Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
Given the ship's length - 150m - I would have guessed the GRT to be around 7000, the same as an Empire or Liberty ship; but the design is more modern and obviously built to maximize cargo space in ways not fully understood sixty years ago.
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Liberty ships are like the red shirt of cargo ships from that time period. Very little engineering went into designing them - thus why so many were lost initially, engineers never took into account the poor grade steel + low atlantic water temp = very brittle steel. Many Liberty ships cracked in half (literally) without a torpedo hit at all, the ships tonnage load was more than the ships hull could handle at such low temperatures causing them to frequently break apart.
While a simple solution was found to reslove this problem, Liberty ships were never designed to last very long; whole idea being quantity over quality. If the ship could be built in only several days time it only needed to make a couple round trips in order to be successful.