[Music] [Music] how do you get a 240 meets a hundred thousand ton oil tanker like this safely into port when you do it with one of these one of the world's most powerful Harbor tugs while giant ships like tankers maybe the glory boys of today's industrious high seas it's the smaller working boats packed with raw power that do the pulling patrolling surveying and rescuing that make it all possible forget about ships when it comes to life at sea it's the working boats that pack in the power speed and technology but which of them is the pick of the bunch [Music] man has always been busy on the high seas be it fishing fighting trading traveling or simply having fun but none of this would be possible without a range of vessels ensuring safe but hang on I think someone's in trouble [Music] listen [Music] life boats characterized by brute strength and a refusal to sink in the angriest of seas lifeboats like this save 8,000 people a year in British waters alone but it wasn't always like this when the lifeboats service began in 1824 all they had was a 36 foot rowing boat not only did the lifeboat men have to face horrific seas they had to power their boat through the massive waves themselves even with 12 strong man behind the oars it would have been incredibly difficult and time-consuming to battle through rough seas just to get a mile out little wonder that until the introduction of powered lifeboats in the 1890s hundreds of people lost their lives in British waters every year but with the help of steam then petrol and diesel engines lifeboats changed completely now they could get far out to sea fast but stranded sailors and the men and women whose job it is to rescue them have never had it as good as they do today I give you the all-weather Trent class lifeboat take it away guys the Trent class just powers into the action no seas or weather will stop her from venturing out to save your life with a top speed of 25 knots and a range of 250 miles she can rescue an incredible 100 people at a time and the key to all this performance is a combination of power and structural strength this is a tough vessel tackling terrible sea conditions is all about squeezing as much power as you can into as light and a smaller boat as possible and the Trent class lifeboat certainly squeezes in that power to v10 840 horsepower turbo diesel engines powering two propellers to be precise one each now the designers really had their work cut out because to fit these two engines in one of them had to be mounted facing astern and the other had to be mounted facing ahead I've got to get my hands on the throttle of these power she's as good as she promises as far as emergency response vehicles go this one's pretty responsive but all that power would be useless without a massively strong hull at speed a life boat hits waves every few seconds subjecting a hull to the same force as a double-decker bus falling off a two-story building the boat has to be very strong without putting on extra weight which could slow her down so she has a brilliantly clever space-age hold it's four inches thick yet weighs next to nothing and is reinforced with a weird material called Kevlar and this is Kevlar now it may look a bit flimsy but underwater once it's mixed with a resin it's 20 times stronger than steel just to give you an idea of how strong it is they make bulletproof vests out of it even if the lifeboats hit full-on by a giant ship it's trying to rescue it's still very hard to sink her throughout a bulkheads sealed with watertight doors isolating any damage from the rest of the boat but even massive power and a space-age hull won't stop you being rolled over by freak waves and over the years many brave lifeboat men have lost their lives waves aren't a problem for the Tran class though did you ever have one of these a weeble remember how they wobbled but never fell down lifeboats are designed in much the same way with all the heaviest components like engine and transmission mounted as low as possible this produces a low center of gravity which combined with a large buoyant volume in the wheelhouse means that the boat is inherently unstable when it's upside-down so if a massive wave does capsize the lifeboat it'll rise itself in seconds brilliant not only is this boat fast anion indestructible it also bristles with state-of-the-art computer technology for tracking down the people it's trying to rescue what you do is you enter an area and pattern of search into this plotter in this case parallel lines then that information is transferred by a satellite powered global positioning system into an autopilot unit the autopilot steers the boat allowing the crew to concentrate on keeping a lookout and to get a really good view they can take control on the upper deck several meters above the tossing waves the Trent class lifeboat uses massive power a space-age hull and state of the art navigation equipment to save more lives at sea than ever before she's the best friend that every sailor hopes never to need she can take pretty much anything the sea has to throw at her or can she taxi [Music] things lurking amongst the waves can even defeat a lifeboat we're talking about the sneakiest and most dangerous of them all mines aha meet Pat she's an RC MDV a remote-controlled mine disposal vehicle and that over there is her mum a Royal Navy Sandown class mine countermeasure vessel the Armed Forces love this snappy abbreviations meter 4 meter the sand down class is one of the most expensive warships ever built she's all about precision and high technology designed to detect and destroy a deadly array of mines some newly laid some lingering in the sea since World War two so how do mines work well mines are either bottom mounted sitting silently on the bottom like this or they float while tethered to the seabed now mines can be triggered in a number of ways the old type of contact triggered meaning the target vessel physically has to touch them but modern mines are much more sophisticated some can detect the magnetic signatures generated by the steel hull of a passing ship this triggers a switch in the mind and the mind goes off we can demonstrate this with our plastic boat with two magnets in the bottom and a needle of our compass is the switch in the mine here we go and that's why this mine hunter is one of the largest warships ever built out of glass reinforced plastic not only does this give her a reduced magnetic signature to prevent her triggering mines it also makes it tough enough to withstand the shock from explosions some modern mines can be triggered off by the sound of a passing ship an underwater microphone known as a hydrophone picks up the waves emanating from a whole of the passing vessel the microphones can even recognize the sounds from specific target vessels and only detonate when these go past [Music] but the sand down has this problem covered too by being able to switch from her diesels to quieter running electric engines when mines are detected nearby but it's the amazing agility of this vessel that separates her from the pack to avoid unforeseen mines or to maintain a precise position whilst deactivating them she's got the twisting and turning ability of a small speedboat let me show you let's start off with the emergency stop [Music] [Applause] she can do 180 degree turn [Music] [Applause] [Music] but why stop at 180 when you can do the full 360 [Applause] incredible 52 meters long 580 tons and you can chuck her about like a small sports car brilliant so how does the sand down managed to pull all that off well the answer lies in her sophisticated propulsion units at the rear of the sand down a tu vois snyder propulsion units similar to the one we're looking at now nothing like regular propellers that point backwards these whisk like blades suspended from the bottom of the hull allow thrust of any magnitude to be generated in any direction so not only do they propel the boats they also steer it as well [Music] well now we've seen how the Sandown class protects herself from the threat posed by minds how does she remove that threat for the rest of the seafaring world that don't have these sophisticated defenses the traditional way of neutralizing Minds is to cut the tether and then quite literally sweep them away to a controlled environment to be destroyed hence the term minesweeper but the sand down class is not a minesweeper she's a mine hunter and works in a far more focused way standing in the main mine hunting opsroom is a bit like being next to a giant computer game console although when you play minesweeper here the stakes are a little higher the first task is to find your mind the sand down does this by dropping a sonar pod into the water beneath a-- it produces sound waves which bounce off underwater objects and produce these images there are four sonar screens in the ops room there are two over there to search for the mine to locate it and there are two over here to classify us now the one on the right is an expanded view basically the one on the left and the mine itself is that orange dot there the boat's ultra accurate propulsion system comes into its own during the sonar scanning process as the mine hunter needs to sit very still and not drift so we've located the mind on the ship's owner at this stage of the equation ends a pap our little yellow submarine she's got her own sonar two cameras black white and color and some explosive are we going to send her down to take a better look well she's in position off you go papac there are note Liverpudlian rock stars steering this electrically powered yellow submarine she's controlled from the ops room onboard the mine hunter so Pat is in the water and I'm controlling her with this little joystick here [Music] we do actually have a view of the mind you can see it quite clearly I'm going along the length of it now with PAP a bit to the right there we go and there is a real line exactly when you find a mind like this you suddenly realize what horrible weapons they are lurking down in the darkest depths so let's get rid of it 5 ft you yes sir [Music] [Music] I think we got it well she certainly makes the sea a safer place but is the sand down class the toughest safety vessel with the toughest job if you need to deal with something a bit bigger something much bigger something that if it ran aground would cause monumental damage you need a completely different form of vessel you need one of these the world's most powerful tug [Music] some boats have massive power some have great precision but this one needs both the Hopeton one of the world's biggest harbor tugs which pushes and pulls the world's biggest ships and we're on our way to meet one right now that over there is a 240 meter long tanker it weighs a hundred thousand tons and takes several miles to turn or stop [Music] no problem when you're cruising the open seas with nothing in your way but moving her into the close confines of a port is a completely different ballgame and that's where the tug comes in this tiny 43 meter boat doing for the giant tanker what it can't do for itself Park and how by using her phenomenal power and agility so just to see the amazing agility of the hopes and here we've got both rudder propellers pointed in that direction and I'm going to put the power on are we going to spin round what's this [Music] we're gonna steal the boat leaning over and we're getting into that nice pirouette system about 60 on both engines although the Hopeton weighs nearly 2,000 tons she's incredibly agile there's no rudder as such but the two ducted propellers do the steering [Music] incredible I've got control of a 2000 tongue tug in the Firth of Forth spinning merrily from now until eternity and now to put that raw power and agility to the test let's park we've come eight miles out into the Firth of Forth to meet this tanker and the whole process of docking us starts now the first thing we're going to do is attach ourselves to the tanker using this incredible rope look at it a line snapping when you've got a hundred thousand tonnes of tanker attached to you could be disastrous so these ropes are thicker than your arm and made of fantastically strong steel light right we're all tied up let's motor [Music] the tanker is still powering itself forward at seven knots but now the tugs are attached they are acting as the huge ship steering and brakes and will control its docking it's a little while before we reach the terminal so let's take a look at some of the heavy-duty technology that makes the docking possible [Music] what I'm trying to say is Wow to 236 litre rolls-royce turbo Diesel's developing 10,000 horsepower that's the same as a hundred Land Rovers and gives massive massive pulling power but it's not just the engines that give the Hopeton its pushing and pulling grunts each three meter propeller is housed in an open-ended cylinder creating a suction effect this vastly increases the amount of thrust that can be produced it effectively means the tug is pushed and pulled through the water [Music] it's all that thrust coupled with a cleverly shaped hole that lets the tug literally grip the water that makes the tugs pulling power so enormous but just how enormous well a tugs pulling power is measured in terms of the wonderfully named bollard pull it's established by hitching a giant version of this spring pulley from the tug in this case me to a bob fixed to the key and then giving the tug a bit of welly here we go 1/3 power half power for power 30 pounds so I can manage a bollard pull of a measly 30 pounds or point zero one three tonnes back to reality the Hopeton has a bollard pull of 124 tonnes which is in fact a world record for a harbor tug it's so powerful they actually had difficulty finding a harbour wall strong enough to test it against so really tankers like this a pretty small fry time for the Hopeton to put all that power into action it's 2,000 tons pitted against the 100,000 tons of the tanker now all those amazing pulling power measurements are shown up here on the screen in the bridge we're about to start the docking process so there's the tanker and there's the terminal we're gonna birther onto [Music] the two tugs are now spinning the tank around it's a six minute process Dell many over there is pushing the bow of the tank around and unhoped them here we're pulling the stern round and then where the tanker is completely all the way around both tugs will then push the tank onto the berth about 150 meters of movement you've heard of extreme ironing well this is extreme parking the two massive v16 diesel engines producing nearly 10,000 horsepower are manipulated by these two simple joysticks here quite incredible half way round although the tankers moving very slowly it's 100,000 ton weight gives it massive momentum and it's taking all the raw power of the tugs to control it so the swing has now been arrested Hopeton is no longer pulling the tank around the momentum created by del many pushing the tankers bow round as created enough swing and we're now pushing the tanker on to the birthing position [Music] getting into that space in the multi-story will never seemed so tricky again and the jobs are Goodin 100,000 ton tanker no brakes and longer than 23 double-decker buses parked on a dock that's not much bigger than it is and all thanks to the massive raw power of the tongue weighing 50 times less than the tanker quite brilliant [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
