Batillus
Société Maritime Shell · Tanker · Scrapped 1985 · built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique
Batillus was the biggest ship ever launched whole — Seawise Giant only passed her after being cut apart and stretched — and the market she was built for vanished before her paint was worn.
Derived metrics
Computed by ships.fyi from the core specification — see how we calculate these.
How big is it, really?
The Batillus's length overall, against things you already know the size of.
The 747-8 bar is the longest airliner ever built — our sibling site aircraft.fyi measures everything that flies the same way.
One Batillus = 1.54 Titanics · 3.9 football pitches · 17 blue whales · 5.4 Boeing 747-8s laid end to end.
The numbers
| Length overall | 414.22 m |
|---|---|
| Beam | 63.01 m |
| Deadweight | 553,662 t |
| Draft (fully laden) | 28.5 m |
| Propulsion | 4 steam turbines, twin screws |
| Delivered | 1976 |
| Fate | Laid up from 1982; scrapped at Kaohsiung, 1985 |
Put the Batillus next to something
Last verified: 2026-07-15 · Spot an error? business@luck.fyi
What makes it different
Batillus came from the same Saint-Nazaire slipways that later built Queen Mary 2 and the Oasis-class cruise giants, and in 1976 she was the largest ship ever constructed in one piece — a title she technically never lost, since Seawise Giant only out-grew her by being cut open and lengthened.
She was designed for a world that had just ended. The 1973 oil crisis closed the economics of the Cape-route supertanker while she was still on the slipway; by 1982, with tanker rates collapsed, she was laid up in a Norwegian fjord alongside her sisters, a half-million-tonne asset with no cargo worth carrying.
In 1985, nine years old and with remarkably few voyages behind her, she was sold for scrap at Kaohsiung for a fraction of her build cost. The Batillus class remains the cautionary tale of maximum scale: four of the five largest ships ever built by deadweight, none of which reached fifteen years of age in trade.
The Batillus line
Batillus class
Who operates the Batillus
No current operator — this ship's sailing days are over. The operators of record are below.