LPG Tanker Tycho Brae. Her original yard model in a scale of 1:100 is displayed on deck 9 of the museum.
The „Tycho Brahe“ was an LPG tanker built in 1982 by Meyer shipyard, Papenburg. LPG is the abbreviation for Liquified Petroleum Gas, also known as propane or butane. The „Tycho Brahe“ could transport up to 15,000 cubic meters of liquid in bulk in three internal tanks. In these, the gas was kept liquid at a temperature of up to -48° C and a pressure of up to 6.4 bar. At 153 m long and 22 m wide, she was the largest LPG tanker under the German flag at the time of her commissioning. In 1990, she transferred to the registry of the Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda. A year later, the ship was sold and subsequently had several owners. In 2006, she was renamed „Barnes Bridge“ and was scrapped in Alang, India, in 2010. Her initial name came from the famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). The sister ship, built in 1983, was named „Immanuel Kant“ after the German philosopher (1724-1804).
This 1:100 scale shipyard model is part of a generous permanent loan to our museum from Mareike Janssen in 2019, consisting of several ship models from the Hamburg shipping company Friedrich A. Detjen. The models (some of which we have already posted in recent months) are all first-class representations of the ships and were made by some of the best northern German model workshops – in this case, the Christel Stührmann workshop from Hamburg. They were built at the same time as the original ships to give the shipping company an impression of what the ship would look like when completed. After that, the models were displayed in the company’s offices for promotional purposes. The production of such models has a tradition dating back to the 17th century. Some shipping companies still order them either from the shipyards or from model-making workshops, but this is increasingly rare.
The models are exhibited on deck 9 of the museum.