Anatomy of an E-class container ship

An isometric cutaway of a Maersk E-class container ship (the Emma Mærsk class), drawn with Claude’s anatomy skill. A section plane removes the near half of the ship in two places, so you can look into the machinery space aft and four holds amidships, with the accommodation block, the funnel and two gantry cranes loading it from the quay.

The figure runs on a small model rather than being a picture of one. Cargo moves the ship through a first-order hydrostatic calculation, so it settles in the water and the veil of sea over the hull follows it. The main-engine slider uses the propeller law (power goes with the cube of revolutions, from 80 MW at 102 rpm) to turn the propeller and set speed and fuel burn. Switch the scene to underway and the quay and cranes fade out, the sea starts to move past, and a wake builds with the speed.

The dimensions, engine rating and headline capacity come from public sources. The hull form, the engine-room layout and the container stowage are my approximations, not the builder’s drawings, and the page says so. The wake is drawn with lines in the same style as the rest of the figure, not with a shader.

It needs JavaScript for the views, sliders and motion; without it the figure is a still drawing and the text still reads.