This reminds me of the case a British destroyer from WW1.<p>This ship started as two Tribal class destroyers, HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu. In 1916, the first lost its bow to a torpedo (and then running aground); the second lost its stern to a mine. The admiralty decided to salvage the remains by joining them together into a new ship, dubbed HMS Zubian.<p><a href="https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-from-two-destroyers" rel="nofollow">https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-f...</a>
I worked on a cruise ship below decks, once, for 3 hours, and I swore I would never take a cruise.<p>Take the dirtiest hotel you have ever been in, and then ensure you cant leave it for days at a time.<p>It interests me that demand is increasing but I suspect thats just good advertising.
Cruise ships have a huge ecological impact everywhere they go. They burn colossal amounts of fuel, they produce lots of toxic exhaust, sewage, etc. A lot of destinations for these things don't exactly have a lot of regulations for any of this either.<p>Just flying to your destination and staying in some nice place is arguably both better for the environment and probably a lot more enjoyable depending on your tastes. Not that flying is particularly good for the environment of course. Or that enjoyable these days. But I wanted to put in context just how nasty cruise ships can be.
I've told the story before on HN, but maybe it fits here too...<p>A great-uncle of mine lived in Eastern Germany. He bought a pleasure cruiser, about 28 meters length. For everything longer than 25m, he would have needed a captain's patent to operate, so he cut out a bit more than 3m at the rear, fixed up all the wires, pipes and shafts, and then had nice (even if imbalanced-looking) boat.<p>So he did the opposite of what the article is about :-)<p>He spent most of his vacations on that boat, cruised up and down the rivers with his family. <a href="https://www.ddr-binnenschifffahrt.de/fotogalerie-gross/Passagier/P-064-lenz.JPG" rel="nofollow">https://www.ddr-binnenschifffahrt.de/fotogalerie-gross/Passa...</a> you can see that it ends pretty abruptly at the rear.
The point is gluing a chunk of cruise ship in the middle to make it bigger. Not selling half a cruise ship to somebody twice. It's the stretch limo business model with norovirus.
I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc.<p>On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
Great - more air pollution from bunker fuel fumes at port cities!<p>Big economic blocks like the EU and the US should force the cruise ships to operate sustainably and not pollute the literal sh*t out of the port cities they stop at.
Reminds me of the limo industry in the '80s, when [stretch limos](<a href="https://www.oldtimer-auktionen.at/auktionen/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cadillac-Superstretch-2010.08.09-017-Gro%C3%9F.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.oldtimer-auktionen.at/auktionen/wp-content/uploa...</a>) just kept getting longer and longer.
I watched the videos embedded in the article, annoyingly they don't show the cutting process just the splitting part but still.<p>One thing I always appreciate about watching these sort ofs things is how much work and people goes into it, like the people repainting the hull and sides of the ship, looks like real hard but honest work and probably comes with a great sense of satisfaction to boot seeing the results of your graft materialize over time.
As the author notes, this isn't a concept that was invented by the cruise companies.<p>My grandfather worked as a welder for a shipyard. I remember him telling me about how they would cut a barge in half, and he and a few other guys would weld in a new chunk that would make the thing longer. This would have been 60ish years ago.
While I have no love for cruise ships, this type of engineering absolutely blows my mind. Same with mega skyscrapers or any other huge engineering project with exacting requirements. In web dev I'm lucky if I even get a complete spec to work from, so millimeter precision over the scale of a ship is far outside of my experience.
The article made several mentions of requiring additional trained crew. Where is the gap in getting staff? I expect there is a tiny fraction of specialists (engineers, medical, ship command) and a boat load of low skill jobs (cooks, cleaning, waiters, pool boys, bar tenders, etc) who could do on the job training if required.
After owning small cruising sailboats for about twenty years my wife and I did the calculation that we could sell our last boat and go on two of three cruises a year. The big cost of cruising, by the way, is not so much the ship but expensive shore excursions that sometimes take you away from the ship overnight.<p>I get all the complaints people have against cruising but for us we have seen so much of the world in relative comfort. The trick is to plan trips around the shore excursions and what experiences you want to have. The ship is just the means to get to those experiences without having to hop on and off airplanes frequently.
You might think, welding a ship together: what could possibly go wrong?<p>The first ships that were welded would suddenly break in two. These were the liberty ships used in WW2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship</a>
This video shows such an expansion, increasing passengers from 212 to 312<p><a href="https://youtu.be/OTpVxCOjmPY?si=FK5qR-Tvf027WZKM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/OTpVxCOjmPY?si=FK5qR-Tvf027WZKM</a>
What's the impact on ship strength, stability, handling, etc? I assume that's considered at the design stage? Any cons to a patchjob like this vs. building it bigger from scratch?
The cruise industry is very fascinating to me. I think in the medium term we could see significant populations of people living long-term on cruise ships; it seems like the economic model is long-run more efficient (assuming the shipbuilding industry is very good at building these structures). You avoid the property tax, zoning, and regulatory burdens that go with living on land. It's likely safer because you're not driving cars and you don't let criminals onboard. And Starlink solves the internet access problem.
What can one do in these massive, employee abusing, law dodging, polluting piles of monstrosities that can’t be done on land? Drink, party, fight (Google cruise ship fights for some colorful stories)…? makes zero sense.<p>If one is going to watch sea life, dive etc, then it makes some sense.<p>I honestly don’t understand the appeal