Most people don’t know about the largest ship of all time:
The Knock Nevis was an Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) that sailed the oceans from 1979 to 2010. Throughout her career she had a bunch of names like Seawise Giant, Happy Giant, Jahre Viking, Knock Nevis, and Mont.
The ship was over 260,000 gross tons, had a displacement of 646,642 long tons when fully loaded, a length of 458.45 meters, a draft of 24.611 meters, a depth of nearly 30 meters, and an average speed of 16.5 knots. Her deck was nearly 7.8 acres and to put that into perspective, most houses in the United States are on a lot of 0.2 acres:
The ship was an absolute beast and was actually too big to safely navigate the English Channel, Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal. In clear weather, it took her two miles to make a complete turn around and five and a half miles to come to a complete stop.
To put the insane size of this ship into comparison, here she is up against some of the world’s tallest buildings:
Throughout the last half of the last century, the Suez Canal was closed multiple times due to instability in the region. This meant that ships had to sail all the way around Africa to get where they needed to go. Since it was now a much longer trip it made sense for companies to start building insanely large ships to make up for it. Because of the very unique situation that allowed this ship to exist in the first place, I doubt her record will be broken anytime soon.
In 1988 she was sunk during the Iran-Iraq War but was salvaged and returned to service. It was only in 2004 when she was laid up and 2010 when she went for scrap. If you thought Titanic was the largest ship out there, she is a kayak compared to this: