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Luxury Liner SS United States Cannot Be Put Back In Service (miamiherald.com)
tomhath writes: Once the fastest ocean liner ever built, the SS United States has been mothballed for almost 50 years. An ambitious project to refurbish the SS United States as a luxury liner has been abandoned due to insurmountable technical and commercial obstacles. Plan B, to turn it into a floating hotel/convention center, might go forward. Miami Herald provides some history of the SS United States in its report: "The iconic 1950s vessel, which was bigger than the Titanic and once carried celebrities across the Atlantic Ocean, was set for a $700 million overhaul by the Los Angeles-based luxury line, which also has offices in Miami. The SS United States was decommissioned in 1969 and has been gutted and docked in Philadelphia for two decades on the Delaware River. On its maiden voyage in 1952, the ship traversed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 42 minutes -- a record it held until 1990."
Someone has to shoot some apes with their babie on that ship to prevent war between ape and mankind.
"by the Los Angeles-based luxury line"
Do slashdot staff even read the shit they publish?
not everything is worth remembering and celebrating. records get broken all the time. and everything can be made into a record by slicing words.
usually if you don't know or care about the current record holder/prize winner/whatever, then there is not much reason to celebrate past winners of same.
if there was nothing very original, innovative, and special, about a particular time slice of a record, it is not worth celebrating after it gets broken. mere footnotes and a row in record book used by specialists interested in that, is all it deserves. to scrapheap with rest.
Actually in this case this ship is still a record holder. It still holds the once very important "Blue Riband", which is the record for the fastest westbound (i.e. against the gulf stream) cross-atlantic passenger voyage. Only its eastbound records have been broken and even those not by regular passenger service. So this truly seems to be the fastest cross-atlantic passenger ship ever built (especially if you consider it held almost 2000 passengers) and it was retired quite early in its life, because cross-atlantic ship voyages were no longer required.
So, considering that, I do find it a shame nobody ever found another use for it...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Trump alone can fix it.
You want to trade the view of an historic ship for a view of New Jersey? Talk about an eyesore!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"But during inspections of the ship, experts found that bringing the ship to today’s standards would require “significant” changes to the hull, which could create stability challenges for the ship. Installing a modern diesel electric propulsion plant would also require rebuilding about 25 percent of the hull, Crystal said. Essentially, the ship require rebuilding from the inside out. "
The nice part about living by the bay is eating all the ships come and go. Having a ship permanently docked there slowly rusting away is an eye sore.
Just like going to an impoverished rust belt town where the building are just getting abused and slowly decaying.
Sure the building may be 125 years old with some unique architecture however it is slowly rotting away. So other than trying to keep that building there for historical reason they should make sure it is fixed up or knocked down and replaced. Sometimes we are so fixated on history that we are using as an excuse to avoid progress.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why does anybody care about a 60+ old ship? Old ships of far more fame get scrapped all the time. How many WW2 era ships were scrapped, even though they fought in many battles?
So what if has the name SS United States, it's not special, just scrap the floating heap of junk before it sinks.
Luxury Liar "United Statis" Cannot Be Put Back In Service.
^D
> Sometimes we are so fixated on history that we are using as an excuse to avoid progress.
But usually we are so fixated on progress that we use it as an excuse to avoid history.
Even if it can cross the ocean in under 4 days, it still doesn't seem like something that a lot of people would be interested in paying money for in the current era. The floating hotel seems like a better idea to me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Try folding grandma into cattle class from Chicago to Paris after getting her molested by the TSA. She has time, this would be much better if anywhere close to cost comparable. Similarly, flying with littles is miserable. This would be reasonable for moving and going for long vacations.
The SS United States figured prominently in one of his Dirk Pitt (Yes, somehow I spent some time reading several of them.) books.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Oh you mean Slashdot is FBI now.
ur
If it's just going to be a motel/convention center why not just dig a small canal inland a few hundred feet in an appropriate location, tow the ship into the "canal", seal off one end of the canal and replace the water around it with cement. Transforming it from marine vessel to rigid structure gets rid of most of the regulation/safety requirements, simplify maintenance and probably half costs.
Thanks!
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
It obviously CAN be put back in to service. To put it back in to service in a desirable manner, a lot of work would need to be done. They've decided it's too much work, which is different from saying it cannot be done.
Or for transporting pets
That certainly explains Tokyo's giant monster problem.
Log in or piss off.
The nice part about living by the bay is eating all the ships come and go.
Gojira-san, is that you?
Is that it cannot be done for less than $700 million, apparently. At least not at a profit.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'd read the "Please, please, please" heading as a James Brown quote, but Henny Youngman seems more appropriate.
Crystal said Friday that while the ship is structurally sound, the technical and commercial challenges with restoring the rusting, docked ship to the high seas were too titanic to undertake.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No, I don't think it has any practical value. It is just the last and greatest of the ocean liners, a piece of history. It is (for irrational reasons) sad to see a great piece of technology rot away.
Try folding grandma into cattle class from Chicago to Paris after getting her molested by the TSA. She has time,
If grandma has the time but finds steerage class unbearable on an airplane (which is absolutely a valid complaint, I can't stand the airlines for long as I'm 6'3" myself), what is she going to do for 4 days on the ship? Is she mobile enough to take care of herself on the long trip? Otherwise if you need to send someone with her to make sure she's OK who is that going to be?
this would be much better if anywhere close to cost comparable
Unfortunately it almost certainly would not be cost comparable. An airplane has a crew of 4-8 staffing it for 8 hours. An ocean liner has a crew of at least 100, staffed for 4 days at a time. As much as airplanes are not the most fuel efficient vehicles on the planet, ocean liners are even worse still.
Similarly, flying with littles is miserable.
It certainly is, and this allows the parents to get their screaming kids further from the rest of the passengers. However the cost (both money and time) is such that families will likely still want to fly instead.
This would be reasonable for moving
If you're not in a hurry to get there, I suppose. I don't know the space allotment for this ship but the last time I was on a cruise it was basically one full-size suitcase per passenger (maybe more for first class cabins? I don't know) so it wouldn't really be that great unless you have most of your belongings going by some other (presumably slower) method.
and going for long vacations.
That is what I expect it would be used for most if it became sea-worthy again. The problem though is that ocean liners are vastly different animals from today's cruise ships. Water slides? Nope. All-you-can eat buffets open all the time? Generally no. Numerous eating options? Not likely. Multiple stops and ports of call? Probably not. Shopping? Generally no. Communication to the land? Generally no. This was about point-to-point transportation. Modern cruise ships trade off speed for relaxation and luxury options (and of course make up for it by selling you stuff and opening their on-board casino while they are in international waters).
Don't get me wrong, I think this could still be an interesting ship to travel on - especially at the speeds it used to be capable of - but I don't think it is something a lot of people would use more than once. For that matter I don't think a lot of people would even use it that many times.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Leave it to Philly to get its hands on something nice and turn it to shit (Yes, I was born+raised in Philly, and the only thing it has going for it is it's historic land marks. I'm suprised it hasn't managed to destroy those too.)
From Wikipedia: "Since 1996 she has been docked at Pier 82 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia."
What does it cost to leave something that huge parked in (what I presume is) a good spot in a major city for twenty years?
Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/CG8Tyhw2g8...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
According to Wikipedia, the Queen Mary 2, at more than twice the tonnage and only two knots slower, took $900 million (£460 million, actually.) to build NEW. Toss in the original construction price after adjusting for inflation, and to get a total price tag of $1.4 billion and change. How is this in any way worth it?
Imagine all the people...
Ocean Liners usually had pretty big cargo holds. People used to take their automobiles as baggage. The ocean liner I took across the Atlantic had 3 swimming pools, a few shops, large dining hall where you could get munchies almost anytime though I think meals were served in shifts. Communication to the land was even common on the Titanic where the radio operator spent most of his time sending messages from the passengers. 1st class was also usually pretty luxurious.
Note that often the later ocean liners were often designed to do cruises in the winter as well. This was true for the ship I traveled on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
$700 million is comparable to what you'd pay to construct a brand new cruise ship. And what they'd end up if they renovated the United States wouldn't be a cruise ship, it'd be an ocean liner.
The difference between a liner and a cruise ship is this: a liner is built to perform regularly scheduled service between ports. Even if the seas are high and there's a storm blowing an ocean liner still goes out because her purpose is to get her passengers to point B when the schedule says they'll be there. So an ocean-liner has to be built to be very fast and very seaworthy.
When air travel supplanted sea travel the companies who owned ocean liners repurposed them for leisurely pleasure cruising. However for this purpose ocean liners are over-built in certain respects and under-built in others. A cruise ship doesn't have to be fast, or shed high seas or stand up to gale force winds. What she needs to do is to take as many people and amusements as possible, at a leisurely pace, into as many interesting places as possible.So cruise ships look nothing like the elegant ocean greyhounds of old like the SS Normandie or the SS United States. A modern cruise ship is basically a top-heavy motorized barge which, despite having jaw-dropping dimensions, can squeeze into shallow harbors that normally can't handle big ships. And they're pokey, even by the standards of 1930s ocean-liners. Cruise passengers aren't really paying to go places, they're paying to spend time on the ship. The ship's ports of call are just for breaking the monotony of incessant luxuriating.
At present there is only one active vessel in the world that is capable of providing true liner service: the RMS Queen Mary 2. Although she resembles a modern cruise ship in her amenities she carries relatively few passengers (2700) for her size (79,000 tons) and cost ($900 million). For a hundred million less you could have a pure cruise ship that carries 1/3 more passengers, and into shallower harbors too. She couldn't sail around the Horn in July in the teeth of a winter gale, but the market for that particular experience is somewhat limited.
Looking at the article, one of the concerns that led to abandoning the SS United States project is the stability of the ship. So clearly they weren't restoring the United States to her original 1950s configuration. That was stable enough but only provided 1900 berths, and those in conditions that while elegant enough would be spartan by modern standards. You wouldn't have swimming pools, bowling alleys, planetariums, or any of the other ridiculous things modern ship designers throw in to astonish and delight their customers. These people must have wanted to transform the SS US into a kind of hybrid liner-cruise ship like the QM2. For that they'd have add space for a lot more passengers along with all the amenities they'd expect on their very expensive vacation. Since you can't make the hull bigger, that means building up. Way up.
Even if they succeeded in the technical challenges of squeezing all that stuff into the hull, the commercial viability of the project is doubtful. There is no practical need in this world for a vessel like the QM2; her sole reason for existing is thrilling customers who are so jaded that an ordinary extraordinary ship just won't do. Only an unique ship will.
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>Sometimes we are so fixated on history that we are using as an excuse to avoid progress.
Conservatism in a nutshell.
lol!
totally stealing that for future use sometime...
When I read things like this, I take this as meaing that they ran the engines to the absolute maximum they possibly dared to on the maiden voyage - and then never wound things up that high again, because they'd measured the vibration limits, and knew how much damage they were now doing when running at 105% of rated power.
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