The Wärtsilä 14RT-flex96C is not the latest deadly virus coming from the tropics to kill you, despite its name. It is, in fact, a diesel engine, designed by a Finnish company, and built in Korea. It is a very powerful engine. It is also a very enormous engine. Bigger than your house. I promise.
The Wärtsilä 14RT-flex96C, which I will just be calling "Tony" from here on out for brevity purposes, is the largest variant of the largest marine engine in the world, and is built for Ultra-Large Container Ships. That's not just a descriptor, it's an actual title for a class of cargo vessels. Over 1,200 feet long, over 160 feet wide, and carrying more than 14,500 container boxes, they're so big they can't even fit through the Panama Canal. That means that Tony needs to have a lot of grunt to get all that metal moving, and also whatever that metal is carrying.
Tony is an inline-14 engine that is more than 87 feet long, and weighs 5,070,632 pounds. No, not "the ship it powers weighs more than five million pounds," the engine on its own weighs more than five million pounds.
About thirty seconds into the video up top, you see the factory workers laying down the crankshaft, with a crane. And just in case you think "oh yeah, that makes sense, don't wanna hurt your back," you then see a shot of the workers standing up beside it. They don't look like people anymore – they look like miniature people. The scale of this engine is just that big.
Once installed in a ship, Tony puts out around 107,000 horsepower, or pretty much the same amount of power you would get if you chained 167 McLaren F1s together, which is 67 more McLaren F1s than was ever made. All in one engine. And the ship it powers can steam away at more than 30 miles per hour.
Tony is a humongous, crazy-powerful engine. And I want one.
Watch How They Assemble The World's Most Powerful Diesel Engine