This thing here, looking like one half of a catamaran designed by Sir Mix-a-lot, is the City of Rotterdam.

More importantly it's proof that naval architects can still produce terrible ships if only they try hard enough.

Officially that front end - I can't really call it the pointy bit - is designed to make the ship more aerodynamic. I suspect what actually happened was that the person responsible was absent-mindedly doodling sex toys when their boss walked in.

In retrospect it probably would have been less embarrassing to just own up at the time.

It's possible of course that that our anonymous architect was inspired by the Russian coastal monitor, Novgorod - the only ship ever to be built by mistakenly copying an errant coffee mug stain on the blueprints.

Sadly they weren't brave enough to go the full circular, which is a shame. Who can resist the charms of a ship that took 45 minutes to sail in a circle using her rudder, but would (allegedly) be set rotating uncontrollably if she fired her cannon?

Regardless of the inspiration, the City of Rotterdam is ostensibly a good ship. It has big, modern engines. It has modern radar. It has bow thrusters and every other modern convenience you'd expect.

It also has a face like a cow gurning into a fisheye camera.

That face - and the circular bridge - turned out to be a problem. On the 3rd of December 2015 the City of Rotterdam came face to face with the more conventional Primula Seaways, and decided to headbutt it. The result was not pretty.

The accident report from the Marine Accident Investigation Board makes for interesting reading if you're as boring as I am, not least for what they have to say about the design of City of Rotterdam's bridge.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/58984f60ed915d06e1000025/MAIBInvReport3-2017.pdf

The bridge had three major issues. Firstly there's no great big pointy bit in the place where sailors traditionally expect to see one. It turns out that this makes it a lot easier to see where the ship is going.

A bit of black string - and the intended point of this on a dark night is best left as an exercise for the reader, because the designers sure as hell didn't think about it - is not an adequate replacement for a few hundred tons of steel

To add to this, the radios were placed at either side of the circular bridge. To use them the officer in charge, or in this case the pilot, had to move away from the middle.

Finally, to set the tin lid on the whole thing, the view out of every window was pretty much identical thanks to the lack of a bow. The only real difference with standing by the radio is that you were now looking at 30 degrees to the direction of travel.

So when the port authorities and Primula Seaways were screaming at the City of Rotterdam to bugger off in the proper direction, the pilot was absolutely convinced that he was already doing so.

The nature of his mistake presumably hit him at about the same time as Primula Seaways.

The captain and pilot of City of Rotterdam were subsequently jailed for four months each as a result. Its hard not to feel like they were slightly stitched up by the design of the ship.

For the rest of us - who presumably don't have to keep an eye out for it wandering into our path too often - it's simply confirmation that all the rules and regulations in the world cannot dim the eternal human ability to fuck things up before they even leave the drawing board...

Honestly though - the Novogorod. Look at the state of it...