World's Largest Cruise Ship Completed...

That's a frogman's dream come true.

I remember as a somewhat niave 17 year old in 1997 being fascinated by this from the moment I first saw it in the local paper.

I followed it online for a bit until about 2001 when reality set in and I realised "nuh-uh".

Cruise ships will keep getting bigger no doubt, but incrementally. They still have quite a way to go to match the biggest ship of any kind ever built, the supertanker Knock Nevis, (Jahre Viking) at 1504' (458m) long and with a fully loaded displacement over 500,000 tons.

Knock Nevis was withdrawn from service as a tanker in 2004 and converted to a FSO. The largest vessels currently operational are the Maersk Line's E-class container ships which are 1,300' (397m) long.

FSO or FPSO = Floating Production, Storage and Offloading unit.

It sits permanently moored at an oil field, used to process crude from wells and store it onboard for later transfer to other vessels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_storage_and_offloading_unit

Here's a video from Top Gear a number of years ago when she was still in service as an ocean-going tanker:

[yt=The largest moving object ever made by human hands]WX2HFVHbo18[/yt]

I read somewhere that this thing on a test run just barely made it under a bridge. The smoke stack is retractable and even with it lowered as low as possible, the ship only had about a 2 foot clearance



I sense nothing but DOOM in that things future

[wyt=Oasis Of The Seas passes under the Great Belt Bridge]RYf8F9-jULo[/wyt]

I just watched NatGeo do an hour show on "Freedom of the Seas", the, at the time, largest cruise ship in the world. The size is just incredible. Pictures in this thread do not do these ships justice. These are enormous, ENORMOUS ships, and watching it on a 42" screen drove that point home. Simply amazing engineering.

J.