MB518

Daimler-Benz was asked in 1928 to develop diesels for boats and airships with no ceiling placed on their output. What came of it, the LOF 6, drove the Hindenburg; navalised as the MB 502 it went to sea in Kriegsmarine Schnellboote as a sixteen-cylinder, and the line then grew into the twenty-cylinder MB 501. The MB 518 was the last step in that development — a 40° V20 built up from individual cylinders, with pre-chamber injection and a large intercooler slung above the engine between the blower at its nose and the intake manifolds in the vee.

Production restarted in 1951, at first for export only, in three forms distinguished mainly by how they were charged: the B, the supercharged C, and the turbocharged D rated at 3,500 PS. Each weighed around five tonnes. The Bundesmarine took them three to a boat in the Silbermöwe, Jaguar and Zobel classes, and they went out to more than 35 countries across four continents, MTU later selling the same engine as the 20V 672. S 130, the only German wartime S-boat still in existence, was re-engined after the war with a pair of them.