In 2020 France did the same with an attack submarine. The Perle had a major fire in its forward half, ruining it. The Saphir was a submarine of the same class being about to be decommissioned. They cut both in half then fitted the forward from Saphir onto Perle, which ended up being way cheaper than rebuilding a new half.

(they're from an older class that is not being built anymore, but the Perle should remain in service a few more years until enough of the new class units are delivered)

https://www.naval-group.com/fr/naval-group-livre-le-sous-mar...

https://archives.defense.gouv.fr/content/download/611644/102...

I used to have a car like that - relative in car business specialized in buying late model cars that had one end (front or back) in good shape, and other end wrecked, and would use the two good halves to make a new car. He used a jig to get the alignment precise, and claimed it was as good as factory. The car seemed fine - there was no way to tell.

A WW2 Btitish ship, the HMS Porcupine, got hit by a submarine and ultimately was split in two halves, promptly nicknamed HMS Pork and HMS Pine.

> HMS Zubian.

I prefer Nuzu.

Cruises hit a spot of:

* All the fun and "not thinking" of an all-inclusive resort (though obviously only if you pay for the drink packages) on land

* Generally cheaper than all inclusive resorts on mainland USA (I'm not as familiar with Europe)

* Competitive on pricing with all inclusive resorts in the Caribbean/Mexico

* Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico

* Get to skip out out of the overt semi-colonial feel of like... a Caribbean/Mexican all inclusive resort. If nothing else, while the crew (ie the people running the ship) are almost certainly going to be mostly south/south-east asian, the staff (ie the people actually supposed to interact with the passengers) are going to be sufficiently multi-culturally mixed to help make all those thoughts fade away...

And let's be real about most Caribbean/Mexican all-inclusive resorts... they aren't always the cleanest, and most people don't leave them except on tightly planned excursions anyways.

"Prices from $1,000" but shows the picture of the presedential suite to lure people in. "Oh yeah, $1,000 is a room next to the engine room with no window and a single bed" at which point people feel a bit embarrassed and accept that it is another $10K just to get a window.

On the other hand, lots of people are returning customers so maybe there is something to be said for moving slowly across the ocean as your life ebbs away ;-)

This is anecdata:

I know three people who've come back sick from cruises. The most interesting one was just last week: someone who had Mal de Débarquement Syndrome for six months. She was dizzy all the time. There is no cure.

This might be a good one to try on your boss if you want to avoid business travel: say you suffer from Mal de Débarquement Syndrome!

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24796-mal-de-...

>It interests me that demand is increasing

I admire your embrace of the “curiosity, not disparagement” principle.

My wife had expressed interest in taking a cruise until COVID and the cruise ship debacle when passengers were forced to stay on the ship, in their cabins for 2 weeks. Though the likelihood of something like that happening again feels pretty low, it has forever put her off the idea.

I don't understand it either. Ted (friend of mine) called them "floating malls" and that has stuck with me.

> It interests me that demand is increasing but I suspect thats just good advertising.

And presumably numbers bouncing back after the pandemic - and as memories of the pandemic fade.

There was a long period where they couldn't run cruises at all due to social distancing. And a load of ships where the infection spread like wildfire and there was barely any medical care available. And a load of people getting trapped on board ships that weren't allowed into ports, so they couldn't get repatriation flights, and so on.

Measure against those catastrophic years, and I've no doubt demand is increasing!

I used to live near a cruise ship port in San Diego and I can't believe people roll the dice on cruises either. Ships would have mass disease breakouts ALL the time. Not to mention how many people just go missing. Our collective memories must be really short and everybody forgot what happened on cruise ships when COVID broke out.

It seems that those three hours gave you insight into one particular operators' practices, but obviously not the industry as a whole.

For my girlfriend's family's sake, I've taken cruises the last two years. One Royal Caribbean, and one Norwegian.

Decades ago I took a couple of Carnival cruises.

Things are not better now. What a shitshow. Royal Caribbean sucked, but Norwegian was a new low. The only word that describes both the en-route experience and the destinations is DISMAL.

At least Royal Caribbean had a pleasant food-court type of dining area, with stations of verious kinds in a dispersed layout that was navigable. Norwegian had only a narrow "racetrack" going around a central core, with serving stations in the wall. It was only a few feet wide, which meant you couldn't move because it was blocked by scooters (a totally predictable situation given the demographics of cruise ships).

Then there was the smoke. WTF. We had an upper cabin with a balcony. Doing 20 knots on the open ocean, we couldn't hang out out there because it was continually inundated with cigarette smoke... and not even from the immediate neighbor. It was mind-boggling. There was also a smoking area right next to a sushi restaurant. And you had to walk through the smoke-ridden casino area on every deck to get anywhere on the boat. At least Royal Caribbean kept that whole giant ashtray confined to a central area on the lower level. Totally fine.

Cruises are absolute shit. You're way better off just going to an all-inclusive resort somewhere, even somewhere cheap.

"It interests me that demand is increasing but I suspect thats just good advertising."

How do explain that so many cruise passengers are repeat customers?

Ever worked in the back of a packed and popular restaurant? It's always hype/advertising hiding the reality of it all.

You been for 3 hours somewhere and making subjective generalizations on all industry? that's interesting

Yeah I cannot imagine the attraction. It's almost literally one of the last things I'd ever want to spend vacation time on.

I talked to a guy who took a week-long cruise that he described as being locked in a prison breathing diesel exhaust. He said there was no place on the ship were you could not smell the exhaust.

They produce sewage that would otherwise not have existed?

> Cruise ships have a huge ecological impact everywhere they go.

The sheer size of these things is hard to comprehend. I'm on vacation at the fancy french riviera and the billionaire's superyachts, when on a bay next to a cruise ship, look like tiny miniature toys. It's just wild. The cruise ships are not just three to five times longer, they're also, way, way, way taller than the superyachts.

You see a cruise ships and it screams "I'm here to destroy the environment".

My wife wanted to try a vacation on a cruise ship but to me it's a big no-no.

Arguably indeed. You have some support for your emotional claims or it is what it is - emotional claims?

Here in Alaska some fisheries and permits have historical length restrictions on vessels. In order to carry the gear, ice, and catch they wanted they would cut boats in half longitudinally and widen them.

> with norovirus.

Chuckle.

* 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.

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

Don't forget it's not just the welds on the outside, but also the welds on all decks and walls on the inside. The resilience of modern vessels mainly comes from the internal structure rather than the hull. The hull is just the skin and needs to be strong enough to withstand the impact of water and tugboats etc but it's not responsible for holding the ship together.

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.

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

how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?

Some uninformed guessing:

A operational net of $100/passenger/day is 10,000,000 passenger days per billion dollars. That’s 27,000 passenger years.

With an average load of 5000 passengers that’s about five years per billion dollars.

My guess is that average operational net is well above $100/passenger/day because cruising caters to luxury market segments; the scale is vast; people expect to be up sold; and gambling. All with little regulatory oversight.

They are regulated by regional professional boards with reciprocity. For example, the American Bureau of Shipping in North America. This concept is called a Classification Society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_classification_society

They are unlikely to skimp on this due to the insurance implications.

I'd guess the average revenue per passenger to be on the order of $200 / day so for that 10k passenger ship that's about $700M of revenue per year. If they can put $200M of that toward the cost of the ship that'd pay for itself in a decade.

Tonight's on-board movie will be The Finest Hours....

It’s the same way the ship is built to start with

It's my understanding that bunker fuel is only used out at sea.

The new "Icon of the Seas" mentioned in the article runs on LNG (propane), but it's definitely the exception. I saw it this winter and it doesn't have any of the black/brown exhaust other cruise ships have. Hopefully all new ships go that way, and old ones are refit.

"We should properly tax/negate negative externalities" in accordance with microeconomics. It's at the core of basic economics and both conservative and liberal economists would agree with this statement. It's a well studied field. The problem is policy. I often post this, but I really wish microeconomics was a required course in high school or primary. I find it to be one of the least understood of the well-established fields, and one that matters when we get older and vote or debate on these topics.

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The cutting apart of ships at their end of life in salvage shipbreaker junkyards is fascinating, terrifying, and sad in equal parts. This (and similar) documentaries of the salvage beaches in India show a lot of interior cutting: https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw?si=Jx7STIHrAEX0Hq6F

It’s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.

The "Silver Spirit Lengthening Video" video in the article has a big segment on cutting, with both the matchine-assisted cutting and the human-cutting.

https://youtu.be/bhZHhDrVQ2Q

It's also possible to do this on "cruise ships" that aren't "cruise ships". My wife and I toured the Dalmation coast (Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece) on the https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-48957... ten years ago - a cruise, but a cruise with ~30 other people, not ~6000. It's a big difference! The ship itself was, as you say, really just the way to get there; everything happened on-shore.

Sailing in a sailboat and being in a floating hotel are so diametrically opposed experiences that it's not even worth comparing.

It's like the difference between back-country camping and going to Animal Kingdom.

Try an alaska cruise. You are there for the views that cannot be seen from land and not the tourist traps.

We went on a river cruise last year (Viking, on the Danube). I thought of it like a bus tour of that part of Europe, except the hotel moves along with you.

Honestly the reason I am "against" cruising is because they are usually floating environmental travesties

If you're ever looking for inspiration, consider that your own foul-ups could launch an entire new field:

These incidents are what led to the creation of the field of materials science.

(Wikipedia link above.)

> you don't let criminals onboard

Plenty of crimes happen at sea. Cruise companies expend effort to sweep these crimes under the carpet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCT8h8gO1g

Criminals are people who've been convicted of a crime. These people are either:

- allowed on cruises (I'm not aware of a "no conviction" clause when buying a cruise ticket)

- in jail, in which case you can also make the argument they're not allowed out in public

So criminals are allowed on board, and people who might commit a crime are not necessarily criminals yet.

There was an effort a few years back (I looked it up, and it was 2001, oops) to market this, a perpetual cruise ship for retired people. "MS The World". I suspect it didn't do all that great, since there weren't a lot of copycats, but it took until covid to strand the project.

Now apparently there's a second ship trying the same business model, "Villa Vie Odyssey". Predictably, the marketing suggests it's the first one ever of its kind.

It's already begun with some news articles noting that retirees find back-to-back cruise voyages less expensive than nursing home care:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/is-living-on-a-cruise-...

Don't people disappear (fall overboard) all the time?

Also I would think diseases spread pretty easily on ships.

Every day we move closer to WALL-E becoming reality.

"'B' is for Buy N Large, your very best friend."

Don't they typically stop at different ports in different countries during the trip?

Other than that, I don't understand it either, especially since you're just stuck on the boat for the majority of the time.