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Oooo.. that's nice, but a pricey way to do it. Buying existing liners, rafting them up and retrofitting would seem like a more achievable aim in practice. You

• pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I admit to knowing nothing about real estate, and even less about ocean liners, but it seems that an ocean liner - even at sub-market rates - would be ridiculously expensive to buy, and then merely ludicrously expensive to operate. Sure, you're not burning a ton of fuel a minute plowing through dolphins and kelp, but you still need to generate power to operate all of the on-board facilities such as electricity, plumbing, elevators, etc. Would the city allow an entrepreneur to run a fat power cable onto a sitting ship - leaving aside political implications of a big honkin' vessel blocking the ocean view, are there even any regulations written for it? Based only on what I've read of jwz just attempting to put a door in a nightclub wall, it seems that a hostile takeover over San Francisco, followed by some summary executions of most of the city government and a formal secession from the United States of America would be easier.
  • ars 14y ago
    Why can't the ship generate its own power? Is a power plant can do it, so can a ship - it's large enough to be able to make the generator efficient enough. Load it up with LNG every one in a while - LNG is transported by sea all the time anyway. If you plan ahead you can pipe the LNG throughout the ship for cooking, and maybe even heating.
    • pavel_lishin 14y ago
      It can absolutely generate its own power. But then you have to pay to ship a whole lot of diesel onto your ship. I'm betting that the liner's efficiency is a heck of a lot less than a local power plant's, since I assume that a line is optimized to move a screw through water, with electric power being a lower priority. You could also build a better power plant on the ship, but that's not free, either.
      • ktizo 14y ago
        Modern vessels use electric motors powered by a generator to move the screw anyway.