering that many of the rope-pullers were probably slaves.)
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200k tonne vessel embedded in the sand how deep? Not as simple as just turning the thing. Picking up a fencepost is fairly easy. Picking up a fencepost that has been planted 4 feet deep in soil is just about impossible. Multiply that effect by how many times?
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Or wedge other ships in front and behind and use them as anchors.
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Sounds like this ship just needs to pull itself up by its keelstraps
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Unload it, take it apart, and reassemble it. Done!
Build a big wall around it and add more water until it just floats free.
Shake the sand until it liquefies and just sail away!
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Says a lot about 2020/2021 that my only reaction to this whole debacle was a mild annoyance. Sigh. - Gustavo Woltmann
I think thereās a great lesson here about āsingle points of failureā.
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