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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."
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...
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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
Yeah, film at 11. 60 year old rusty hulk would require extensive re-build to accommodate a propulsion plant it was never designed for.
What the hell did these guys expect? A new coat of paint, and it's ready to go again? I mean, any sane person should have approached this with a mindset of "this will likely cost more than a new build. But this is (insert famous ship name here) after all, so commercial considerations should not be the main motivators." Any other way of approaching such a job would be just hare-brained.
But can he make SS United States great again?
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.
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.
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.
" fitted with diesels sized for aircraft carriers"
Aircraft carriers do not use diesels. Maybe some Jeep carriers and ships like LPH but not the big carriers.
They uses massive steam turbines and yes the USS United States used a power plant very much like the one used in the first generation of US super carriers.
From http://www.ss-united-states.ne...
"Propulsion: The ship was able to attain such a high rate of speed due to an unrivaled power-to-weight ratio. The SS United States was a quadruple screw vessel, powered by 4 Westinghouse steam turbines, rotating at 5240 rpm, which produced up to a combined 247,785 shaft horsepower (SHP). Today's nuclear powered aircraft carriers only produce slightly more power than this. Her oil-burning boilers could reach 1,200 degrees F, causing the turbines to spin faster than than any ship of her day. The Big U could steam for 10,000 miles without stopping to refuel. The SS United States was a mere 28 feet shorter than the Queen Mary, but due to the extensive usage of aluminum in her superstructure (2,000 tons) weighed only 53,290 tons, roughly 30,000 tons less than the Queen Mary. The SS United States was such a success that its hull and engine designs were placed in nearly all large naval battle ships, and the ship itself was the prototype for the first super aircraft carriers, the Forrestal class. On the Big U, the powerplant was slightly derated because boiler superheat temp was lowered from 1,000 degrees to about 925 in the interests of reliability/maintenance. The Carriers actually generated 5,000 to 10,000 SHP per shaft more than the Big U. The propulsion system was a closely guarded secret until the 1970s. "
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That certainly explains Tokyo's giant monster problem.
Log in or piss off.
Yep. It was Flood Tide.
The baddies were going to use it to block the Mississippi at a narrow point near New Orleans, to redirect it to a new docking facility that they'd built in the middle of nowhere.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So what if has the name SS United States, it's not special
It's special because it was the fastest ever passenger liner, and one of the last, if not the last, of the great trans-atlantic liners that once represented an entire cultural era.
$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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