Sorry for not responding sooner, almost finished my meds, and am starting to feel better, just two more days and one dose and I'll (hopefully) be back to normal.
Ok, as I understand it the process for loading a ship in those days was:
- Train rolls up with boxcars and flatcars full of sacks and crates of miscellaneous goods
- Blokes with handcarts unload all the crap from trains into sheds
- Shuffle stuff back and forth between sheds to consolidate/sort by destination, ship, hold, eventually on loading day putting together a big pile of cargo on the dock beside the ship, all by hand etc
- A gang of blokes pile sacks and boxes into a cargo net to be craned. The standard dockside cranes IIRC were mostly sized for about 3 tons as the max practical load, old pictures show rows and rows of identical cranes in most ports
- Net is lifted into one of the many holds on the ship
- Another gang of blokes pull out the sacks and boxes and stow them, where necessary building temporary frameworks of lumber etc to hold the cargo in place and allow them to stack it efficiently (dunnage)
To unload, reverse the process. It could take weeks to load or unload a big ship with dozens of men labouring full time. Imagine packing hundreds of house removals at once into a 10,000 ton truck. Incredibly labour intensive, a relatively skilled job but also physically exhausting. Lots of stuff lost, broken, stolen. Obviously, exceptions applied I would think getting cargo onto a blue riband liner or mail ship would be pretty slick.
Note that a lot of ships in that timeframe (like Hog Islanders, Liberty/Victory ships) had their own cranes onboard to let them work places with no cranes or to skip queuing for cranes, if you image search the vertical posts with the angled booms are very distinctive in the silhouette.
Unloading to the water isn’t generally helpful since then it leaves the customer with the issue of getting the cargo from the water onto land or another ship, but there is another niche here which is unloading to lighters if there is no functional port for the ship to dock at, or if the cargo needs to go up a river etc. But in that case you might also look up LASH/Lighters Aboard Ship, barge carriers etc which would also allow you to get some more mechanisation/unitization of cargo handling.
Ok, so if I'm reading and understand this all correctly, it sounds like there was a great deal more 'handling' in the S&H back in the day, lol.
For my ideas, HH Jr's private Yacht's are going to far off places, and doing things there that require much more than dropping the anchor, and so I'm wanting some specific ideas for how to get the 'deck edge' elevators in civilian use, so cargo of all kinds can be unloaded from the ship to a dock, onto another ship, into the water directly, or onto a beach. So cranes and elevators, and lighters, and some variety of engineering equipment will all need to be carried/used/deployed/recovered from the 'yacht'.
We have the Hog-Island shipyard getting purchased something post 1921/pre 1930 by HH Sr, so after the last historical ship is completed, but before the place gets scavenged down to nothing, so we have a great big shipyard that in OTL vanished shortly after WWI historically, but in this ATL, is still around if badly under utilized/staffed.
We have the potential to have HH go into the shipping industry (in a modest way) to pay to keep the shipyard afloat on it's own dime. We also have the ability to introduce a wealthy fellow attempting to build things in a shipyard ~20 years before the things got built in OTL, and with the family business, it shouldn't be to big a leap to try out some of these ideas.
So, the 'yacht' will need to be a passable merchant ship capable of paying for itself when regularly employed in normal commerce, but being far more capable than a run of the mill cargo ship.
So, for the excuses I plan to use to explain away the earlier than OTL development(s), I'm planning to use the offshore oil exploration/exploitation that my hero is going to get his hand in, plus all the world record setting thing from OTL, mixed with creating situations where he can make a new world record in new fields. We already have HH setting aviation records, and by getting him into merchant shipping/shipbuilding, and various non-land based aircraft record setting attempts, I'm hoping to get various technologies developed just because HH is doing it, and for no other reason than He want's to. Of course, none of that means that he cannot also be setting himself up for making a huge profit on some of these efforts.
I'll need ideas for some stunts that can lead to the need for aircraft catapults on ships, already mentioned the deck-edge elevators for cargo/lighters, I want 'handling decks' for seaplane tenders, followed by flying off/catapult off decks/platforms, and then full on cargo ships with a 'landing on deck', that can be setup/taken down on the go at sea...
For the intermediate step, between OTL cargo handling and containerization, I'm wondering about cargo nets and palettes, so something like a large, sturdy/reusable wooden base, stuff gets stacked up on these, while the pallets are set up in the middle of the nets, and when the thing gets loaded up, just pull the net up and enclose the contents within. Would additional pallets be needed to make a cube for better stowage aboard ship? How much space would have to be sacrificed to speed to load only lots of pre-loaded palleted/netted cargo? You won't get as tight a fit with bulk loading netted/palleted cargo clumps, but at what point is it better to be able to load/unload quickly, versus painstakingly hand loading everything aboard and then painstakingly hand unloading everything from the ship, and repeating this for every voyage?
Using the numbers from up thread, which I intend for HH to have afloat sometime in the mid 1930's as his latest and greatest personal yacht, how long to load/unload something that monstrous using the historical ways? And if we can speed up the loading/unloading process to say 2 days on each end, how much cargo capacity can we sacrifice if the ships turnaround time allows extra voyages?
Spit-balling here;
Say the Hughes Titan cargo ship goes on a voyage that takes, IDK, say 2-3 weeks travel time one way, and then needs 2-3 weeks to offload, and another 2-3 weeks to reload, 2-3 weeks to return, followed by another 2-3 weeks to unload, and still another 2-3 weeks to load up another outbound cargo. Total turn around time here would be 4-6 weeks in transit, + 4-6 weeks at the destination port, + 4-6 weeks back in home port, or 12-18 weeks between runs. Now, if the ship & it's ports are setup for speedy loading/unloading, and we can unload/reload in just two days, what would that do for the ships profit-making potential? 4-6 weeks + 4 days between voyages. If we take the middle time, 39 days/voyage, versus 105 days using historical L/UL times/methods.
So, using the old/historical ways...
7 profit making voyages would take 735 days, or just over two years, while using my made up numbers...
18 profit making voyages would take 702 days, or just under two years.
Admittedly, these numbers are not likely to be accurate, and I suspect that I'm being a bit to enthusiastic, but at what point would we reach a 'better' shipping option? At what point can we have a need for these Hughes Hog Islander's?