Talk:Batillus-class supertanker

Why did the owners choose to keep the ships in service such a short number of years?
Doesn't anybody have more information on these ships and why they had such short lives? Jason404 (talk) 04:38, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * In response to your question why they had such short lives, I'm more or less quoting the relevant sections of an e-mail from Auke Visser. (I e-mailed him with your question; his website is under the article's References.) The ships were ordered around 1974/75, when the 1973 oil crisis had started and the demand for oil grew. After the crisis, the demand declined. Also, the export of oil started from Alaska, Russia, North Sea, and new oil fields in Gulf of Mexico. Finally, less tankers were required now that oil could be extracted nearby. The Batillus class supertankers had a double propulsion and their fuel usage was just too much, they were too large to enter most havens, and they had many technical problems that required expensive and time consuming repairs. --82.171.70.54 (talk) 23:37, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Why scrapped so early!?
Why were these four and the Seawise Giant scrapped? In service for only ten years seems really odd no? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.30.214.247 (talk) 20:45, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Same Exact Dimensions
Just wondering why all four ships list the same exact dimensions. It's very common (if not always the case) that very large ships of the same class as-built differ by inches if not feet in length and beam. Davidl9999 (talk) 22:12, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

TopCities pages
All of the TopCities pages in the References section appear to be unavailable. 76.21.8.213 (talk) 05:01, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

"When considering fully loaded displacement, the Seawise Giant still holds the record, edging out the Batillus ships."
This phrase should have a link to the page Displacement_(ship) included in it. My apologies for not knowing how to do this. 204.10.127.120 (talk) 08:19, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Article needs expansion. Many questions are unanswered
For such world-leading ultra-large ships, the article is missing a very large amount of information. Principally, who were these ships built for? who paid for them?

But beyond that, why were these ship's built? What rationale did the original entity that funded this massive ship building project give for the project? Was it planned for, perhaps, more economic operation in the oil transport trade? (bigger ships may have been theorized to operate more cheaply???); and therefore paid for by a private company? Or was it paid for by the French government? or perhaps some French hybrid state/private funding source?

Also missing is any description of the ships operation on the seas. Regardless of how the decision may have been made fund and undertake the megaproject, what were the economics of the ship(s) during their operating lifetimes? Why were they scrapped so early? What were the considerations (economic? political? ???) that kept one of the ships on the water until 2003? Did Prairial stay in oil transport service for her entire life? ... or become something else in her latter years before she was scrapped?

Wikipedia is not censored, and this info should not be missing from the article just to preclude a slightly embarrasing story being explicated in the encyclpedia of human knowledge? Any information on this from the French sources—which, unfortunately, I cannot read—would greatly improve the article. N2e (talk) 13:57, 6 December 2020 (UTC)