New subcategory for Chemical Tankers?

[Robbie]

I have always wondered why this has not happened before but how easy would it be to make sub categories for the Chemical Tanker category on this site? even if it was like the subcategories we have for General Cargo vessels where there is a weight limit and build year it would be good. There are so many ships uploaded every day into this category and for myself a lot of them I have no interest in but still have to scroll through them. Small coastal tankers like the Lerik could easily be filtered out if there was a category say 10000grt.
Anyway just an idea, it would be interesting to see what everyone else thinks.

Cheers Robbie

[pieter melissen]

I have always wondered why this has not happened before but how easy would it be to make sub categories for the Chemical Tanker category on this site? even if it was like the subcategories we have for General Cargo vessels where there is a weight limit and build year it would be good. There are so many ships uploaded every day into this category and for myself a lot of them I have no interest in but still have to scroll through them. Small coastal tankers like the Lerik could easily be filtered out if there was a category say 10000grt.
Anyway just an idea, it would be interesting to see what everyone else thinks.

Cheers Robbie

Thanks Robbie, currently we are dealing with a complete makeover of the tanker categories first of all by adding all the IMO numbers for the ships posted in the early days of the site. Secondly the tanker types are being readdressed, for instance by moving all chemical and (coated) product tankers into one category. There are also quite a number of LPG tankers "hidden"in the chemical tanker category, which in time will also have to move.

What is still on the list is a completely new set-up, with most likely a division according top age brackets. (All tankers built before 1970 are now put in one category as you may have seen) and the current chemical/product tanker cateogry contains about 10% of all the pictures on the site. This, as you rightly point out, is not a desirable situation. The problem with tankers is that these days they can carry all kinds of petroleum liquids, whereby VLCC's areused to carry full loads of fuel oil and clean coated product tankers may easily carry a cargo of crude oil if required. From the outside the differences between a coated or non coated tanker are barely or not visible, so putting them in the correct category requires additional investigation. That Equasis is not very helpful by sort of ignoring the existence of coated product tankers (LR1-LR2)is not very helpful for those who just spot a tanker and post it.

So in short to avoid these sort of confusions and debates, the division into age brackets looks to be the best solution, which maybe can be introduced in the not too distant future.  

[Bob Scott]

Trying to separate chemical tankers from product tankers would be a near-impossible task for Admins and would make the site much less user-friendly. Users would have little hope (or interest in) differentiating between the two. As it is, most tankers in the clean products trade also have an IMO type classification for the carriage of at least "easy" chemicals.