The bulk carrier, the tanker, the container ship, and the gas carrier between them move most of the world’s seaborne tonnage, and each has its own size-class hub on this site. They do not cover everything that floats commercially. A car carrier loads through a stern ramp and counts its cargo in reference cars. A ro-pax ferry mixes a vehicle deck with a thousand passengers and answers to passenger-ship damage-stability law. A semi-submersible heavy-transport ship sinks its own deck to float a drilling rig aboard. None of these fits the dry-bulk-or-liquid-or-box taxonomy, and the capacity measures that describe them are specific to the trade. This article is the hub for that remainder: the specialised, ro-ro, and non-cruise passenger types, each with its purpose, its defining design feature, and the unit its capacity is quoted in.
The organizing idea is the cargo interface, the way the cargo gets on and off, because that single design choice drives the rest of the ship. A bulk carrier pours cargo down through open hatches. A container ship stacks boxes with cell guides and shore cranes. The ships here load by rolling cargo aboard on its own wheels, by floating it on over a sunken deck, or by lifting indivisible project pieces with the ship’s own gear. Each interface forces a hull form, a deck arrangement, and a way of measuring how much the ship holds. The companion calculators for these classes, the ro-pax type estimator, the ferry estimator, the reefer-container capacity tool, the heavy-lift estimator, and the cruise-ship estimator, each pin down the principal dimension for one of these families.
Roll-on/roll-off: the ramp and the rolling cargo
A roll-on/roll-off ship loads cargo that drives or is towed aboard on wheels, then drives off at the discharge port. There is no crane lift and no cell guide. The defining feature is the ramp, usually a hinged stern ramp or a quarter ramp at the stern corner, sometimes a side ramp, that bridges ship to quay so a tractor unit can tow a trailer up into the ship. Inside, the cargo decks run nearly the full length, connected by internal ramps or by car-deck lifts, so a single trailer can be driven from the shore ramp to its stowage position without ever being lifted. That continuous drive-through arrangement is what the term roll-on/roll-off names, and it is why ro-ro ships turn around in port faster than a box ship of similar size: a full trailer deck can discharge and reload in a few hours.
The trade-off is cargo density. A ro-ro ship carries air. The vehicle decks need headroom and lane spacing, and the wheeled cargo sits on a single layer per deck rather than stacking, so a ro-ro hull moves far less weight per cubic metre than a bulk carrier or a tanker. Owners answer that with many decks. A deep-sea car carrier stacks ten to thirteen vehicle decks inside a tall box-shaped hull, some of them hoistable so the deck height can flex between low cars and tall machinery. The result is the slab-sided, high-freeboard profile that makes a car carrier unmistakable on the horizon, and the large windage area that makes it a handful in a crosswind.
The ramp itself is a structural and operational specialty. A stern ramp sits on the centreline and folds down onto the quay directly astern; a quarter ramp angles out from the stern corner so the ship can work alongside a conventional berth without needing a dedicated end-on linkspan, which is why the deep-sea car-carrier fleet favours it. The ramp’s rated axle load sets a hard limit on the heaviest unit the ship can load, and the internal ramps between decks repeat that limit at every level, so a PCTC’s effective high-and-heavy capacity is governed by the weakest ramp in the drive path, not by the deck strength alone. Ramp angle matters too: a low approach angle is needed so a long, low-clearance trailer does not ground its belly on the ramp crown, which constrains where in the tidal range the ship can work.
Lane metres: the ro-ro capacity unit
Where a car carrier counts CEU, a trailer-carrying ro-ro and a ro-pax ferry count lane metres. A lane metre is one metre of length along a stowage lane of standard width, the width taken conventionally as 2 metres, so one lane metre is about 2 square metres of deck. A ship’s lane-metre rating is the total drive-on lane length across all its vehicle decks, and it is the figure a ro-ro operator sells, because deck length rather than cargo weight is the binding constraint on a high-cube, low-density trailer cargo. The conversion to physical units is the planning step: a passenger car occupies roughly 6 lane metres once access spacing is counted, and a standard European articulated semitrailer roughly 18 lane metres, so a ship rated at 2,600 lane metres carries on the order of 210 trailers, the count varying with the exact trailer length and the lane width the operator uses. Lane metres and CEU describe the same physical deck from two angles, length for trailers and footprint for cars, and a mixed ro-ro books both.
Pure car carriers and pure car/truck carriers
The vehicle-only branch of the ro-ro family is the car carrier. A pure car carrier (PCC) is built solely for passenger cars, with fixed-height decks set close together to pack the most cars into the hull. A pure car and truck carrier (PCTC) is the more capable and now-dominant design: it adds hoistable decks and ramps strengthened for heavier axle loads, so it can mix cars with trucks, buses, and high-and-heavy units such as tractors, excavators, and rolling industrial plant. The PCTC’s hoistable decks let the crew reconfigure deck heights cargo by cargo, opening up tall lanes for machinery on one voyage and packing low car lanes on the next.
Car-carrier capacity is quoted in Car Equivalent Units. The CEU is to a car carrier what the TEU is to a container ship: a notional standard unit that lets one number describe a ship loading many different vehicles. One CEU is the deck footprint of a standard reference car, conventionally taken as the 1966 Toyota Corona RT43, measured at 4,125 mm long, 1,550 mm wide, and 1,400 mm high. A ship’s CEU rating is the count of reference cars its decks would hold. Real cargo is never all reference cars: a modern SUV occupies more than one CEU, a bus or a truck several, and a tall piece of high-and-heavy machinery both consumes floor area and forces nearby decks up to clear its height. So the CEU figure is a capacity ceiling against a notional fleet, not a promise of physical units loaded, and a charterer planning a mixed cargo converts each vehicle type to its CEU factor before checking it fits. The car-carrier and PCTC estimator works that deck-area arithmetic for a given CEU rating, and the broader family is set out in the ro-ro vessel article.
Tonnage and the car-carrier hull
Two more numbers describe a car carrier alongside its CEU: deadweight tonnage and gross tonnage, and the relationship between them is unusual for this class. Gross tonnage under the International Convention on Tonnage Measurement of Ships, 1969, in force since 18 July 1982, is a function of the total enclosed volume of the ship, not its weight. A car carrier is almost all enclosed volume, ten or more decks of air, so its gross tonnage runs high relative to the modest cargo deadweight of the light vehicles it carries. That high GT drives the ship’s port dues, canal tolls, and manning and survey thresholds, since GT is the basis for most regulatory and commercial charges, while the deadweight stays low because cars weigh little for the space they occupy. The contrast between a high GT and a low deadweight is a signature of the high-cube, low-density ro-ro hull, and it is why a car carrier and a bulk carrier of similar length sit in different fee brackets. The volume-versus-weight distinction is the same one set out in the lightweight versus deadweight article.
ConRo: container over ro-ro
A ConRo ship splits its capacity between containers and rolling cargo. The lower hull is arranged as a ro-ro vehicle deck reached by a stern or quarter ramp, while the upper part of the ship carries containers in cell guides stacked above the weather deck, lifted on and off by shore cranes in the usual box fashion. The design suits trades with a steady two-way mix of boxed cargo and vehicles, the Atlantic and the US-to-Puerto-Rico routes being the classic examples, where neither a pure box ship nor a pure ro-ro would use the ship’s volume well. The ConRo earns its keep by combining the fast ramp turnaround for rolling cargo with the high stacking density of containers in the same call, at the cost of a more complex stowage plan and two separate cargo-handling systems to keep busy.
Ro-pax ferries and the damage-stability problem
A ro-pax ship adds passengers to the ro-ro vehicle deck. The moment a ship is certified to carry more than 12 passengers it becomes a passenger ship under SOLAS, and the ro-ro arrangement makes that a hard combination to make safe. SOLAS defines a ro-ro passenger ship as a passenger ship with ro-ro cargo spaces or special category spaces, the wording introduced in the November 1995 amendments to Chapter II-1. The danger sits in the geometry: the long, undivided vehicle deck that makes ro-ro cargo handling fast is also a deck with no transverse bulkheads to stop water spreading. If the sea reaches that deck through a bow or stern door failure or a side breach, the water sloshes the full length of the ship, the free-surface effect destroys the righting arm, and the ship can capsize in minutes. The loss of the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987 and the Estonia in 1994 both turned on water on the vehicle deck.
The regulatory response runs on two tracks. The first is the global SOLAS subdivision and damage-stability code. Ships built from 1 January 2009 are assessed under the probabilistic rules in SOLAS Chapter II-1 Parts B-1 to B-4: the ship must achieve an attained subdivision index A at least equal to a required index R that scales with ship length and passenger numbers, computed by summing survival probabilities across a statistical population of damage cases and loading drafts. That harmonized probabilistic approach replaced the older deterministic two-compartment SOLAS 90 standard. The second track is regional. After the SOLAS 95 conference, eight northern European states signed the Stockholm Agreement on 28 February 1996, adding a specific water-on-deck requirement: a ro-ro passenger ship operating in the region must remain stable with a calculated quantity of water accumulated on the vehicle deck, the standard requiring survival with up to 0.5 m of water on deck where the residual freeboard after damage is low, scaled to significant wave heights up to 4 m. The ro-pax type estimator and the ferry estimator work the lane-metre and passenger-capacity side of these ships, and the regulatory frame is set out in the passenger-ship article, the damage-stability article, and the free-surface-effect article.
The two safety regimes interact in the design office. The probabilistic SOLAS 2009 index rewards subdivision below the vehicle deck, more watertight compartments and higher internal bulkheads, while the Stockholm water-on-deck check rewards reserve buoyancy and freeboard at the vehicle-deck level so accumulated water has somewhere to drain and the deck edge does not immerse. A modern northwest-European ro-pax has to satisfy both at once, which pushes the design toward higher freeboard, sponsons or a wider beam for stability, and casings and side structure that keep the open vehicle deck from acting as one long free-surface tank. The deterministic SOLAS 90 standard that the probabilistic rules replaced asked a simpler two-compartment survival question and did not, on its own, account for water pooling on the ro-ro deck, which is the specific failure mode the Stockholm Agreement was written to close after the 1994 loss.
Fire is the other ro-ro hazard, because a vehicle deck packed with fuel-laden cars and trailers is a fire load with few internal divisions. SOLAS Chapter II-2 Regulation 20 sets the protection rules for vehicle, special category, and ro-ro spaces: fixed fire-detection and alarm coverage, fixed water-based extinguishing systems, structural fire protection, and ventilation control. IMO tightened these further through resolution MSC.550(108), with new requirements for vehicle and ro-ro spaces and for weather decks carrying vehicles, applying mainly to ships built from 1 January 2026 with some provisions retroactive to older passenger ships. The rise of electric vehicles on car decks, with battery fires that are hard to extinguish with conventional water spray and can reignite hours later, is the live engineering problem behind that tightening, and it bears on the car carriers as much as the ferries.
Refrigerated ships and the reefer-container shift
A reefer ship is a refrigerated cargo ship built to carry perishables, classically bananas, citrus, deciduous fruit, and frozen meat and fish, at controlled temperature from load port to market. The defining feature is the insulated, refrigerated hold: the cargo spaces are lined with insulation, fitted with a refrigeration plant that pushes cooled air through gratings and false decks, and subdivided into tween decks so chilled and frozen parcels at different temperatures stay separate and so cartons are not crushed under their own stack weight. A conventional reefer runs its holds anywhere from deep-frozen around minus 25 Celsius for meat up to a controlled chill near plus 13 Celsius for green bananas, with humidity and air-change rates managed to keep the produce in condition across a multi-week voyage.
Reefer capacity is quoted differently from dry cargo. The historical and still-used measure is cubic feet of insulated, temperature-controlled bale space, with traditional reefer ships running from roughly 100,000 up to around 600,000 cubic feet of refrigerated volume. The pallet-friendly modern variant quotes capacity in pallet positions, since palletized fruit loaded through side doors is the workhorse trade. The cubic-foot figure describes net usable refrigerated volume after insulation and air-circulation gratings, which is why a reefer’s grain or bale capacity reads lower than the gross hold volume of a dry-cargo ship of the same size.
The cargo conditions are the point of the ship, and they are specific to the produce. A banana cargo is the classic case: it loads green and is held below its ripening threshold, around 13 to 14 Celsius, with the reefer plant tuned to keep the fruit from starting to ripen in transit while not chilling it into the dark blotches that cold damage causes. The temperature has to stay inside a narrow band the whole voyage, because a warm excursion ripens the fruit early and a cold one spoils it, and the airflow has to reach every carton, which is why reefer holds use gratings and ducted air rather than just a cold space. Higher-value trades add controlled-atmosphere management, holding oxygen and carbon dioxide at a few percent each to slow the fruit’s respiration and extend the storage life, with oxygen often pulled down toward 2 to 5 percent. A conventional reefer ship runs these regimes hold by hold; a reefer container runs them box by box under its own integral unit, which is part of why the box took the high-value perishable trades.
The commercial story of the reefer trade since the 1980s is the shift from these specialized ships to refrigerated containers. A reefer container is an insulated ISO box with an integral refrigeration unit at one end that plugs into ship’s power, and it lets perishable cargo ride on an ordinary container ship in any reefer-capable slot. Container lines added thousands of reefer plugs to their fleets, and the door-to-door reach of the box, no transhipment of loose cartons, no dedicated reefer terminal, steadily took cargo off the conventional reefer ships, which now run mostly as tramp tonnage on the trades where container service is thin or where a single charterer wants a whole-ship volume of one product. On the container side, refrigerated capacity is counted not in cubic feet but in reefer plugs, the number of slots wired to power a powered reefer box. The reefer-container capacity tool works the plug-and-slot side of that trade, the conventional reefer estimator the insulated-volume side, and the box hardware is set out in the marine reefer container systems article.
Heavy-lift and project-cargo ships
A heavy-lift or project-cargo ship carries indivisible loads too large or too heavy for a standard ship’s gear: transformers, port cranes, refinery columns, yachts, locomotives, offshore modules, and complete vessels. Two design families do the work, distinguished by how the cargo gets aboard.
The first is the geared heavy-lift ship, an open-deck multipurpose hull fitted with very high capacity cranes. The cranes are the defining feature, often two heavy-lift cranes that can work in tandem to lift a single load between them, with individual capacities running into the hundreds and the largest combined lifts into the thousands of tonnes. The cargo is lifted on and lifted off (lift-on/lift-off), so the ship is independent of shore crane availability, which matters in the remote and lightly equipped ports that project cargo often moves between. Wide, low, unobstructed weather decks and high-capacity ballast systems let the ship trim and heel-compensate as a heavy lift swings outboard.
The second family is the semi-submersible heavy-transport ship, which carries floating cargo by the float-on/float-off method. Instead of lifting, the ship floods its ballast tanks to submerge its long, flat main deck below the waterline, by 6 to 14 m for the largest vessels, and the cargo, a jack-up rig, a semi-submersible drilling unit, an offshore platform, a naval ship, or a damaged vessel, is floated or warped into position over the sunken deck. The crew then pumps the ballast out, the deck rises beneath the cargo, and the load lifts clear of the water seated on pre-built cribbing. The casing-like buoyancy towers at bow and stern give the ship enough reserve buoyancy and stability to control the submerged-deck condition, the most delicate part of the operation. The heavy-lift estimator works the deadweight, deck-strength, and lift-or-float capacity side of these ships.
A third arrangement, the dock-type ship, sits between the two. It carries full-length side walls around the cargo area, like a floating dry dock, and can take cargo three ways: float-in/float-out by submerging the dock deck, lift-on/lift-off with cranes, or roll-on/roll-off over a stern ramp. Unlike the semi-submersible, a dock ship retains its ballast water once the deck has sunk, using the side walls for stability through the submerged condition rather than relying on bow and stern buoyancy towers. The choice between semi-submersible and dock-type comes down to the cargo: an offshore rig that floats wants the open semi-submersible deck, while a mix of floating and rolling cargo suits the more enclosed dock ship.
Project-cargo work is as much about the engineering analysis as the hull. Each lift or float-on is a one-off marine operation with its own ballast sequence, stability calculation through the critical condition, seafastening design for the ocean leg, and load-out plan, reviewed by a marine warranty surveyor before the cargo moves. The critical condition for a semi-submersible is the moment the deck is just awash and the waterplane area collapses to the slender buoyancy towers, where a small heeling moment produces a large angle, so the ballast and the cargo centring have to be controlled closely through that window. That analysis-per-voyage character is what separates the heavy-lift trade from the repetitive parcel trades of bulk and container shipping, and it is why heavy-lift operators keep in-house naval-architecture teams that other shipowners outsource.
Multipurpose and general-cargo ships
The multipurpose (MPP) vessel is the descendant of the classic general-cargo ship and the most flexible hull in the merchant fleet. Its defining feature is self-sufficiency: large box-shaped holds with movable tween decks, wide hatches, and the ship’s own cargo cranes, often heavy-lift capable, so it can load and discharge without shore equipment. One MPP voyage might carry bagged grain, steel coils and plate, project pieces, and a deck stow of containers, loading at a minor port with no gantry cranes. That versatility keeps MPP tonnage working the trades that the specialized fleets cannot serve economically: breakbulk and project cargo to and from developing ports, and the long tail of non-containerizable industrial cargo. The general-cargo and MPP estimator works the hold-volume and deadweight side of these ships, and the type is described in the general cargo ship article.
The tween-decker is the older general-cargo form that the MPP refined. A tween-decker has one or more intermediate decks (the tween decks, from “between”) dividing each hold into vertical layers. Those decks let breakbulk cargo, bagged, cased, baled, and palletized goods, be stowed in manageable tiers without the lower cargo bearing the full crush weight of everything above it, and let different parcels for different ports be kept separate. The tween-decker dominated the liner trades before containerization, with a network of cargo liners running fixed schedules and loading mixed breakbulk through multiple hatches. The container ship displaced it on the main trades from the 1960s, and the surviving general-cargo fleet evolved toward the more capable MPP. The capacity measure for both is straightforward deadweight tonnage plus bale and grain hold volume, the same volumetric measures explained in the lightweight versus deadweight article, with the container-ship comparison in the container ship article.
Livestock carriers
A livestock carrier moves live animals, principally sheep and cattle, on long ocean voyages, the Australia and New Zealand to Middle East and North Africa trades being the largest. The defining feature is the multi-tiered livestock pen structure: open or enclosed decks fitted with pens, feed and water reticulation, bedding, and the heavy forced ventilation needed to clear heat, moisture, and ammonia from a hull full of animals. Many livestock carriers are conversions of older car carriers or container ships, since the multi-deck ro-ro hull and the box-shaped container hull both convert readily to stacked animal decks. Capacity is quoted in head of stock, separately for small stock (sheep) and large stock (cattle), governed by pen-area-per-animal stocking-density standards that depend on species, liveweight, and the climate of the voyage.
The trade runs under tight and tightening welfare regulation. Flag-state and exporting-country rules set the stocking densities, the ventilation rates, the feed and water provisioning, and the limits on voyages through extreme heat, and class societies issue dedicated livestock-carrier notations covering pen construction, ventilation redundancy, and drainage. The animal-welfare scrutiny of the long-haul live-export trade is the dominant commercial and political pressure on the sector, with several exporting countries restricting or phasing out particular routes. The livestock-carrier estimator works the pen-area and stocking-density arithmetic for a given deck plan.
The engineering centres on ventilation and on the heat-and-moisture balance. A full deck of animals generates heat, water vapour, and ammonia continuously, and the ventilation system has to clear all three fast enough that the wet-bulb temperature on the lower decks stays inside the survivable range for the species, which is the binding limit on hot-weather voyages through the Red Sea and the Gulf. That is why livestock carriers carry large, redundant mechanical-ventilation plant and why a failure of that plant is treated as an emergency rather than a discomfort. Feed and fresh-water capacity sets the voyage range, since the ship has to carry the whole consumption of its stock for the passage plus a reserve, and the stocking-density tables that govern how many head a deck may hold are written to leave each animal room to lie down and reach feed and water, not just to stand.
Dredgers
A dredger excavates material from the seabed or a riverbed, for navigation-channel deepening, land reclamation, or aggregate extraction. It is a working vessel rather than a cargo carrier, though the hopper dredgers do carry the excavated spoil as cargo. The two principal types are distinguished by how they cut and lift the bed. A trailing suction hopper dredger (TSHD) is a self-propelled ship that drags one or two suction pipes along the seabed while under way, sucking up a sand-and-water slurry, settling the solids into an on-board hopper, and steaming off to discharge by bottom doors, pumping ashore, or rainbowing the spoil over the bow onto a reclamation. A cutter suction dredger (CSD) is usually a stationary or barge-mounted unit with a rotating cutter head that breaks up hard-packed or rocky bed before a suction pump lifts the spoil through a floating pipeline to the placement area.
Dredger capacity is quoted in hopper volume, the cubic-metre capacity of the spoil hopper, for the trailing suction type, and in installed cutter power and pump capacity for the cutter type, since a CSD’s output is set by how fast it can cut and pump rather than by any onboard storage. The large reclamation dredgers built for major land-making projects carry hoppers of tens of thousands of cubic metres. Dredgers fall under the same SOLAS and load-line framework as other ships, with the specialized dredging notation issued by class covering the hopper, the dredge installation, and the reduced-freeboard dredging condition. The dredger estimator works the hopper-volume and production side of these vessels.
The dredging condition is what makes a hopper dredger a special case for the naval architect. When the hopper fills with saturated spoil the ship floats deeper than its ordinary cargo draft, so dredgers are assigned a separate, deeper load line for the dredging operation, valid only in sheltered or coastal work, distinct from the seagoing line they use on passage. The spoil itself is a free liquid until it settles, so the hopper acts as a large free-surface tank during loading, and the overflow system that lets clear water spill back to the sea while the solids settle has to be managed so the ship’s stability stays inside its limits as the load builds. A hopper dredger therefore lives with a stability margin that shifts continuously through its short loading cycle, which is unlike the static loaded condition of a cargo ship and is the reason dredging notations carry their own stability and freeboard rules.
Capacity measures across the specialised fleet
The thread running through these classes is that each trade settled on a capacity unit that matches its cargo, and reading a ship’s specification means knowing which unit is in play. The vehicle carriers count CEU. The ro-pax ferries quote lane metres of vehicle deck and a passenger certificate. The reefers quote cubic feet or pallet positions of refrigerated volume, against the container ship’s reefer-plug count. The heavy-lift ships quote crane SWL or float-on deadweight. The dredgers quote hopper cubic metres or installed cutter power. The MPP and general-cargo ships fall back on the universal pair, deadweight tonnage and bale or grain hold volume. None of these reduces to the single deadweight figure that describes a bulk carrier, which is why the specialised fleet needs its own vocabulary and its own set of estimators.
Two of those units deserve a closer look because they trip people up. The CEU is a notional unit, not a count of cars actually loaded: it is reference-car footprints, so a ship full of SUVs and machinery carries far fewer than its CEU rating in physical vehicles. And the reefer cubic-foot figure is net refrigerated volume after insulation and air gratings, so it cannot be compared directly with the gross hold volume of a dry-cargo ship. Both measures describe a ceiling against a standard cargo, the same way the TEU describes a container ship against a standard box, and both need a conversion step before they answer the practical question of how much of a specific cargo fits.
Choosing the hull follows the cargo’s interface, not its commodity. A finished-vehicle cargo goes on a PCTC because it drives aboard and counts in CEU. A mixed trailer-and-passenger short-sea run goes on a ro-pax because it sells lane metres and carries foot passengers under one certificate. A whole-ship volume of one fruit can still justify a conventional reefer; a few hundred boxes of the same fruit ride reefer slots on a container ship. An indivisible 800-tonne transformer needs a geared heavy-lift ship’s tandem cranes, while a floating drilling rig needs a semi-submersible’s sunken deck. A parcel of steel and project cargo to a port with no shore crane wants an MPP’s own gear. The specialised fleet exists because each of these cargoes breaks the assumption, pour it, stack it, or pump it, that the bulk, container, and tanker hulls are built on.
Limitations
This article is a type overview, not a stability or stowage manual. The damage-stability figures for ro-pax ships, the 0.5 m water-on-deck height and the SOLAS 90 versus probabilistic SOLAS 2009 distinction, are stated at the level a type description needs; an actual subdivision assessment runs the attained-index calculation against the specific hull’s compartmentation and loading conditions and is the work of a naval architect, not a reference article. The Stockholm Agreement is a regional instrument for northwest European waters and does not bind ships outside that area, where the global SOLAS Chapter II-1 standard governs.
The CEU reference dimensions cited here are the conventional Toyota Corona RT43 figures used across the trade, but CEU is a commercial measure rather than a single treaty-defined unit, and individual operators and classification societies apply their own conversion factors for non-standard vehicles. No specific vessel’s CEU rating, reefer cubic-foot capacity, crane SWL, or hopper volume is quoted as a fact in this article, because those are per-ship specifications that vary widely within each class and would be invented detail if stated generically. The reefer temperature bands and the dredger and heavy-lift descriptions are typical of the class and should be read as orientation, not as design values. For any commercial or regulatory decision, work from the specific ship’s class certificate, capacity plan, and the current text of the applicable SOLAS and class rules rather than from this overview.
See also
- Ro-ro vessel
- Passenger ship: SOLAS definition and safety rules
- General cargo ship
- Container ship
- Marine reefer container systems
- Damage stability
- Free-surface effect
- Bulk carrier size classes
- Tanker size classes
- Lightweight vs deadweight
- Ro-pax type estimator
- Ferry estimator
- Car carrier and PCTC estimator
- Reefer-container capacity tool
- Conventional reefer estimator
- Heavy-lift estimator
- General cargo and MPP estimator
- Livestock carrier estimator
- Dredger estimator
- Cruise ship estimator