Experiment · Isometric figure
Anatomy of an E-class container ship
A cutaway of a Maersk E-class vessel: the engine room, the holds, the accommodation block and a quay crane, with a small physical model behind the readout.
What is cut away
A section plane runs along the ship 12 m to port of the centre line, and everything nearer the camera is removed between two windows: the machinery space aft, and four holds amidships. Inside the first you can follow the exhaust and the power: fourteen cylinders, three turbochargers, an uptake into the funnel, then a thrust block, the shaft line, a stern tube and the propeller, with the rudder and its steering gear behind it. Five generating sets sit forward of the engine under the accommodation block.
The holds show cell-guided stacks on the tank top, with the same bays loaded above deck.
What the sliders do
Cargo moves the ship through a first-order hydrostatic model: displacement is lightship, stores and containers (about 10.3 t per TEU), plus enough ballast to hold a 9.5 m minimum draught. Draught is displacement over the block coefficient, length, beam and sea water density, so the hull really does settle in the water and the veil of sea over the near shell follows it.
The main engine slider uses the propeller law: power goes with the cube of revolutions from 80.1 MW at 102 rpm, speed goes with revolutions (nudged by the Admiralty rule for displacement) and fuel is power times 171 g/kWh. The propeller is drawn at a tenth of its real speed so you can see the blades.
Numbers
| Length, beam | 397 m, 56 m |
|---|---|
| Scantling draught | 15.5 m |
| Main engine | 14 cylinders, 80.1 MW at 102 rpm |
| Top speed | 25.5 kn |
| Capacity (class headline) | 14,770 TEU |
| Bays drawn | 21, stowed up to nine tiers on deck |
Real and drawn
The principal dimensions, the engine type and rating, and the headline capacity come from public sources. Everything else is drawn from general knowledge of how container ships are arranged, not from the builder's drawings: the hull form is a loft of waterlines I defined, the engine room layout and the generator count are stylised, and containers appear as stacks with their joints marked rather than as individual boxes.
Sources: E-class container ship, Emma Mærsk and Professional Mariner (rated engine speed). Sources disagree on capacity (about 11,000 to 15,500 TEU, depending on how it is rated), so the slider uses the 14,770 TEU class headline.
Drawn with Claude, from a small model, as plain SVG and a little JavaScript. No libraries, fonts or network requests.