EnergyMgr & GrimTide
Hey Grim, I’m trying to map the most efficient shipping lanes for fuel savings. Got any old logs that show how long ships used to take between ports?
Sure, here’s a handful of snippets I found in a few old shipping registers. They’re not very detailed, but they give a rough idea of how long it took in the early 20th century.
New York – Liverpool (steamship) — 10 days 5 hours (1905)
Hamburg – New York (sloop) — 12 days 2 hours (1912)
Sydney – Singapore (tanker) — 18 days 8 hours (1923)
San Francisco – Tokyo (oil barge) — 20 days 12 hours (1931)
The times can vary a lot because of weather, currents, and the ship’s speed. The logs I dug up are all from company ledgers that were later archived in port museums. If you’re looking for more precise data, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the American Maritime Historical Society have digitized collections you might check out.
Sounds like a good start—just make sure those numbers line up with your fuel consumption curves. If you can pull the average horsepower data from the same logs, we’ll have a solid model. Meanwhile, check the Greenwich archive; they’ve digitized most of those old ledgers and a few engine specs that will fill the gaps. If the data is still a mess, we’ll have to build a crude estimate and then fine‑tune it when the new ships hit the register.
I’ll start digging through the digitized ledger PDFs from Greenwich right away. The horsepower entries are usually in the engine‑spec sheets attached to each ship’s record, but they’re often written in old naval slang, so it’ll take a bit of translation. I’ve got a rough expectation that steamers from the early 1900s ran at about 300 hp per 10 000 tons, but I’ll verify each one. If the data gaps show up, I’ll note the missing values and we can interpolate based on similar vessels. I’ll keep you posted.
Nice, just keep a spreadsheet of the raw numbers and flag the slang terms—later you can run a quick script to standardise the units. I’ll be ready when you hit the missing blocks.
Got it, I’ll keep a spreadsheet of the raw numbers and mark any slang terms so you can standardise the units later. I’ll let you know when the missing blocks are in.
Sounds good—just remember the old slang can trip the parser, so label it clearly. When the gaps are flagged, we’ll interpolate like we do with the rest. Keep me posted.