Abstract
The containerization of general cargo transportation has made an innovative contribution to the growth of international sea transportation. The development of cellular containership had broken through the barrier against to larger ship size and higher ship speed due to troublesome cargo handling, so that the size of containership has been becoming larger and larger continuously. specially, since the advent of Post-Panamax type, the tendency of scaling-up is becoming enormously rapid. The technological features and effects of large-sized containerships on the transportation energy performance are investigated here by the statistical analysis of various containerships' principal items. The analysis reveals that, though the scaling up of ship size is very effective for improving the transportation energy performance, the effectiveness is decreasing in the ship size region larger than Post-Panamax type mainly due to the limits of cargo loading performance and the inevitable deviation from the optimum ship design conditions.
