meet the LASH mother vessel. On arrival, the mother vessel crane lifts the LASH barges onto the ships. LASH cargo does not require transshipment, as the movement from the origin to destination takes place with a single bill of lading. An important technical problem raised by the invention of the new transport system was the shape of the lighters. Several other designs, differentiated mainly by the shape of the lighters and the loading mechanism, were proposed, but the LASH system found the largest range of applications. In this approach, the lighters were individually lifted onto the carrier ship by a large gantry crane located at the stern of the ship. The crane could move the entire length of the ship and stack the lighters atop each other in the ship's body and on the deck. The cranes had a load-carrying capacity of more than 500 Mp. Loading or unloading a lighter took on average fifteen minutes. LASH ships were constructed in Europe, Japan and the USA with almost uniform parameters. The host vessel is sometimes purpose-built or modified with a door at the waterline, to allow the payloads to be loaded and unloaded without special lifting equipment. An example would be (originally LASH Turkiye), built at Avondale Shipyard for the American shipping line Prudential Grace, and later transferred to the Ready Reserve Fleet. Technical data Sea Bee system Another related system was the Sea Bee, which had a lifting system located at the stern of the carrier ship, known as Type C8-class ship. The lift, known as a "Syncrolift" was a platform that could be lowered below the water surface. Two lighters weighing up to 1,000 metric tons are maneuvered onto the submerged platform and raised to the height of the deck, where special rails engage and transport the lighters down the length of the ship to their berthings. The lighters used in the Sea Bee system are considerably larger than the LASH lighter, and the loading hardware is also stronger, with a lifting force of more than 2,000 Mp. The first ship of a series of three Sea Bee ships was SS Doctor Lykes, followed by SS Almeria Lykes and SS Tillie Lykes all of which were operated by Lykes Brothers Steamship Company. The "Sea Bee" vessels had three decks and could transport 38 lighters (12 on the lower decks and 14 on the upper deck). The dual function