| Ship's Diary |
| During her time at sea, HMS Endurance will be sending back regular diaries to keep us all up to date with what is happening on this deployment. Use the links below to read extracts from the diary. |
| Some Interesting Facts |
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HMS ENDURANCE is propelled by 2 diesel engines, these are huge, producing over 8000 shaft horse power. That’s about the equivalent of 100 small family cars combined. Perhaps this is just as well as she displaces approximately 6000 tonnes, the equivalent of about 600 of those family cars. With her fuel tanks full to the brim of 1,200 cubic metres, that’s 1,200,000 litres, she can travel an impressive 24,600 nautical miles. Enough to comfortably get all round the world, but it would take over 12 weeks!
Let’s try to work out how far one of those family cars would travel with the same fuel – to make the maths easier I might round up or down a little. For the sake of the example let us say there are 5 litres to the gallon (it’s actually nearer to 4.5 but we want to understand the maths!) Let us also say that the family car does on average 50 miles to the gallon, which conveniently works out at 10 miles to the litre (50 divided by 5) For the sake of convenience let us ignore the fact that a statute mile is 1640 yards and a nautical mile is 2000 yards please bear with me and let the land mile be approximately the same as a sea mile. So… with 1,200,000 litres of fuel a small family car would travel 12,000,000 miles (fuel available multiplied by distance per litre). Seems a little further than HMS ENDURANCE doesn’t it? But… remember our Bergen Diesels are the equivalent power of 100 family cars, so let us adjust the distance travelled by the car = 12,000,000 divided by 100 = 120,000 miles Which is still just under 5 times further than our ship, which can travel 24,600 divided by 1,200,000 = 0.0205 miles to the litre or put another way 1,200,000 divided by 24,000 = 50 litres per mile (note the simplification again!) And… let’s not forget that the combined weight of the 100 cars would only be one sixth of HMS ENDURANCE so properly we should reduce their total distance by that amount also, as below: 120,000 (miles travelled) divided by 6 (factor of size) = 20,000 miles Thus… with some assumptions (reasonable or otherwise!) we have demonstrated that the propulsion plant onboard HMS ENDURANCE is easily as efficient as the average family car. Pretty impressive as that same diesel propulsion plant will also generate all the power required to support the crew of 120 men and women for over 12 weeks don’t you think? Next facts about how we generate the power, distil the water, feed the sailors, and sort the gash (that’s the naval terminology for rubbish)
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