150 ton ships?
They almost sound like modern cargo ships.
You need a comma and three more zeros....approximately. Recent aircraft carriers, for instance, have weighed in the 90,000 to 100,000 ton range, if memory serves.
After my previous reply I wanted to be certain of my figures, so here is an excerpt from Wikipedia for the Harry S. Truman:
Description Harry Truman (also known as HST within the Navy) is 1,092 ft (333 m) long, 257 ft (78 m) wide and is as high as a twenty-four-story building, at 244 feet (74 m). The super carrier can accommodate approximately 80 aircraft and has a flight deck 4.5 acres (1.8 ha) in size, using four elevators that are 3,880 ft² (360 m²) each to move planes between the flight deck and the hangar bay. With a combat load, HST displaces almost 97,000 tons and can accommodate 6,250 crewmembers.
That’s the size of a not very large Gulf shrimper. That is still pretty big for that time.
That’s the size of a not very large Gulf shrimper. That is still pretty big for that time.
A cubic yard of water is 1682 pounds, so 150 tons (that’s displacement, but you know that) is about 178.36 cubic yards of water. By comparison, the Nina (formerly the Santa Clara, renamed for Columbus’ expedition) displaced about 100 tons, probably less (I’ve seen it estimated as little as 80 tons, but basically the three ships were of a similar size); the Santa Maria was the largest of his three ships, and it displaced about 110 tons.
In Roman times, single quarried objects 200 tons and up were transported to Rome from Egypt, by sea; the grain haulers Rome used probably served as the models and/or were adapted for such use. While some experts consider 100 tons the usual size for a large vessel in Roman times, that can’t possibly be true.
In earlier times, when Athens was at its peak, it built very large grain haulers, which could only be loaded in Egypt (where the grain originated) and only handled in the Piraeus. By Roman times the grain market in Athens was not what it had been, and one of the ancient writers living in Athens noted that the people of the city came out to gawk when one of the Roman-era haulers had to put in at the Piraeus due to some problem or other.
150 tons I think means about a 60ft ship.