Australian Billionaire Plans To Build Titanic II 289
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the of-course-he-does dept.
from the of-course-he-does dept.
SchrodingerZ writes "Just in time to miss the 100-year anniversary of the fatal voyage of the Titanic, Australian mining billionaire Clive Palmer announced he has plans to recreate the Titanic, calling it Titanic II. 'It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st Century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems,' says Palmer. He stated it was to be as close to the original as possible, with some modern adjustments. Its maiden voyage is set for 2016."
Re:Well, that sounds unsinkable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More lifeboats. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Let the free market decide. If a company builds a ship with only enough life boats for half the people then the half of the people that die won't use that company again thereby correcting the problem.
Re:More lifeboats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose your liner sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1880 and everyone got in the life boats.
Then what?
You had no radio to contact any other ships, so you're just floating around in the water with very limited supplies and little chance of rescue. Unless you were lucky and some other ship saw you sink or saw any flares you were able to launch, the odds were that you would die a slow death waiting for help.
The Titanic was probably the first such sinking where there would have been a good chance of everyone surviving if they carried enough life boats. And people learned from that.
Re:Go Ballmer! (Score:4, Insightful)
Length isn't everything.
RMS Titanic was only 46,328 gross tons (true displacement 52,310 tons). That's less than one-third the size of the QM2 (148,528 gross tons).
Titanic is a fairly small ship by today's standards. "Average" in the current market would be 60,000 to 110,000 gross tons. Ships in the 50,000 ton class are being retired or sold off at 15 years old because they aren't profitable enough compared to the big things. (Celebrity's "Horizon" and "Zenith", for example.)
(Posting AC since still at work...)
Re:Go Ballmer! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go Ballmer! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you could put the nude tanning section on the roof of the First-Class Lounge. [wikimedia.org], which IIRC was accessible to First Class passengers at the time. Just a thought.
OTOH, if you have ever sailed the North Atlantic, at any time of year, you'd know that no sane human being would want to wear a bikini, given the consistent high winds and relatively low temperatures (there's a reason icebergs were hanging around in that region in April, after all...)
Size or Style (Score:3, Insightful)
While a Concordia is not much bigger, if you going to book some time on fancy floating palace don't you want to be on the very biggest?
Not necessarily. Some of the fancier cruises (read - no water slides) are on smaller ships. And this should make it even simpler to reconstruct a Titanis-ish looking ship: