The Miracle Behind the World's Biggest Cruise Ship

Hook, line, and sinker. I am a sucker for the big-isms when explaining something that is the world's biggest. I was hooked when I read last week about Royal Caribean's newest cruise ship.

Let me uncork these -isms so I can share the cool construction pictures:

• Right off the bat, this ship is longer, taller, and wider than any other passenger ship ever built.
• The smokestack had to be retracted this weekend just so it could squeeze under a bridge in Denmark and make it to the Atlantic and on to its home port, Port Everglades in Florida. Amazingly it had less than a 2-foot gap between the bridge and smokestack.
• The ship features 16 passenger decks and 2,704 staterooms.
• The total power output of the ship's engines is 97,000 kW and the cruise speed is 22.6 knots.
• Ship includes an open-air park with trees and hanging gardens, a pool that changes into a stage, an ice rink, and a small golf course.
• It reuses its waste water and consumes 25 percent less power than similar, but smaller, cruise liners.
• This ship cost $1.5 billion dollars to construct.

Huge cranes and a gigantic dry dock helped to build this ship, but the true miracle for these new breed of ships is modular construction. Components of the ship were fabricated and assembled separately. Each of the 181 sections of the ship were then lowered into the dry dock and welded to the previous sections.

Thanks to this miracle of modular assembly, a $1.5 billion dollar ship took less than two years to construct.