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Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page for this ship says it does have two 2500kW bow thrusters. I imagine if they were worth much in this situation we wouldn’t be talking about them, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given



Looking it up a 2500kW bow thruster gives a thrust of about 30 tons (https://www.thrustmaster.net/tunnel-thrusters/electric-motor...)

which is not going to do much here. It seems the trouble with a lot of solutions - the tugs can probably tug with a force of something like 600 tons combined but the ship weights 220,000 tons which is like putting a force of 5kg on a 2 ton car which is stuck. Probably not going to budge it.

Really you want something which will shove it with a force maybe 10% of the weight, say 20,000 tons but there don't seem to be many of those lying around.

I wondered if they tied a cable from the ship to one of the other large ships nearby and fired up the main engines if that could do something?


I imagine they could snap the cable, but that doesn't seem very useful.


For fluid dynamic reasons those sort of thrusters are only effective when the ship is stationary


Well, at the moment the ship is _very_ stationary.




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