Panama Canal Ship engages props in lock
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It is easy to look up the power of this particular class of ship on Wikipedia. It has a 7-cylinder Wartsila-Sulzer 2-stroke diesel, 44,000 kilowatt or about 60,000 h.p. it isn't, as some people say, like someone in a Honda Civic trying to burn out from a light. It is Newton's laws of motion. "A body at rest tends to remain at rest." When you have 60,000 tons at rest, it takes a bit of a shove to get it moving at all. If you just had the engine ticking over and then inched the throttle further open, it would take you an hour to get out of that lock. There are other ships waiting to lock through. Each lockage is revenue for the canal company. The lock gates are built to take the stress. Another factor is that engines in ships like this are direct-coupled to the props. There is no clutch, no reversing gear. To reverse, you have to stop the engine and then start it going in the other direction, just as happened withreciprocating steam engines. A steam engine could be rolled over at just a few RPMs. but internal combustion engines have minimum revs below which they won't run. A simple 4-cylinder, 4-stroke without a lot of electronics on it, could usually be throttled down to 450 rpm or so. But below this it eventually would just choke. These big marine 2-strokes can turn over very slowly, but not 10 or 20 or 30 RPM.
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