Biggest Cruise Ship

This is the vertiginous tale of Symphony of the Seas, the biggest and most challenging cruise ship ever made.

The Symphony of the Seas - the biggest ever constructed cruise liner on its inaugural cruise from Barcelona in March 2018 - is about five time larger than the Titanic. In other words, Symphony of the Seas is perhaps the most ridiculous and amusing luxurious resort in the world.

Imagine a cruise ship. However, in the last ten years, cruise liners have gone from being a means of transportation to huge swimming towns with parachute-simulator ( "Quantum of the Seas"), go-carting ("Norwegian Joy"), autoscooters ("Quantum again") and icebars ("Norwegian Breakaway"). The cruise ship business is going through a gold era fueled by thousands of years of exploding tourist numbers from China.

Twenty-five million passengers sailed on a cruise ship in 2017. To many, a voyage for the first time is seldom the last. Between Southampton, Venice and Barbados, the harbours are full of returning clients. And as Richard Fain likes to say: Nobody gets such numbers.

Fain realized that the cruise industry's corporate identity was a real chance. In order to win a new kind of client, Fain needed a new ship. He commissioned Harri Kulovaara, a Finish shipbuilding engineer who made a name for himself by designed ferryboats for passengers.

One of them was a 150-metre high, two-storey central boardwalk, which culminated in a gigantic rear windows. Bringing daylight into the middle of the ship - in front of it a series of gloomy, depressive places - the windows create a road-like turntable for the people. The Voyager was launched when you wanted to know exactly when the ship's designs went astray.

All of a sudden, crossing was in an armada of conveniences. "There' been a big upheaval," says Trevor Young, VP of New Buildings at Royal Rivale MSC Croises. Vessels must be able to withstand North Atlantic winds, North Atlantic snows and scorching Carribean warm. An ocean-going ship is its own island: it must produce its own power and its own waters and handle its own wastes.

As there is no fire brigade and no ambulance, every member of the ship's personnel is fire-trained and the shipboard health center must be able to cope with almost any kind of emergencies (including death: all vessels have a small mortuary, a need for a diversion so loved by the elderly). Kulovaara's newbuilding division is housed in the Royal Caribbean Innovations Lab, which is headquartered in Biscayne Bay, Florida, in the biggest seaport, Portmiami.

"â??When I first got engaged, we didn't use CAD,â? says Fain. "What we used was SAD, or'scissor-assisted design', because what you did was put your sketch on the dinner menu and then slice and pas. "Today, the Innovation Lab has comprehensive prototype and test equipment and a large digital realism simulation tool that allows Kulovaara's engineers and architecture to move through the interiors throughout the entire designing world.

More important perhaps is the move of the 2,200-man ship's personnel, who must have easy galley and stowage facilities in the intestines. Since then, the company has worked on several of Royal Caribbean's most wild projects, among them a lookout deck high above Quantum of the Seas.

It' s been a bad day: gray fog was hanging in the sky like gaze, but the ship was still a few kilometers away from it. Upright, the deck is assembled in approximately 80 gigantic segments - each weighing up to 800 tons - and then robot-welded together like giant pieces of individually designed robot.

At the port side the decks of a new MSC cruise ship sank. The Symphony ran faster than planned. Kulovaara, Fain and the RCCM visited another of their vessels, the Edge of catching starship in November 2018. Timo Yrjovuori, the Symphony construction engineer, guided me around the ship while they were attending the group.

When we entered the lower deck of the Symphony, the ship was full of action. And the culmination of the Omega series is the divided body: It has 18 floors, its middle section is a further development of Voyager's pedestrian area. To stand in the center of the boardwalk (Oasis vessels are divided into seven "quarters") is like being in Manhattan, with miniscrapers on each side.

You see, Yrjovuori and I visited the ship. Down below, Symphony of the Seas is like a storehouse on the Amazon, a logistic city. The most notable characteristic of the symphony is perhaps the nave above the Royal Promenade: As Kulovaara put it, it was a charm - a self-contained designer retreat that Royal has used to solve problems since Voyager.

His staterooms are massively prefabricated and set into the ship like giant Jenga-Blöcke. Over half of the symphony is taken up by state rooms. One centimeter saving by using a thin layer of plywood over the length of the ship can mean one additional cab per decker. Bath unit are tested for inclination: a locked lavatory must run off at 10° ship's inclination without entering the room.

"They have the feeling of the movement of the ship, the appearance must match," says the law. At Quantum, Royal has launched a range of different types of vertical and horizontal masonry. Before I visited France in November 2017, I went to New York to see the cruise ship industry's brightening up.

National Caribbean had hired a room in Brooklyn's Navy Yard to show what it called Project Excalibur. It will make its Symphony of the Seas début and be broadcast throughout the whole fleet. Gigantic 4K monitors on robot beams performed a dancing show on the central platform (the show, something like a novum realm, is shown on Quantum-class ships) before Fain made his show.

You are expecting Symphony to be the most power-economical ship at sea in terms of mass (a statement currently being made by Harmony). "All the new Royale vessels have a hull that ejects minute blisters to decrease aerodynamic resistance, which means that the ship actually flies in the outdoors. At the moment Kulovaara has ordered 13 vessels. By 2014, the Caribbean became the world's biggest cruise line in terms of cruise ship capacities (the Mardi Gras is still bigger, mainly because it operates short cruises).

In 2017, MSC Cruises announces the construction of four world-class 200,000 tonne vessels whose Symphony shared-hulps have a remarkable similarity. The archrival Carnival has ordered two 180,000-ton vessels, which are expected in 2020.