Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
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Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#2The point is gluing a chunk of cruise ship in the middle to make it bigger. Not selling half a cruise ship to somebody twice. It's the stretch limo business model with norovirus.
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#3I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc.
On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#4I worked on a cruise ship below decks, once, for 3 hours, and I swore I would never take a cruise.
Take the dirtiest hotel you have ever been in, and then ensure you cant leave it for days at a time.
It interests me that demand is increasing but I suspect thats just good advertising.
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#5I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
A weld doesn't have to be weaker than the parent metal. I assume these people might inspect their welds before painting them over. Same process as when they make new ships
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#6I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
It’s the same way the ship is built to start with
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#7I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
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Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#8I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
For the most part, it doesn't matter how long it takes to pay this back. They borrow the money, pay installments, and still end up with a 10-15% profit per passenger from day one (and that's after deducting deprecation).
But because they live on credit, they were pretty badly hosed during COVID-19.
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#9I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
* Regulation is non-existent in the cruise industry. You shop for the venue with the most lax regulations of the ≈200 countries in the world.
* The equivalent is insurance. Insuring a $2B ship carries pretty good due diligence. A ship simply failing is rare. Of course, ship insurance doesn't care about employee rights, safe food, medical care, or other things one might expect to keep people safe. It's about protecting the capital expense. If everyone on the ship dies, but the ship survives, that's okay!
* Welds are quite strong -- it just extends the metal. This is especially true when the baseline quality of the metal is not high.
On something heat-treated SAE AISI 4130 steel (what e.g. fancy steel bicycles are made of), you see significant weakening. There is a heat-affected zone where the normal tempering is taken off, and the joining material isn't the fancy CrMo of the baseline material.
I'm not a nautical engineer, but I doubt cruise ships are made of overly fancy steel. When you're making a 180,000 ton ship, your best bet is to use cheap steel, and if you need more strength, to simply use more of it. A good weld should be every bit as strong as the cheap steel around it, and the heat-affected zone is a lot less important if the steel isn't heat-treated or tempered in any way in the first place. It will harden the steel a bit, of course, but it shouldn't be the same level of impact.
It's also worth noting you already have welds, and things need to be engineered for welds. It's not hard to reinforce the welds. Indeed, on a bike frame, the welds are where the stresses are highest, and you get around that by making the tubes a bit thicker (or, for fancier bikes, thicker just near the welds -- that's what a butted bike tube does).
I think cruises are horrible, horrible things for a whole slew of reasons, but none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style.
Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
#10I'm amazed that these welds can hold ship sections like that. I wonder if this is regulated in any way? E.g. class and quality of welds required etc. On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
Icon of the seas, back of the envelop calculation:
Revenue: 52 weeks of sailing x 5.6k passengers [1] x 1.8k $/week [2] ~= 525m $/year
Costs: Interest [3] 160m $/year + Crew [4] 118m $/year + Hospitality [6] 200m $/year = 478m $/year
Profit ~= 47m $/year or ~9%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cruise_ships [2] https://www.cruzely.com/heres-how-much-money-cruise-ships-ma... [3] 8% on 2b$ [4] Crew: 50k $/year * 2350 crew [5], just guessing the costs here, including all accomodation + living costs, probably still to high? [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_of_the_Seas [6] Hospitality: 100 $/guest/day? = 52 * 7 * 100 * 5.6k = 200m $/year