MS Veendam - How a ship works

This is the MS Veendam 

719' long, 57,000 tons, 1,350 passengers, 568 crew 

Owned by Holland America (which in turn is owned by Carnival). She gets her name from a peat producing town of 28,000 in the Netherlands (not far from Amsterdam).  Holland America names their ships by tacking on "dam" at the end to the end of words for places (if it doesn't already end in "dam"). The town next door to Veendam is Assen, which might have been an awkward name. Same for the town of Made (translation - maggot). Still, better than the town Whogivsa (OK, I made that one up). I spent a couple months on her in 2017 on a cruise to the Med. I used printed pictures of my model ship (Tanker McTankerface) to trade engine room tours with the Chief engineer. Normally all crew areas are strictly off-limits to passengers.  If you're on a cruise and want to see more of the ship - just ask (hint - ask early as they may or may not  do a tour. If they do it will likely be restricted to 6 people).

The Veendam was built in 1996 by the Italian shipyard Fincantieri.

By Sextum - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5 it, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1687013
Fincantieri, the 4th largest shipyard in the world is based in Trieste, Italy (next door to Croatia). That's not a cruise ship sitting in the ways. Fincantieri builds all kinds of ships. Radar is standard, but they charge extra for guns and missiles.

How a cruise ship actually works is quite interesting. Most passengers take for granted all the amenities that mimic what we're used to on land. With the exception of the life boats and spinning radar antennas most of it is hidden away on the lower decks (they also hide the crew down there).

Heading to the engine room

The engine room space is divided up for safety

The doors separating compartments are fire and waterproof. Although it's a pain-in-the-ass they do keep them shut all the time. This policy has paid off twice - The Veendam managed to crash into the Norwegian Wind in 2003 and a container ship in Argentina in 2011.

Control room - one of the few places near the engines where you don't need earplugs.

Those are indeed backup throttles (the 2 big black levers in the middle control the starboard and port electric motors, the ones to each side control the electric thruster motors). The engine room snipes only grudgingly let the boneheads on the bridge screw with their engine controls.

One of the most appreciated pieces of equipment is sitting on the counter.  No, not the printer, the espresso machine in the back ground.

I didn't get a close enough look, but I'm pretty sure that's a car stereo mounted on the board next to the screen (probably plays Van Halen on loop - Eddie and Alex were born in Holland)

Not sure what the red key in the lock-box on the left is for. Could be the abandon ship horn (or the pharmacy for engineering parties).

This is one of the 5 engines. Two are 12 cylinders, 3 are 8's. What you're seeing is the lower part of a massive hunk of steel. The green hatch covers gives you access to each individual cylinder, connecting rods, bearings, dead rats, etc. Ship engines run just like a truck engine - they're just bigger (and slower turning). This engine is about 12,000 horsepower. The manufacturer (Wartsila - based in Finland) makes engines that produce up to 7,670 hp per cylinder. Everything's bigger on a ship.

Ship engines can be run on a wide variety of fuels. Which one they use depends on where the ship is.  Normally in (or near) a port they are required to use diesel fuel. Diesel burns cleaner, but it's twice as expensive as bunker fuel.  Bunker fuel is really only one step above crude oil (which is why it's so much less expensive). It's nasty, smelly, sludge-like stuff. It's almost a solid at room temperature. In order to use it in an engine it has to be heated (steam pipes run through the fuel tanks) and very carefully filtered.

Fuel tanks on a ship are huge. I took this picture inside the tunnel/corridor that runs through it.

The big white box is called the "Day Tank". Enough fuel for several hours running (not a full day despite the name) is pumped into it - then carefully filtered

The blue cauldron/restaurant pressure cooker looking things are centrifugal fuel filters. Spinning the fuel is a fast way to thoroughly remove gunk from the fuel (diesel engines are really really picky about what you squirt into the cylinders). Particulates and water are a Bozo no-no. These engines are quite expensive. If you have 10 minutes to kill and want to see the engine taken apart click here crankshaft replacement . In the sped up video they replace the crankshaft on one of the Veendam's sister ships (the Zaandam) because the main bearings were wrecked. The $1,000,000 crankshaft weighs 15,000 pounds and the replacement process cost Holland America $15M. That'll teach 'em to make sure the lubricating oil is clean.

Looking down from the ship to the docks you will often see these types of tanker trucks pull up and connect hoses to the ship. They aren't refueling trucks (it would take a week to fuel up the ship using tanker trucks). What they're doing is taking away the fuel gunk (and assorted used oils and lubricants). It all goes back to the refinery for recycling.

    This is an in-port refueling ship. They tie up directly to the ship           and connect huge hoses. Normally it takes several hours to refuel       the ship. Having one of these babies come to your ship and hook       up will cost you upwards of $1,000,000. Oddly, bunker oil isn't         sold by the gallon.  It's sold by the ton. This is because it's                 volume is very temperature dependent.

    Similar to a fuel ship, sometimes a tug will yank over a fuel                barge.

                                  Only navies refuel at sea.

      No commercial airliner would ever attempt this dangerous stunt.

Like most newer ships, the Veendam propulsion is a diesel/electric affair (same way most trains work).  The big diesel engines are not connected directly to the propeller shaft (by contrast - large container ships engines connect directly to the propeller shaft. They start the engine to go and stop it when they reach the next port). The 5 Veendam engines all connect to generators.

Ship size clutch (the engine is to the right)

You can see the power output shaft from the engine in the middle

This green box is one of the generators (to the right is the clutch, then the engine)

My model (Tanker McTankerface) runs on just 12 volts. That way I don't accidentally zap myself into fine particles of smoke. 6,000 volts demands a great deal of respect and care.

Older ships like the Prinsendam (the ship I rode in 2016 to the Arctic Cap) connect the big diesels directly to a gigantic transmission and then straight to the props. All the transmission does is split the power output - some goes to the prop, some goes to a generator to power on-board systems.

Prinsendam transmission. Yeah I know, this big hunk of metal could be just about anything.

The advantage of a diesel/electric configuration is that any of the 5 engines can drive the ship. If you need to take one off-line for servicing its real easy. Most of the time at sea they only have 1 or 2 engines running. When they transit the African east coast they'll light off all 5 (so they can try to outrun Somali pirates).

So where does all this juice go?

This big green box contains an enormous electric motor (20,000+ hp).  The big barbecue looking thing is a giant bearing holding the shaft coming from the engine. This is the gizmo that actually spins the props, but getting all that power to the props isn't quite that simple.

The big electric drive motor is just to the right.  You can see the shaft itself on its way to the prop. The three barbecue looking things are real important. Two are just bearings holding the shaft steady.  The one in the middle is the thruster bearing.

When you spin the prop - it shoves the hell out of the propeller shaft. That shoving force needs to be transferred to the ship somehow.  All that gray steel you see under the green bearing housing is essentially how the work of the prop rotation translates into something useful for the ship (i.e. making it move). Without going into a long boring explanation about exactly how the thruster bearing works, it is interesting to note that the above design was first put into service by the Germans on their WWI U-boats. Before the Germans adopted the newer design (and then the rest of the world) the older thruster bearing was a cantankerous contraption was much hated by the engineering staff.

So all this is well and good for going forwards. What happens when you need to back the ship up? In theory you could just reverse the polarity of the big electric motor driving the ship. The Veendam can in fact do this - but the lag time between "shifting into reverse" and actually having the prop counter rotate takes so long that the ship will likely smash into the dock (if you want to see that happen click here  Big ferry destroys quay).  Instead, the Veendam has the ability to change the pitch of the prop on the fly (that way the thrust from the props is in reverse but they're still spinning in the same direction).  

This is the shaft near the very back end of the ship (notice how the nuts on the far right are blurred - I toured the engine room while at sea. The shaft is spinning). The big green collar on the left (with the hoses connected to it) determines the pitch of the prop blades by shoving a control rod back and forth. The gray wall in the back ground is the hull of the ship, about 20' below water.

This is a close up of the green collar on the right. Its nothing more than a mechanical indicator.

After you get the ship moving, then steering it becomes rather important. On the Veendam they use two conventional rudders (as opposed to the Queen Mary which doesn't have any - the props themselves swivel). 

This isn't the rudder of the Veendam. They aren't quite this huge.

The hydraulic forces the sea exerts on a ship's rudder(s) are staggering. The rudders themselves, while not solid metal, are seriously strong (and heavy). Therefore it takes a great deal of power to move them. One of the traditional ways to control a rudder's alignment to the ship is to have hydraulic pistons connected to arms attached to the top of the rudder. This has been the standard for years on pleasure boats (still is). 

This is the steering mechanism commonly used on boats.

I was expecting to see a super-sized version of the piston/ram arrangement on the Veendam.

I was wrong. The piston arrangement (standard on ships for more than 60 years) has been supplanted by massive "Rotary Vane Steering Gears". The circular green thing in the middle of the picture can twist the rudder more efficiently than the old way. You can actually see the top of the rudder post - it's the big circular steel thing sticking up vertically a few inches out of the middle of the green thing. The rudder post is the top part of the rudder that connects to the ship through a watertight sleeve in the stern.

Rudders have an inherent problem - they only work when water is moving across them. When you're trying to get away from the dock (at super slow speed) they're useless. To get a ship away from the dock far enough that you can throttle up the engines and put the rudders into play you have two options. First is tugs:

Oftentimes when you come into port you'll see tugs hovering close-by. I've never gotten a straight answer about whether they charge for being there or they are just hoping something goes wrong and you have to throw them a line. Reminds me of lawyers following an ambulance. 

I didn't need 5 pictures of tugs (I just happen to like 'em).

The problem with tugs is money. Connecting to a tug can cost  thousands of dollars (for example the tug charge for bringing a tanker to dock can easily be $50,000). The other problem with tugs is availability. Cruise ships get around this by installing large thrusters. 

The thrusters are those two big horizontal holes near the bottom of the ship covered by gratings.

Behind the grating is a large transverse mounted propeller. Normally you can't see the thrusters. This picture was taken as the water was draining out of the dry-dock the ship is sitting in.

On a ship the size of the Veendam the thrusters are more than 3,000 horse power each. The Veendam has two forward and one in the stern. She has the ability to resist a 25 knot cross wind. The older Prinsendam is not blessed with anywhere near this much thruster power. As a result - she eats up half of the entire Holland America yearly tug budget.

After the ship burns the fuel in the engine you have a lot of hot gases. In a car those gases leave the engine, go through the catalytic converter, the muffler, then out the tail pipe. Not on a ship.

The orange megaphone looking thing is one of the ship's horns. If you're up on the top deck when they blow it - you'll jump 3 feet in the air. They're LOUD. By-the-way, not all of the stainless steel tubes sticking up are engine exhausts. The smaller ones are incinerator vents.

Before a ship dumps the engine gases they try to extract as much of the "free" heat that they can (some of the heat also comes from the engine cooling water).

These big cylinders are evaporators. This is the main source of fresh drinking water on board. Cruise ships use a phenomenal amount of freshwater.  The Veendam makes around 260,000 gallons of water per DAY. More about freshwater later.

One thing ship operators worry about is how to manage all the systems that need a constant source of sea water.

This is called a "Sea Chest". It's really nothing more than a big hole in the bottom of the ship.  From the sea chest you can filter the seawater and connect up as many pipes as you need for seawater without having to drill a hole in the side of the ship each time. When cruise ships travel up the Amazon river they have a problem. The water they take in is so muddy they can't filter it quickly enough. On those trips you'll notice the captain (after the chief engineer has a fit) will ask passengers to limit fresh water usage.

Another use for the engine hot gases is to heat the hot water for the showers, kitchen, etc. This is done by the use of a heat exchanger (pass the heat from the gases to the freshwater). The radiator on your car is a heat exchanger. With the amount of freshwater the ship blows through per day I thought the water heater would be huge.

Once again I was wrong. That blue thing is all it takes to produce enough hot water for the whole ship. Exhaust gases are hot!

This is a Formula 1 engine at full throttle on a test stand. Notice how the exhaust pipes are glowing orange.

So now do they blow the burnt gases up the stack? In the old days - yes. 

By today's standards this smoke plume is awful. If your ship belches like this one does almost all ports in the world will ban you from entering.

Today almost all cruise ships use exhaust scrubbers.

This is a picture of an exhaust scrubber being installed. They're enormous (and expensive) and they work. Scrubbing will remove 98% of the pollutants (like sulfur dioxide and soot). Go back 6 pictures to the one of the exhaust stack and try to guess which engine is actually running.

As you would guess, scrubber technology comes in several different forms depending on what fuel you're burning and where the ship is operating. In it's simplest form all you are doing is spraying a heavy mist of seawater into a big chamber as you pass the exhaust gases through it. If you're out at sea, seawater is sufficiently alkaline for the scrubber to work just fine. The water from the process is pumped back overboard and the sludge is collected, dried, and stored for the next port disposal. If your ship is floating in fresh water the system doesn't work at all.  In those circumstances you have to add chemicals to the spray to make it work. I'm guessing the chief engineer is quite busy tweaking the system during a Panama Canal transit. 

Back to the fresh water making. Most of the water is made using the evaporators. You can also convert seawater to freshwater by jamming it through membranes with holes so small that they strip the larger salt molecules away and only permit water to flow across. This is called reverse osmosis and I have a small R/O system in the kitchen. On a ship, of course, it's much larger.

The white pipes are the ends of 10' long membrane chambers. You can tell by the position of the red stopcock handles that the system isn't currently powered up. The membranes are quite fragile. Once you start using one it's best to not shut it off.

It takes high pressure to force the water across the membranes. The blue electric pump provides it.

At this point you could just pump the freshwater all around the ship to where it's needed, but that isn't what happens. The engineers put minerals into the water.

This tank contains a big lump of minerals.  As they pump the water through the tank the minerals slowly dissolve into the water. If you ask why they bother to do this the standard answer is "the water is too fresh for long term human consumption". I, however, think that's bullshit. I'm guessing the real reason they dump so much minerals into the water is that it makes the water quite "hard".  If you've ever taken a shower in a place that has soft-water you spend way more time in the shower "trying to get the soap off". With super hard water your skin feels rough immediately as you rinse. I'm guessing this lowers the ship's daily water usage considerably. The downside to super hard water is drinking it. If you have kidney issues I recommend you bring your own bottles of fresh drinking water or you'll swell up like the Michelin Man.

Ships don't pump water around like tall buildings do. With tall buildings you often see a water tank on the roof.

Having a water tank high up makes providing water pressure real easy - each floor has it's own water pressure regulator (otherwise the lower floors would have water pressure like the faucet was hooked up to a fire truck). On a ship, having a big heavy water tank on the top deck would be a real issue. Ships want to keep as much weight as low in the bowels of the ship that they can (otherwise they have a nasty habit of capsizing). 

The bright blue thing is a pressure regulator. The row of piping runs up to only one deck per pipe. That way each deck has the correct water pressure but the big heavy fresh water holding tank stays way below decks.

What happens when all that water comes back (i.e. waste water?) Cruise ship waste control is taken very seriously.  So seriously that they have an officer dedicated solely to the task (the environmental engineer). 

In the old days the commodes were nothing more than the two square trashcan looking boxes. They were connected directly to holes in the side of the ship. Their main function is obvious, the secondary function was to keep the sailor from being washed overboard. BTW marine toilets are called "heads" - due to their usual location at the head of the ship.

Water treatment is complicated. In general it's divided into 'black' and 'grey' water.  Black water is the term assigned to toilet water (and is not a comment on ship food). Grey water is the stuff that a dishwasher would produce. Black water is essentially treated by bio-remediation. 

This is one of the biotank doohickeys. Although it looks a little suspect cleanliness-wise, it didn't smell at all (thank God!) 

That stuff behind the glass (with the word "Jets" on it) is exactly what you think it is. 

After further drying, the resulting solid waste is packaged and removed at the next port. 

Grey water has any oils removed and is then subjected to intense UV sterilization (the bright stainless steel horizontal pipe with the two red vertical handles connected to it) ) and dumped overboard. This water is quite clean and doesn't pose the marine hazard that the old way of adding chlorine to the water did.

Cruise ships are built to handle the weather almost anywhere in the world.  When they are operating in a hot, high humidity environment (Caribbean) air conditioning becomes a big deal.

The a/c load on a ship in the tropics is massive. Down in engineering they provide chilled water to the rest of the ship for on site handling units. What each of those big green tanks does - I don't know (trying to converse in an active engine room while wearing earplugs is like playing charades)

One of the biggest dangers at sea that sailors fear is fire. When you're on a cruise you'll often see the crew conducting fire drills. Stay out of their way, but if you get the chance, watch closely. The ships all have highly trained teams of firefighters on-board.  You may see your cabin steward wearing turnouts.

The firefighting support provided by the engineering department is considerable.

The first line of defense is this pressurized water tank that supplies the ceiling fire sprinklers. Using this pressurized setup is one more safety feature - in the event of total electrical failure the operation of the sprinklers is still assured.  If you break the head of a sprinkler in your cabin you can expect this much water to soak your bed.

Fire on board is a very serious matter.  In 1980 the Prinsendam (not the one I was on) suffered a pipe rupture in the fuel system. That squirted a stream of oil onto a hot exhaust pipe - triggering an inferno within seconds. The crew of the Prinsendam did everything right, but the design of the ship built in 1973 had a hidden flaw. They had the latest and best technology–foam applicators, full-flooding carbon dioxide, remote controlled ventilation and fuel shut-down systems. What no one had considered was the location of main fire fighting supply pump.

                              This baby right here

The freak fire had cut off the power to the pump (and it's back-ups). 200 miles off of Ketchikan, Alaska the Prinsendam was in serious trouble.

By SSgt. Richard D. McKee - U.S. DefenseImagery photo VIRIN: DF-SN-86-12843, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17946380

The rescue of all the passengers and crew makes for interesting reading Prinsendam sinking In the end, they simply couldn't get enough water to put the fire out and the Prinsendam sank in 8,000' of water. From an engineering standpoint they realized that if they could have powered that big green pump remotely (i.e. not from an engine room generator - all of which had been flooded by the C02 system) they could have saved the ship. With this (and other things) in mind Holland America retrofitted big emergency generators on the top, outside deck on all of their ships. Then came the infamous 2014 Carnival Triumph "Poop Cruise" (an engine room fire wiped out the generators - which in turn powered the vacuum pumps for the toilets). Today cruise line operators are prepared to power more than just the basics needed for ship safety (the Poop Cruise was a public relations nightmare - even though no one was in danger). 

This is a couple of the bilge pumps. The "emergency" they're referring to could be a lot of things but one is fire.  When you have to fight a fire with lots of water you could pump so much water on board that you sink the ship just trying to put the fire out. Notice how the valve has a chain and lock on it. This makes the Coast Guard happy. Maybe that's what the red key in the control room is for.

Besides emergency generators, cruise lines are required to have enough battery power to provide 24 hours for specific essential services (nav, radios, lights, beer refrigerator). Hidden behind these green panels is enough power to make a submarine skipper jealous.

Keeping a ship from rocking makes all the land lubbers happy. Note - you can only mitigate rocking motion. You can't do anything about pitching motion except slow down or stay in port.  Pitching happens when the ship slams into a wave. 

Guarantee you more than a few people did a face plant when the ship hit this wave. 

To reduce the ship roll they deploy stabilizers.

These are deployed into their active position whenever the ship gets into rough water (there's one on each side of the ship).  When the ship rolls right they try to "fly" the ship to the left.  Stabilizers work pretty well but they produce a lot of drag (which is why the captain will keep them retracted for as long as possible). The movement of the fins is controlled by a computer and gyroscopes. Over the years the control of the stabilizers has gotten more and more sophisticated. Currently the stabilizers are constantly in the learning mode and adjust to the sea state - going so far as to anticipate the next wave movement (not just react to it).

The two horizontal green bars (with the big hydraulic ram in-between) are part of the mechanism that extends the fins. The hull of the ship is just to the right.

This is the hydraulic unit that powers the movement of the fins.

So (if you're a ship nerd) can you see the stabilizer fins when the boat isn't in dry dock? Yes, but it takes persistence.

When you're standing on the dock next to the ship look for the "keyhole" symbol (next to "TUG").  That's the symbol for the location of the fins (if they fail to retract - knowing where they are is extremely important for tug captains). When you spot it look directly up at the ship and look for a landmark you can easily remember (I count ship lights starting from the stern).

This is looking straight down from the top deck. The stabilizer fin is sticking out next to the edge of the lifeboat (sorry, have never figgered out how to insert an arrow onto the picture). It's subtle, but look for the discoloration under the water to the right of the orange canvas cover on the lifeboat. The fin is about 12' underwater. In real time you'll only get the occasional fleeting glimpse as the water clears in the exact right spot.

Fin stabilizers are the only practical way to dampen a rolling ship, however, they only work when the ship is underway. Back in the early 1900's naval engineers experimented with gyroscopic roll damping.

These are 25 ton gyroscopes being installed in 1917 on the USS Henderson 

In WW II the Henderson was converted into a hospital ship. Gyroscopic roll dampers will also work while the ship is at anchor. This feature was much appreciated by the surgeons.
By Unknown - Navsource Online - US Navy photo # NH 99308 from the collections of the US Naval Historical Center, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3638357

The downside to gyroscopic stabilizers is cost, size, and weight. They need to weigh around 5% of the weight of the ship (about 6,000,000 pounds for the Veendam - which is why they don't have them).

Cruise ships dump absolutely nothing overboard.  All the solid waste is hand sorted for recycling at the next port or is incinerated.

Odds and ends

While the Veendam is powered by diesel, they still have a need for lots of steam (mostly used in the galley). Behind the guy in the orange shirt is a good, old fashioned boiler.

The big gray box marked "Atlas Copco" is huge air compressor. Compressed air is useful for lots of things - but on a ship it has one really really important function. Compressed air is how you start one of the big engines (there is no hand crank backup system). To start one of those monsters they blow high pressure air into intake manifold. Hearing one thunder to life is impressive.

Despite the myriad safety systems, things can still go wrong (fires, black water holding tank explosions). Engine rooms are a dangerous place and they aren't easy to get out of as they're so far down in the ship. This waterproof, fire proof door leads to a ladder that extends all the way to the upper deck (that would be a helluva climb).

This sign on one of the doors below decks is merely a reflection on the realities of cruising. People die all the time on the long cruises. The majority of people who can afford to take 2 months off usually means retired. On one cruise I became friends with the ship's doctor (Bones). The demographics for the cruise was 90 people over 80, 80 people over 90, and 4 people over 100. We lost 7 on that trip. The ships all have a dedicated cooler (they don't store the stiffs in the meat locker.

This is the Chief Engineer for the Prinsendam

One of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. Unfortunately he wasn't named Scotty.

 I cannot change the laws of physics, Captain! A've got to have thirty minutes.