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I've recently been on Rügen and I have seen this:

enter image description here

Does anybody have an idea what this is?

(To give Google a chance: A ship with four "towers" made out of steel on it. They looks a bit like high-voltage electrical towers.)

Martin Thoma
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    It looks like a ship that's transporting travelling cranes, possibly for use in a port somewhere. – Dave Tweed Sep 08 '16 at 11:18
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    Those things don't look like electrical towers at all. – Olin Lathrop Sep 08 '16 at 12:20
  • @OlinLathrop http://view.stern.de/de/picture/2358696/strom-elektrizitaet-starkstrommasten-starkstromleitung-starkstrommast-starkstromleitungen-mainplaisirs-620.jpg – Martin Thoma Sep 08 '16 at 12:40
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    My guess is that those are the base-towers for off-shore wind towers, with the wind towers finished those parts will be beneath the waves. – mart Sep 08 '16 at 12:49
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    I believe that kind of ship is categorically called a 'heavy lift ship.' The towers are just its cargo. – Ethan48 Sep 08 '16 at 13:12
  • @Martin: Exactly. The towers on the ship don't look anything like the electrical towers in your picture. What clearly makes the towers on ship not electrical is that there is no place to string high voltage lines with their associated clearance from surrounding conductors. This is why HV towers often have "arms", as in your picture, that the HV cables hang from at the end of long insulators. – Olin Lathrop Sep 09 '16 at 11:44
  • @OlinLathrop I didn't write they are electrical towers. I wrote they look similar. It was just the simplest way to describe the metal construction to make this question searchable. Feel free to be constructive and add a better description which could be used by others. – Martin Thoma Sep 09 '16 at 11:59

1 Answers1

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It's a heavy-lift vessel, carrying four identical structures as cargo.

It's very likely they are jacket foundations for offshore wind turbines. The excellent 4C Offshore has a database of such vessels used on offshore wind farms. It also has a list of all offshore windfarms under construction by country, and tells you which vessels are working on it, so given that you know where the photo was taken, you may able to work out which farm it's supplying.

I think they're going to Wikinger offshore wind farm. That's using jacket foundations, is being built as I write this post, and is about 20 km north-east of Rügen.

Here's a jacket foundation in situ at alpha ventus windfarm, courtesy of the IET: enter image description here

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