Luxury Liner SS United States Cannot Be Put Back In Service (miamiherald.com) 118
tomhath writes: Once the fastest ocean liner ever built, the SS United States has been mothballed for almost 50 years. An ambitious project to refurbish the SS United States as a luxury liner has been abandoned due to insurmountable technical and commercial obstacles. Plan B, to turn it into a floating hotel/convention center, might go forward. Miami Herald provides some history of the SS United States in its report: "The iconic 1950s vessel, which was bigger than the Titanic and once carried celebrities across the Atlantic Ocean, was set for a $700 million overhaul by the Los Angeles-based luxury line, which also has offices in Miami. The SS United States was decommissioned in 1969 and has been gutted and docked in Philadelphia for two decades on the Delaware River. On its maiden voyage in 1952, the ship traversed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 42 minutes -- a record it held until 1990."
not all sub records are worth remembering (Score:2, Insightful)
not everything is worth remembering and celebrating. records get broken all the time. and everything can be made into a record by slicing words.
usually if you don't know or care about the current record holder/prize winner/whatever, then there is not much reason to celebrate past winners of same.
if there was nothing very original, innovative, and special, about a particular time slice of a record, it is not worth celebrating after it gets broken. mere footnotes and a row in record book used by specialists i
Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually in this case this ship is still a record holder. It still holds the once very important "Blue Riband", which is the record for the fastest westbound (i.e. against the gulf stream) cross-atlantic passenger voyage. Only its eastbound records have been broken and even those not by regular passenger service. So this truly seems to be the fastest cross-atlantic passenger ship ever built (especially if you consider it held almost 2000 passengers) and it was retired quite early in its life, because cross-atlantic ship voyages were no longer required.
So, considering that, I do find it a shame nobody ever found another use for it...
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a pretty amazing design overall for any ship -- wood wasn't allowed in the framing or decoration and there was extensive use of aluminium. The top speed was kept something of a secret and the power to weight ratio is still the best for any commercial ocean liner.
The cruising speed of 32 knots (37 mph) is still amazing for a vessel of this size and impressive even in comparison to nuclear powered military vessels. I've got a small speedboat that will do slightly over 40 mph on a calm inland lake, the notion that this can cruise at a similar speed is astonishing giving its size and open ocean conditions. The wind conditions on open decks would have been pretty harsh westbound -- I'd guess combined air speeds of 60 mph wouldn't be unlikely considering combined surface speed with wind speeds.
It's an amazing design although I'm not at all surprised that return to service has been abandoned. IIRC, a lot has been stripped from the interior and the level of refit and refurbishment required is probably vast. They also used a lot of asbestos building it and dealing with that is probably a huge headache even if much of it could just be sealed and kept in place.
Any private company would probably would be facing costs that wouldn't provide a ship that could produce the same return on investment as new construction. A new cruise ship would probably cost the same and provide a layout and accommodations far more in tune with modern expectations as well as much more passenger capacity.
What market there is for long-haul passenger service is probably better served by smaller ships at higher levels of luxury that match the costs and number of people interested in and capable of the fares required, and they are probably not time sensitive enough to need speeds in excess of 25 knots.
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You sound like you might know: Have there ever been any nuclear-powered passenger vessels, or do all these big luxury liners burn diesel?
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You sound like you might know: Have there ever been any nuclear-powered passenger vessels, or do all these big luxury liners burn diesel?
No, only icebreakers and cargo ships as commercial vessels.
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The NS Savannah was a mixed cargo passenger ship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It had 30 staterooms and looked like it would have have been a very interesting way to travel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The NS Savannah was a mixed cargo passenger ship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It had 30 staterooms and looked like it would have have been a very interesting way to travel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
correct, but cargo ships that have a passenger carrying capacity are not that unusual, but AFAIK no passenger liners were nukes. I knew someone who was a reactor operator on the Savannah, you're right it was an interesting vessel.
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Savannah was a pretty unfortunate design.
It didn't carry enough passengers to be economic and it couldn't handle containers - which was unfortunate when containerisation was taking over the cargo trade. That essentially relegated her to low yield operations.
Otto Hahn had similar problems and PWR reactors are simply too fiddly for commercial use, which in turn means they're expensive to operate thanks to labour costs.
If/when LFTRs are commercialised they should prove worthwhile for large operators to look at
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Because instead of an incredible contributor to global warming, we'd like to have a radioactive source making the waters (in case it sank) causing more mutations...
The navy claims it has never lost a PWM. You do have to worry about the mining, though. Toxic tailings, etc etc.
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the above is not helpful at all: 32 knots is about 60 km/h. That's a quite low cruise speed for a car, for example.
But a lot faster than the average car's cruise speed on water, though.
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Interesting)
There actually haven't been many nuclear-powered civilian ships at all:
No luxury liners on the list. Ocean liners typically burn heavy fuel oil.
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Some of those icebreakers are used for passenger cruises to the Arctic.
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Interesting)
The NS Savannah in the late 1950s/early 1960s was built as a combined cargo/passenger vessel as something of a demonstration of nuclear power in civilian maritime service. It had a pretty short career and was decommissioned in 1971, never quite successful as either a passenger ship (probably too late in that mode of travel's era) or as a cargo ship (the passenger component of the design compromising the cargo carrying nature).
The remainder of passenger ships use diesel or bunker fuel. I think most contemporary designs are diesel-electric with diesel electric generators powering electric motor propulsion (pods or direct-shaft driven). Older designs used diesel or bunker fired boilers feeding multiple-reduction steam turbines driving the prop shafts.
I haven't run across the use of gas turbines electric generator as power sources. Probably not fuel efficient enough for most use cases, although I'd wonder if there would be a use case in a modern mega cruiseliner which used both electric prop drive and had a giant baseload electric demand for passenger facilities.
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wood wasn't allowed in the framing or decoration
A bit of good sense that navies had long since figured out...
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The SS Normandie's death-by-fire in 1942 showed that extensive use of flammable decor had a downside:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdCXDkF0LfA
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The USS United States used the same power plant as the Iowa Class BBs. A lot of it's details where kept secret and like all ocean liners it was designed to be put into service as a Troop ship in case of war. Part of the problem was that they where going to swap out that old power plant and put in diesels which would have been a lot cheaper to run but would have made the ship a lot slower. They would have basicly needed to take the ship apart are rebuild it.
Re:Actually, in this case... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that astonishing. The main speed constraint on a displacement hull like an ocean liner's is the bow wave. As a ship moves forward, the water it pushes aside has its pressure increased slightly, so it bulges upward at the bow. What goes up must come down, so this bulge eventually drops down to sea level, then overshoots and drops below sea level. This is called a bow wave. The key here is that this motion of this wave is dictated purely by the physics of the water (and the water depth, but that effect is small enough it can be ignored in the ocean). And that the front of this induced pressure wave is stuck to the bow of your ship (it's a standing wave when viewed from the ship), hence why it's called a bow wave.
I'll skip the math, but the net effect is that at slow speeds, your ship is moving through multiple waves of its own creation [boatdesign.net] and stays relatively level. But at a certain speed called the hull speed [wikipedia.org], the wavelength almost exactly matches the length of the ship, and the bulk of the ship's mass sinks down into the trough of its self-induced bow wave. At that point, your ship is basically trying to power itself "uphill" through the water (opposite of surfing), and the energy required to move faster increases dramatically.
There are two ways to bypass this problem.
This is also the rationale for the bulb underneath the bow of large oil tankers and cargo ships. It's location underneath the water slightly forward of the ship makes the water act as if the ship is slightly longer (the bow wave starts earlier), allowing it to eek out a tiny bit more speed at the same amount of wave resistance.
Great explanation (Score:1)
Re: Actually, in this case... (Score:2)
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I just got off a cruise liner and was wondering about that bulb at the front. Thanks a lot for your post.
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One inaccuracy: nuclear ships do not have unlimited power. They can keep up near-maximum power for a long, long time, so they can travel long distances fast, but that doesn't affect top speed.
The power has to go from the main source (boilers, diesel or gas engines, hamster wheels, whatever) through the ship into the water, which means that one limiting factor on speed is the screws. They've got to be a lot better at high speeds than they were in WWII, but there will be limits.
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Also seaworthiness.
In heavy seas the bow of a ship (otherwise optimized for speed) can sink dangerously low into the waves. The bulb [wikipedia.org] at the front helps to lift the bow out of the ocean and also reduces pitching. The safety aspect diminishes with the size of the ship: the largest-sized vessels don't need it, but ships sized in the 50-150 ton range can benefit significantly.
The latest tumblehome design (see Zumwalt class [wikipedia.org] destroyers) is being criticized extensively [phisicalpsience.com] for it's innate lack of seaworthiness.
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Not that anyone cares by now, but the bulbous bows in my final link are all shown on military vessels where they nearly always contain sonar gear.
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The reason the ocean liner has disappeared into the mists of history is that market is essentially zero. On top of that, the other two major sources of revenue for liners (immigrants and cargo) are also gone.
Also note that ocean liners and cruise ships are two different animals. Liners operated like airlines, on a fixed schedule linking two points carrying the maximum number of passengers possible with t
Re: Actually, in this case... (Score:2)
If you want to appeal to anyone besides ultra-elderly passengers whose adult children are treating the cruise like an ad-hoc assisted living facility to get rid of their parents for a few weeks, you have to get the travel time back down to 4 or 5 days, max... Long enough for customers to do a transatlantic cruise, spend a couple of days in Europe, then fly home in the span of a week.
Anything that demands more than 8 days is going to PROFOUNDLY limit the number of potential passengers, because most Americans
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Towards the end of Ocean Liners, they were often designed to also do cruises. This was true for the ocean liner my family took across the Atlantic in 1966, the Empress of Canada, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] , which along with her sister ships, was built in the late '50's-1960. From wiki,
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I believe that once the Blue Riband was obtained, some of the boilers and possibly turbines were removed to give more passenger and/or cargo capacity, and hence the speed was reduced. The Blue Riband run was a one-off for the prestige. The power-speed relationship is a cube law and it was no way economical to do regular trans-Atlantic runs at 35 Knots.
As a matter of interest, the power, displacement and speed were very similar to a WW2 Iowa class [wikipedia.org] battleship (240,000 hp / 45,000 tons / 35 kts).. To emphas
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Hmm.. that made me think of The first Jumbo Jet to be flown commercially and where it ended up, It doesn't have to be floating nor flying:
http://www.darkroastedblend.co... [darkroastedblend.com]
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The wind conditions on open decks would have been pretty harsh westbound
There used to be a fast ferry service between Dover and Calais, using a Incat 74 m catamaran that ran at 42 kts to do the trip in 45 min. They had a small open space at the back of the ship, just above the water jets. You couldn't look forward from that deck, it was enclosed on 3 sides with only a view aft. Nevertheless, at full speed there'd be a howling gale on that deck, I felt I had to hold on to my glasses as otherwise they'd have been blown off.
This was nominally the smoking space, but I don't think m
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"it was retired quite early in its life"
If you look at the lifespans of modern passenger ships, 20 years is about normal.
They're sometimes onsold to third-level operators but even then it's unusual to see one more than 40 years old.
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The big difference between a nuclear ship and a non-nuclear ship is sustained speed, not top speed. The nuke is just the power plant, and the power has to go through the ship's systems and be applied to the ocean by the screws in either case, and having more power than the screws can use efficiently is not going to help top speed.
Re:not all sub records are worth remembering (Score:5, Interesting)
More accurately, it was designed to be easily reconfigured as a troopship, which made a big federal subsidy available for its construction. That option was never exercised.
The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth did carry troops during WW2. They ran the North Atlantic without escorts, because they were so fast a U-Boat spotting them would have essentially no chance of getting into position for a shot.
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The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth did carry troops during WW2. They ran the North Atlantic without escorts, because they were so fast a U-Boat spotting them would have essentially no chance of getting into position for a shot.
They did have escorts, certainly in European waters, but they were not put in the routine slow convoys. They had a special escort which seemed to have included elderly light cruisers, because in October 1942 the QM cut one in half - HMS Curacoa (a WW1 veteran). While it would have been very difficult for a U Boat to torpedo such a fast target, there were still aircraft and even surface attakers to worry about.
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Unfortunately we don't always get to choose what gets saved and what gets lost to time. I believe that once something exceeds a certain delta of age and signifigance it is almost always worth restoring and making use of. This fulfills the more nebulous roles of preservation, for example those of providing tangible reminders of history and allowing subtle details to be saved until we happen to find them interesting.
Put another way, consider that other nautical wonder The Great Eastern. I think it lasted 20 y
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It's notable because it really represents the end of an era. The SS United States is really the last of its kind, as it wasn't long after it was built that airplanes took over the role of transporting passengers across the Atlantic, which pretty ended any advancements in ocean-going passenger liners(*). That's why it still holds records, some of which will likely never be broken, and why many people consider the ship to be special as it represents the peak of ocean liners.
With that said, the current state
Is this a metaphor? (Score:2)
Trump alone can fix it.
Re:Is this a metaphor? (Score:5, Funny)
But can he make SS United States great again?
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Being born of an immigrant mother and a father who, himself, had immigrant parents.
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If we build a wall on its deck, we can keep the undesirable passengers out!
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not with this metaphor, they can be "paying" (create wealth by working, help economy by spending), but undesirable because they talk funny and are brown
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what culture? lots of cultures and subcultures in the USA already. Latin american culture already here by plenty of legal citizens. Work getting done for pay and people then spending that money is how the economy functions.
Do you work for a living or are you a parasite on someone else?
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No, but he might start an SS in the United States.
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Hell on earth? "But why can't we use atomic bombs???"
the obstacles (Score:2)
"But during inspections of the ship, experts found that bringing the ship to today’s standards would require “significant” changes to the hull, which could create stability challenges for the ship. Installing a modern diesel electric propulsion plant would also require rebuilding about 25 percent of the hull, Crystal said. Essentially, the ship require rebuilding from the inside out. "
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was never stated that this was a done deal. It was announced as a feasibility study, and this is the result of the study.
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I'm sure the shipping line's engineers thought of all of this because they are the pros - I'm just a dipshit software developer and am absolutely unqualified to second guess folks who are in the profession.
I've no doubt they did think of it (ex-marine engineer myself). However I expect that the marketing department pushed this idea as far as it would go.
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Sounds like it was built like a tank to resist U-boats, and fitted with diesels sized for aircraft carriers. The Wikipedia page is worth a read. To fireproof it and save weight the Navy specified building the ballroom piano out of aluminum. Eventually they found a naturally fire resistant wood for the instrument.
The propellers are on display in museums already, and the interior was gutted and fixtures sold off long ago. Why the hull mods? Maybe the heavy compartmentalization required by the Navy still obstr
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Sounds like it was built like a tank to resist U-boats
No, built like a speedboat to outrun them. Submerged U-Boats were agonizingly slow, and their chances of spotting the ship on the horizon and getting into position for a torpedo shot before it passed by were essentially nil. Hitler offered a whopping bounty to any U-Boat skipper who nailed the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth, but nobody ever got a shot off.
fitted with diesels
Steam turbines.
Re:the obstacles (Score:5, Informative)
" fitted with diesels sized for aircraft carriers"
Aircraft carriers do not use diesels. Maybe some Jeep carriers and ships like LPH but not the big carriers.
They uses massive steam turbines and yes the USS United States used a power plant very much like the one used in the first generation of US super carriers.
From http://www.ss-united-states.ne... [ss-united-states.net]
"Propulsion: The ship was able to attain such a high rate of speed due to an unrivaled power-to-weight ratio. The SS United States was a quadruple screw vessel, powered by 4 Westinghouse steam turbines, rotating at 5240 rpm, which produced up to a combined 247,785 shaft horsepower (SHP). Today's nuclear powered aircraft carriers only produce slightly more power than this. Her oil-burning boilers could reach 1,200 degrees F, causing the turbines to spin faster than than any ship of her day. The Big U could steam for 10,000 miles without stopping to refuel. The SS United States was a mere 28 feet shorter than the Queen Mary, but due to the extensive usage of aluminum in her superstructure (2,000 tons) weighed only 53,290 tons, roughly 30,000 tons less than the Queen Mary. The SS United States was such a success that its hull and engine designs were placed in nearly all large naval battle ships, and the ship itself was the prototype for the first super aircraft carriers, the Forrestal class. On the Big U, the powerplant was slightly derated because boiler superheat temp was lowered from 1,000 degrees to about 925 in the interests of reliability/maintenance. The Carriers actually generated 5,000 to 10,000 SHP per shaft more than the Big U. The propulsion system was a closely guarded secret until the 1970s. "
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So perhaps the four, 11MW WÃrtsilà 38 diesel engines aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are just paperweights?
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They are not in service yet and they are still VSTOL carriers just big ones. Also they will still have turbines as well. Just in this case gas turbines. Frankly the UKs fixation issues I have always found very odd. The way the clung to the Comet/Nimrod even after the AEW disaster is a good example. The fact that they didn't build this generation of carriers as CATOBAR is another. They are just really hung up on VSTOL.
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As you hint at later, they were designed and intended to be CATOBAR. They decided the extra cost was going to be prohibitive in the middle of the process and switched to VSTOL. I suppose if your Navy is limited to F-35s aircraft anyhow, you might as well buy the VSTOL version and try to recover some money elsewhere.
Yes, all sharing the load, but they definitely have big diesel engines in there.
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" I suppose if your Navy is limited to F-35s aircraft anyhow, you might as well buy the VSTOL version and try to recover some money elsewhere."
Not really. For one big issue you are limited to helicopter AEW vs the E2 Hawkeye. Second the VSTOL F35 carries a smaller load a shorter distance then the CATOBAR F35 and the big issue is carry back aka you may have to drop some expensive weapons into the sea to land. Also the VSTOL F35 will be more complex to maintain and operate.
The QE carrier did not start out as
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Sounds like it was built like a tank to resist U-boats, and fitted with diesels sized for aircraft carriers. The Wikipedia page is worth a read.
Read it yourself : it was steam propelled ("SS" is a clue).
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So what if has the name SS United States, it's not special
It's special because it was the fastest ever passenger liner, and one of the last, if not the last, of the great trans-atlantic liners that once represented an entire cultural era.
Is there really demand for it as an ocean liner? (Score:2)
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Try folding grandma into cattle class from Chicago to Paris after getting her molested by the TSA. She has time,
If grandma has the time but finds steerage class unbearable on an airplane (which is absolutely a valid complaint, I can't stand the airlines for long as I'm 6'3" myself), what is she going to do for 4 days on the ship? Is she mobile enough to take care of herself on the long trip? Otherwise if you need to send someone with her to make sure she's OK who is that going to be?
this would be much better if anywhere close to cost comparable
Unfortunately it almost certainly would not be cost comparable. An airplane has a crew of 4-8 staffing it for 8 hours. An ocean li
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Ocean Liners usually had pretty big cargo holds. People used to take their automobiles as baggage. The ocean liner I took across the Atlantic had 3 swimming pools, a few shops, large dining hall where you could get munchies almost anytime though I think meals were served in shifts. Communication to the land was even common on the Titanic where the radio operator spent most of his time sending messages from the passengers. 1st class was also usually pretty luxurious.
Note that often the later ocean liners wer
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No, I don't think it has any practical value. It is just the last and greatest of the ocean liners, a piece of history. It is (for irrational reasons) sad to see a great piece of technology rot away.
Alert Clive Cussler! (Score:2)
The SS United States figured prominently in one of his Dirk Pitt (Yes, somehow I spent some time reading several of them.) books.
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Yep. It was Flood Tide [wikipedia.org].
The baddies were going to use it to block the Mississippi at a narrow point near New Orleans, to redirect it to a new docking facility that they'd built in the middle of nowhere.
"Cannot"? Misleading title. (Score:2)
It obviously CAN be put back in to service. To put it back in to service in a desirable manner, a lot of work would need to be done. They've decided it's too much work, which is different from saying it cannot be done.
My impression (Score:2)
Is that it cannot be done for less than $700 million, apparently. At least not at a profit.
LOSEadelphia strikes again (Score:1)
Parking? (Score:2)
From Wikipedia: "Since 1996 she has been docked at Pier 82 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia."
What does it cost to leave something that huge parked in (what I presume is) a good spot in a major city for twenty years?
Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/CG8Tyhw2g8... [goo.gl]
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From Wikipedia: "Since 1996 she has been docked at Pier 82 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia."
What does it cost to leave something that huge parked in (what I presume is) a good spot in a major city for twenty years?
Currently $60,000 per month, but I don't know who owns the dock. It's right by the Walmart and there's a lovely view of the ship from the Ikea cafeteria across the road.
$700 million to refurbish? (Score:2)
According to Wikipedia, the Queen Mary 2, at more than twice the tonnage and only two knots slower, took $900 million (£460 million, actually.) to build NEW. Toss in the original construction price after adjusting for inflation, and to get a total price tag of $1.4 billion and change. How is this in any way worth it?
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If owning a luxury liner is just an extension of my penis, then it is always worth it.
It's just the wrong kind of ship. (Score:4, Informative)
$700 million is comparable to what you'd pay to construct a brand new cruise ship. And what they'd end up if they renovated the United States wouldn't be a cruise ship, it'd be an ocean liner.
The difference between a liner and a cruise ship is this: a liner is built to perform regularly scheduled service between ports. Even if the seas are high and there's a storm blowing an ocean liner still goes out because her purpose is to get her passengers to point B when the schedule says they'll be there. So an ocean-liner has to be built to be very fast and very seaworthy.
When air travel supplanted sea travel the companies who owned ocean liners repurposed them for leisurely pleasure cruising. However for this purpose ocean liners are over-built in certain respects and under-built in others. A cruise ship doesn't have to be fast, or shed high seas or stand up to gale force winds. What she needs to do is to take as many people and amusements as possible, at a leisurely pace, into as many interesting places as possible.So cruise ships look nothing like the elegant ocean greyhounds of old like the SS Normandie or the SS United States. A modern cruise ship is basically a top-heavy motorized barge which, despite having jaw-dropping dimensions, can squeeze into shallow harbors that normally can't handle big ships. And they're pokey, even by the standards of 1930s ocean-liners. Cruise passengers aren't really paying to go places, they're paying to spend time on the ship. The ship's ports of call are just for breaking the monotony of incessant luxuriating.
At present there is only one active vessel in the world that is capable of providing true liner service: the RMS Queen Mary 2. Although she resembles a modern cruise ship in her amenities she carries relatively few passengers (2700) for her size (79,000 tons) and cost ($900 million). For a hundred million less you could have a pure cruise ship that carries 1/3 more passengers, and into shallower harbors too. She couldn't sail around the Horn in July in the teeth of a winter gale, but the market for that particular experience is somewhat limited.
Looking at the article, one of the concerns that led to abandoning the SS United States project is the stability of the ship. So clearly they weren't restoring the United States to her original 1950s configuration. That was stable enough but only provided 1900 berths, and those in conditions that while elegant enough would be spartan by modern standards. You wouldn't have swimming pools, bowling alleys, planetariums, or any of the other ridiculous things modern ship designers throw in to astonish and delight their customers. These people must have wanted to transform the SS US into a kind of hybrid liner-cruise ship like the QM2. For that they'd have add space for a lot more passengers along with all the amenities they'd expect on their very expensive vacation. Since you can't make the hull bigger, that means building up. Way up.
Even if they succeeded in the technical challenges of squeezing all that stuff into the hull, the commercial viability of the project is doubtful. There is no practical need in this world for a vessel like the QM2; her sole reason for existing is thrilling customers who are so jaded that an ordinary extraordinary ship just won't do. Only an unique ship will.
breaking the monotony of incessant luxuriating (Score:2)
lol!
totally stealing that for future use sometime...
Turned the engines to 11 ... (Score:2)
When I read things like this, I take this as meaing that they ran the engines to the absolute maximum they possibly dared to on the maiden voyage - and then never wound things up that high again, because they'd measured the vibration limits, and knew how much damage they were now doing when running at 105% of rated power.
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You want to trade the view of an historic ship for a view of New Jersey? Talk about an eyesore!
Re:Please, please, please (Score:4, Interesting)
The nice part about living by the bay is eating all the ships come and go. Having a ship permanently docked there slowly rusting away is an eye sore.
Just like going to an impoverished rust belt town where the building are just getting abused and slowly decaying.
Sure the building may be 125 years old with some unique architecture however it is slowly rotting away. So other than trying to keep that building there for historical reason they should make sure it is fixed up or knocked down and replaced. Sometimes we are so fixated on history that we are using as an excuse to avoid progress.
Re:Please, please, please (Score:5, Funny)
That certainly explains Tokyo's giant monster problem.
Re: Please, please, please (Score:2)
The nice part about living by the bay is eating all the ships come and go.
Gojira-san, is that you?
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I'd read the "Please, please, please" heading as a James Brown quote, but Henny Youngman seems more appropriate.
Crystal said Friday that while the ship is structurally sound, the technical and commercial challenges with restoring the rusting, docked ship to the high seas were too titanic to undertake.