Say what you will about how things made today aren’t up to the quality standards of years past, but the Shell Prelude is proof that man can still accomplish amazing engineering feats when tasked to do so.

So what is the Prelude? It’s a floating natural gas facility (FLNG) that Shell has developed in order to tap into gas fields that can’t be economically tapped using other available technologies.

This monstrosity is over a quarter of a mile long (Closer to 3/10s of a mile. Am I the only one now thinking, “This would make a killer floating drag strip…”?) and will displace over 600,000 metric tons. Still not impressed? Besides its massive scale, the ship was also designed to be out at sea for twenty-five years before returning to land. Very cool. Oh yeah, and it was also designed to withstand a Category Five cyclone. (No word on icebergs, though…)

Since we all care about the power figures, the Prelude has 6,700 horsepower worth of thrusters at its disposal, although the power to weight ratio is a bit lacking, I will admit. All jokes aside, this may not fall under the umbrella of “performance” in the traditional sense, but it truly is a marvel of design and construction on a massive scale, which makes it 100% BangShift approved.

On a side note, the accent of Willie Gray, the substructure manager, is phenomenal and he has the look of a man who has a great story or two in him. Definitely someone that I would buy a beer if I met him at a pub. But, if for some reason you didn’t live in the UK for a few years like I did and can mentally wade through some of the thicker accents, the video has subtitles that can be enabled as well.