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."

Comments

Actually, in this case...

[Ecuador]

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...

Re:Actually, in this case...

[swb]

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.

Re:Actually, in this case...

[rmdingler]

At least one.

Re:Actually, in this case...

[_merlin]

There actually haven't been many nuclear-powered civilian ships at all:

• NS Savannah (US, merchant cargo ship, demonstration platform
• Otto Hahn (Germany, ore/passenger configuration, re-engined with diesel propulsion, re-commissioned for container service)
• Mutsu (Japan, freighter, never carried commercial cargo)
• Sevmorput (USSR, icebreaking LASH carrier/container ship)
• Lenin (USSR, icebreaker)
• Arktika (USSR, icebreaker)
• Sibir (USSR, icebreaker)
• Rossiya (USSR, icebreaker)
• Taymyr (USSR, icebreker)
• Vaygach (USSR, icebreker)
• 50 Let Pobedy (Russia, icebreaker)

  No luxury liners on the list. Ocean liners typically burn heavy fuel oil.

Re:Actually, in this case...

[daremonai]

Also the above is not helpful at all: 32 knots is about 60 km/h. That's a quite low cruise speed for a car, for example.

But a lot faster than the average car's cruise speed on water, though.

Re:Actually, in this case...

[swb]

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.

Re:Actually, in this case...

[Solandri]

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.

It's not that astonishing. The main speed constraint on a displacement hull like an ocean liner's is the bow wave. As a ship moves forward, the water it pushes aside has its pressure increased slightly, so it bulges upward at the bow. What goes up must come down, so this bulge eventually drops down to sea level, then overshoots and drops below sea level. This is called a bow wave. The key here is that this motion of this wave is dictated purely by the physics of the water (and the water depth, but that effect is small enough it can be ignored in the ocean). And that the front of this induced pressure wave is stuck to the bow of your ship (it's a standing wave when viewed from the ship), hence why it's called a bow wave.

I'll skip the math, but the net effect is that at slow speeds, your ship is moving through multiple waves of its own creation and stays relatively level. But at a certain speed called the hull speed, the wavelength almost exactly matches the length of the ship, and the bulk of the ship's mass sinks down into the trough of its self-induced bow wave. At that point, your ship is basically trying to power itself "uphill" through the water (opposite of surfing), and the energy required to move faster increases dramatically.

There are two ways to bypass this problem.

• Stop displacing water. That's what your speedboat does. At speeds above about 20 knots, it starts planing on top of the water, instead of forcing its way through it. This lifts the hull out of the water, and thus no more standing wave problem.
• Make the ship longer. The longer the ship is, the faster it can go before this standing bow wave lengthens to match the length of your ship. This is how displacement ships like ocean liners, cargo ships, and navy ships get around the problem. (Actually the nuclear powered navy ships can just increase energy output to power through this - it's not an absolute limit like the speed of light; and if you go fast enough the back of your ship climbs higher out of the trough so the energy requirement decreases).

This is also the rationale for the bulb underneath the bow of large oil tankers and cargo ships. It's location underneath the water slightly forward of the ship makes the water act as if the ship is slightly longer (the bow wave starts earlier), allowing it to eek out a tiny bit more speed at the same amount of wave resistance.

Re:Is this a metaphor?

[mobby_6kl]

But can he make SS United States great again?

Re:Please, please, please

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:not all sub records are worth remembering

[Deadstick]

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.

Re:not all sub records are worth remembering

[nintendoeats]

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.

Re:the obstacles

[muecksteiner]

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.

Re:the obstacles

[LWATCDR]

" 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. "

Re:Please, please, please

[c]

The nice part about living by the bay is eating all the ships come and go.

That certainly explains Tokyo's giant monster problem.

It's just the wrong kind of ship.

[hey!]

$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.