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Imagine a glass-fronted cruise ship almost a mile long and 30 storeys high, driven by 100 diesel engines. The Freedom Ship, as it has been dubbed by Norman Nixon, the US engineer behind the project, is a floating condominium 1,320m long and 180m wide. It would house up to 85,000 residents (most of them millionaires) in 20,000 apartments and cost $6bn (#3.6bn) to build.
According to its US backers, around 70% of the finance needed to build the ship is in place. This could be good news for Northern Ireland or for Scotland, rumoured to be possible locations for construction of the floating community. The project would create up to 36,000 jobs.
The international market for cruise ship design and construction is enjoying a boom. All the major cruise lines have invested in new vessels and the ships are getting bigger. Only last month, P&O subsidiary Princess Cruises took delivery of the 2,600-passenger Grand Princess, the first of three new vessels which, at 109,000 gross tonnes (gt), are the largest and most expensive in the world.
The Grand Princess is 18m taller than Nelson's Column and at 48m across is wider than the wingspan of a Boeing 767 airliner. Even larger vessels of 130,000gt are being built in Finland for P&O-rival Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.
But these designs would be dwarfed by the Freedom Ship and other proposed cruise ships.
Another US company, World City Corporation, says it has lined up $250m of equity and is negotiating a US government loan to build a 387m, 250,000gt cruise ship, containing three hotels with 2,800 guest rooms, and 100,000 sq ft of conference and exhibition facilities.
The vessel, named America World City, will not compete with the conventional cruise market (worth around $7.5bn per year), but is aiming instead at the much larger market for meetings and conventions, which is said to be worth around $60bn.
Proponents of this new breed of behemoth believe they have identified virgin markets in which they can operate without competing against well-established cruise lines.
The foremost British designer of these next-generation cruise ships is John McNeece, who unveiled his futuristic Cruise Bowl project earlier this year. McNeece believes that for too long the cruise industry has been driven by engineering, rather...