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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."
It was a pretty amazing design overall for any ship -- wood wasn't allowed in the framing or decoration and there was extensive use of aluminium. The top speed was kept something of a secret and the power to weight ratio is still the best for any commercial ocean liner.
The cruising speed of 32 knots (37 mph) is still amazing for a vessel of this size and impressive even in comparison to nuclear powered military vessels. I've got a small speedboat that will do slightly over 40 mph on a calm inland lake, the notion that this can cruise at a similar speed is astonishing giving its size and open ocean conditions. The wind conditions on open decks would have been pretty harsh westbound -- I'd guess combined air speeds of 60 mph wouldn't be unlikely considering combined surface speed with wind speeds.
It's an amazing design although I'm not at all surprised that return to service has been abandoned. IIRC, a lot has been stripped from the interior and the level of refit and refurbishment required is probably vast. They also used a lot of asbestos building it and dealing with that is probably a huge headache even if much of it could just be sealed and kept in place.
Any private company would probably would be facing costs that wouldn't provide a ship that could produce the same return on investment as new construction. A new cruise ship would probably cost the same and provide a layout and accommodations far more in tune with modern expectations as well as much more passenger capacity.
What market there is for long-haul passenger service is probably better served by smaller ships at higher levels of luxury that match the costs and number of people interested in and capable of the fares required, and they are probably not time sensitive enough to need speeds in excess of 25 knots.
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.
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At least one.
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There actually haven't been many nuclear-powered civilian ships at all:
No luxury liners on the list. Ocean liners typically burn heavy fuel oil.
More accurately, it was designed to be easily reconfigured as a troopship, which made a big federal subsidy available for its construction. That option was never exercised.
The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth did carry troops during WW2. They ran the North Atlantic without escorts, because they were so fast a U-Boat spotting them would have essentially no chance of getting into position for a shot.
The NS Savannah in the late 1950s/early 1960s was built as a combined cargo/passenger vessel as something of a demonstration of nuclear power in civilian maritime service. It had a pretty short career and was decommissioned in 1971, never quite successful as either a passenger ship (probably too late in that mode of travel's era) or as a cargo ship (the passenger component of the design compromising the cargo carrying nature).
The remainder of passenger ships use diesel or bunker fuel. I think most contemporary designs are diesel-electric with diesel electric generators powering electric motor propulsion (pods or direct-shaft driven). Older designs used diesel or bunker fired boilers feeding multiple-reduction steam turbines driving the prop shafts.
I haven't run across the use of gas turbines electric generator as power sources. Probably not fuel efficient enough for most use cases, although I'd wonder if there would be a use case in a modern mega cruiseliner which used both electric prop drive and had a giant baseload electric demand for passenger facilities.
Unfortunately we don't always get to choose what gets saved and what gets lost to time. I believe that once something exceeds a certain delta of age and signifigance it is almost always worth restoring and making use of. This fulfills the more nebulous roles of preservation, for example those of providing tangible reminders of history and allowing subtle details to be saved until we happen to find them interesting.
Put another way, consider that other nautical wonder The Great Eastern. I think it lasted 20 years before being scrapped because it was of no further use. If it existed today I believe it would be restored as some kind of hotel/museum and we would be very happy to have it. However, at the time there was no basic instinct to preserve and so now 100 years later it is lost to us. We can only imagine how frigging (in the rigging) huge it was.
Have you ever taken a closer look at a steam turbine installation on a major vessel? I am a software developer like you, but one of my grandfathers was a ship-building engineer (on large turbine-powered ships in the 30ies and 40ies, to boot), so there is some nerdy knowledge in the family. These installations are extremely intricate, and have to be more or less woven into the fabric of the ship: a modern diesel-electric set-up is plug and play by comparison (apart from the gigantic size of the machinery involved, that is).
I assume that the actual marine engineers in that company tried to tell their managers that this would not work, but that the PR department got to make a press release first. Or something like that.