BEHAVIOR AND HANDLING OF SHIPS

If you want to get a clear understanding of all possibilities of the big oil tankers as well as of all limitations imposed on them, you should definitely have a chance to try them out with no risk. And the Shiphandling Training Center located at Port Reve, in France will provide you with such a brilliant opportunity.

This is a place where a whole fleet of model tankers scaled 1:25 is being operated on a lake. It should be noted, however, that not only do vessel models offer this chance of handling scale replicas of the huge tankers under various conditions; the center also offers quite instructive overall view on the different maneuvers in a protracted time.

As a result, there is a lot of shiphandling operations conducted in this miniature world in a relatively short time, is five times faster than they would be in real life conditions. While the author of this book was observing the maneuvers on the lake analyzing them, it became quite clear to him that the positions of the pivot point plays a critically important role in explaining the vessel's behavior.