Building the World’s Biggest Ship: Behind-the-Scenes First Look

• outdoors
• boats
• ships
• engineering
• extreme machines
• cruise ships

On the forested coast of southern Finland, in the town of Turku, a brass band plays to a festive crowd gathered along the lip of a 1200-ft.-long, 50-ft.-deep hole. An antique cannon fires, its boom echoing off the colossal white cruise ship that looms up out of the dry dock. After a brief speech, a trio of dignitaries turns a valve. A stream of water gushes onto the floor of the pit far below. For the shipbuilders at Aker Yards, this “float-out” is a proud moment. Some 230 ft. longer than the Titanic, the 1112-ft. Independence of the Seas is an awesome behemoth, the third in a triplet of vessels that are the largest cruise ships in the world. For its owner, Royal Caribbean, the ship is an $800 million tour de force. But the Independence isn’t the most remarkable thing on display in the sprawling shipyard.

Even as the vessel is buoyed for the first time, its triumph is dwarfed by the pieces of an even larger leviathan, a $1.2 billion monster named Oasis of the Seas. The 1180-ft. Oasis represents the latest effort in an intense, decades-long race with other cruise lines to push the envelope in terms of how massively ships can be conceived and constructed. So far,the Oasis’s only rival will be its own sister ship, scheduled to launch a mere 11 months afterward. But the superlatives these ships have earned may not last long.

“The larger we build, the larger we’re able to build,” says Harri Kulovaara, executive vice president in charge of maritime construction at Royal Caribbean.

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