Take a look at this internal combustion engine. Scroll to the bottom for some cool pics.

http://people.bath.ac.uk/ccsshb/12cyl/

Note that it can only spin at 102 RPM.

At that size, one rotation is such a long trip that it better pack some snacks.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

They featured these (or similar) on "How It's Made" the other week. Amazing. The irony is thinking about how many engines it would take to move the engine to the shipyard.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Since it's a two-stroke, I wonder if it makes that "ra-na-na-na-na-na" noise.

Just very slowly...

Years ago I got a tour of a natural gas pipeline pumping station which had engines (powered by the product, of course) which much have approached that size. I was standing next to a cylindrical object the size of a garbage can when the guide pointed out that it was a piston which had been removed in a previous overhaul. I hadn't recognized it because of the size.

I suppose the owners like single engine/single propeller designs for cost but if I was the captain I think I'd vote for some redundancy.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Yes. I didn't agree with that statement either.

Wow. How long do you think it'll be before somebody puts one in a car?

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"Bessie Braddock to Churchill "Winston, your drunk!"
Churchill: "Bessie, you're ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober""
the solar system

More like build a car aound one!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Thats the kind of thing my Dad used to look after for a living. Until he retired he was a Marine Cgief Engineer. He started on Steam in the 50s and finshed his days on big Diesel plant. He was the comissioning Engineer on a couple of big Tankers built in Japanese yards for British clients in the early 70s.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

That must have been interesting work.

Being around LARGE machinery is sort of exciting. I worked in a steel mill for a while when I was younger and being next to and watching 50,000 HP electric motors "roll" the steel ingots was cool. The BOF was also "thrilling" to watch. Hard to explain.

I suppose the owners like single engine/single propeller designs for cost but if I was the captain I think I'd vote for some redundancy.

So would I but apparently the engines have proven so reliable that redundancy isn't required. There are a lot of those container ships out there. I don't recall many of them having problems with engine failures. If container ships were being endangered or lost due to engine failures then they'd be building them with more than one engine.

As Bill Lear used to say, the more stuff you have, the more things there are to break.

Also, having one good engine out of two might not help anyway because then all of your thrust would be on one side of the hull...

Which is what the rudder's for. It'd just be hard to make a turn to the side that the working prop's on.

With an unfortunate name, Shafting a Ship is a good article about how many shafts a ship should have.

The article then goes on to show that that's not the case for warships due to needing redundant propulsion providers, the ability to provide steering via the props, etc.

Some cruise ships have the diesel engines turn generators that in turn power electric motors mounted in steerable pods. The arrangement allows some very large ships to cruise efficiently and then dock without need for tugs.

Most Tugs use directed thrust now.They have an Azimuth Propulsor' and don't have rudders at all.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

why must everyone always compare a big engine to an SUV engine?
most light duty trucks don't even have "big" engines any more. the biggest common gasoline engines i can think of are right at 6.2 liters- about 370 or so cubic inches.
the light truck diesels are i think at around 6.5 liters.
not exactly "big", when you can get a 7 liter (427) in a Corvette (one that makes over 500hp, gets 26 mpg, and weighs around 400 pounds. gotta love technology). go back 30 years ago, and you could get 500" torque monsters in mid sized Cadillacs, and 440"-460" engines in pretty much everything else.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I just realized my car engine and my skull both have the same capacity.

Ah jeez. Lighten up.

The last SUV I had had a smaller engine than my last project car....

The pickup I have now has an engine nearly twice the size of what my sons car has. I don't currently have a project car for comparison

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

"We threw a rod!"
"How high did it go?"
"This particular rod was in compression Sir. She went up about 10 feet. Four people injured, luckily there was no one next to it..."
"And?"
"Well, you might want to alert the deck crew. The upper deck is covered white from bird, umm, perturbation."
Probably not technically accurate, but I've had this hilarious image in my head after first reading this thread and the scale involved. Particularly the "how high?".
I thought the compression and consequent pressure might shoot that sucker straight up one or two hundred feet, but then I thought of the massiveness of the rod-piston system, and decided that that was a huge overestimation.

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pax et veritas

I want to assemble one in space with Sea Dragon launches.

Imagine that used to power a drill thru the moon.