I recently read an article that the Royal Caribbean have just given the go ahead for the largest ever cruise liner to set sail, it’s nearly 1200ft long and has something ridiculous like 5 water slides and a zoo on it (maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point).
It got me thinking – is there a ceiling to how large a boat can be? Does buoyancy have a limit? If you ignored the impracticality of mooring and getting into smaller bodies of water, is the capacity of Ship building limitless?
In: 2380
Couple of things… since I’ve been tangentially involved with several of Royal’s new builds…
If you’re talking about *Icon of the Seas*, they didn’t “just give the go-ahead”, that ship is less than 3 months from completion and will enter service in January. They take about 3 years to build following another 4-5 years to design and do the engineering on (which is why when they design one, they usually build at least 3 of them. Designing a ship is expensive af).
In terms of size, Icon Class is only a few feet longer than their existing Oasis Class ships, and a few feet narrower (called “beam”). In terms of overall size, it’s comparable to some of the very large container ships.
The only real constraints to size are needing a dry dock big enough to accommodate the construction (and later, repair and maintenance), and you have to be able to get it from the yard to the sea – Icon is being built at the Meyer yard in Turku, Finland, and getting from the Baltic to the ocean involves getting under a bridge on the west side of Denmark that has a maximum clearance (also called “air draft”) of 57m. Ships built in other yards don’t have that limitation.
The ships also have to be able to put into the various ports of call, where the channels need to be deep enough to accommodate the approximately 9 metres of ship that is below the water line (called “draft”) and be able to maneuver the ship in those conditions.
For some ships, they also have to be able to fit in the locks of the Panama Canal.
When you see a measurement like “Gross Tons”, that’s not a measure of weight, but rather one of *volume* (of the enclosed portions of the ship). This is more of an administrative metric that guides things like number of lifeboats, passenger capacity, minimum crew, taxation, and so forth.
The actual weight of a ship is considerably less since most of the enclosed space of the ship is just empty space filled with air. A surprising amount of that space is actually dedicated to air handling and ventilation throughout the ship.
A ship the size of Icon probably has an actual mass of a little over 100,000 tons.
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