Shifting my paradigm: Ship Sizes.

[Tessa]

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.

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.