I’ve been on both of the previous largest ships and they’re just obsessively big. The former largest one felt like being in a small city with a carnival on top.
I don’t know why they need to be any bigger. The market for these has to have hit a capacity…prepandemic, when I last went on one, they were not even fully filling those in prime season.
“Even the official website is a bloated nightmare that’s difficult to navigate.” - Lol
We turned down a big extended family cruise about a decade ago. Everything was top-tier and a wealthy patriarch’s milestone birthday but I begged off because I’m self-employed and had to “look after clients”. (Also, trapped with relatives for a week - a big nope.)
Remember Legionnaire’s Disease? One of the very first recorded outbreaks was on a cruise ship. No thanks!
So that’s what happened to Kowloon Walled City. . . they turned it into a boat.
Nice.
Now that you mention it the vast majority of citizens in Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series are essentially human beings on an endless vacation cruise traveling the galaxy on unfathomably huge luxury ships.
I wonder if this kind of thing was where he got the idea.
For sure. Except in this case you can’t take a side trip to the Hoover Dam or Zion to clear your head. You’re stuck on the strip the whole time.
The pool space to passenger ratio on this thing is going to be appalling. And the number of waterslides on it makes me think the passengers will be appalling.
If it ran into an iceberg there’d be a few silver linings to be found I’d say.
If only there was a way to turn the slides to face the open sea… 
What’s that?
Gluing big rocks together.
Behold “Medium-size Iceberg” we didn’t see coming…
I’m not willing to go to the website, but poking around on the Wiki article for this monstrosity fails to produce the answer to one of my first questions: how much fuel does this thing consume? Yeah, I know LNG and diluted fuel helps, but I’m still feeling like this might be an important question.
Remake of Speed 2.
The engineering in those ships is undeniably impressive. They really are amazing if you look at them strictly through that lens. I have no interest in cruising (though not judging people who do, to each their own). But I do actually find the ships themselves pretty fascinating. They really are the peak of shipbuilding in every way and the builders of the Titanic would be in awe of what is now possible.
No thanks, indeed!
Also, family or friends trips sometimes sound good in theory, but in practice can be annoying.
My wife and I have done that, but then there is always a long stretch before we do it again.
Especially if it happens to be with people that are incapable of having their own opinion or assisting with a decision.
I won’t lie, it looks very impressive. It also looks like it must leave a trail of dead fish, bleached coral and deafened whales behind it everywhere it goes.
Is there a point to taking a cruise when the ship becomes so big you could wander around all week and not see the ocean?
The engineering is indeed impressive.
D’ya think they do submersible tours?
“Because we can! And because it’s a way to stick it to those idiot ‘environmentalists’ who want us all to live like poor people!”
There really are far too many people out there who cannot maintain a coherent self-image without conspicuous consumption, and they will literally let the world die before they admit that they need to relinquish even the possibility of acquiring one or two extravagant luxuries.
And now I completely want to run an RPG set on a ship like this. Kind of like “The Poseidon Adventure”, only still upright…
Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride?
