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Freedom Ship is a concept for a floating city proposed by Norman Nixon of Freedom Ship International.
According to the company's website,
- With a design length of 4,500 feet (1400 m), a width of 750 feet (230 m), and a height of 350 feet (110 m), Freedom Ship would be more than 4 times longer than the Queen Mary. The design concepts include a mobile modern city featuring luxurious living, an extensive duty-free international shopping mall, and a full 1.7 million square foot (160,000 m²) floor set aside for various companies to showcase their products.
- Freedom Ship would not be a cruise ship, it is proposed to be a unique place to live, work, retire, vacation, or visit. The proposed voyage would continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world's coastal regions. Its large fleet of commuter aircraft and hydrofoils would ferry residents and visitors to and from shore.
Current naval engineering techniques are inadequate for the construction of such a large vessel. At present supertankers cannot be made larger because of the enormous stresses imposed on hulls by hogging and sagging in heavy seas, leading to catastrophic failures like the breaking in half of the 797 foot (243 m) Prestige off Spain on 19 November 2002. Freedom Ship International has given no indication of how it plans to overcome the engineering problems in building such a large floating structure, although one way to mitigate the mechanical stresses involved would be to have a keel that is 1/3 deeper than the ship is long.
If built, it might cost around $11 billion.
Appearances in popular culture
A dark and satirical vision of the breakdown of social order aboard such a ship appeared briefly in Grant Morrison's comic book series The Filth.
External links
- Official site of Freedom Ship International
- Collected Critical Comments on the Freedom Ship project This page by Patri Friedman contains skeptical comments from various websites about the project, as well as a link to his own comments - which FSI briefly threatened to sue him for.
"Freedom Ship"