Baltic

Baltic may refer to:

Geography

Northern Europe

North America

People and their languages

Baltic (tug)

The Baltic is a German emergency tow vessel (ETV) commissioned in 2010.

The vessel which was built in Spain by Astilleros Armon is owned by Arbeitsgemeinschaft Küstenschutz of Germany, a consortium of tugboat companies. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development of Germany has chartered the vessel to protect the German coastline. The Baltic replaced the tugboat Fairplay 26 as an ETV and operates from Warnemünde in the western Baltic Sea. She was commissioned on 24 September 2010.

The Baltic features a bollard pull of 127 tons and a maximum speed of 17 knots (31 km/h; 20 mph).

In October 2010, only a few days after commissioning, the Baltic was deployed to assist during the fire on the ferry Lisco Gloria off the island of Fehmarn.

Technical dates

Engine

The Baltic is driven by two main engines of the General Electric 16V250MDB3 type which are connected to two Schottel controllable pitch propellers via transmissions and drive shafts. The engines are 16-cylinder Diesel units which can provide 4,239 kilowatts (5,685 hp) each at a nominal 1,050 revolutions per minute. The propellers are encased in Kort nozzles and have a maximum revolution speed of 170 rpm. Two thrusters are installed in the bow and the stern section respectively to improve the ship's manoeuvrability.

Baltic languages

The Baltic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family, and are spoken by the Balts. Baltic languages are spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups: Western Baltic (containing only extinct languages), and Eastern Baltic (containing two living languages, Lithuanian and Latvian). The range of the Eastern Balts once reached to the Ural mountains. Although related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible. Old Prussian (a Western Baltic language which went extinct in the 18th century) ranks as the most archaic of the Baltic languages.

Branches

The Baltic languages are generally thought to form a single family with two branches, Eastern and Western. However, these are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto-Slavic.