D'ye think I can squeeze it into a Focus...?

CKA Volvo S40/V50

They sometimes have a smaller engine alongside the big one and this is used to turn it over, they call them " Father and son "

Jim

The *really* big ones get turned over by a smaller one and huge amounts of compressed air. The smaller one is started by compressed air generated by an even smaller one.

You prime and start the smaller one with electric. The smaller one fills the compressed air chambers with enough to turn over the medium one. Once that one has caught you fill the compressed air cylinder up fully and stick the little one on full throttle to keep it as charged as possible. Then you turn the big one with the medium one and the compressed air. You can usually let the little one go offline at this point and use the big one for main drive and the medium for power generation. Or you can just leave it all to the big one. Neglecting maintenance of the smaller ones is a good way to ending a naval engineering career.

Warwick

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Warwick saying something like:

Many years ago I read 'Supertanker' (written in 1974, iirc), in which the author described the trend towards big single engines in tankers and bulk carriers. Only problem with that is dependency on one engine and the fingers-crossed nature of that.

While the ships were fairly new, all was hunky-dory, but a few years on and in the hands of the second/third/fourth owners things get a bit different.

A relatively common scenario he described was the contamination of the bulk distilled water tank and the need to shut down the main engine, repair the heat exchanger, dump the contaminated distilled water and then regenerate 150 tons of distilled water. Fwir, it would take at least 24 hours to do this, meaning the ship was drifting at the mercy of wind and tide.

AKA Land Rover Freelander (next model)