Engineering Inch by Inch

hey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave with another video in our series covering Princess cruise ships and their incredible engineering now on this channel we cover making in every stripe we encounter it in I love covering watchmakers as much as I love covering the construction of skyscrapers and the thing that surprised me the most at the beginning of our partnership with Princess was how fast these things get built this is like an Empire State Building it's literally as tall as long as the Empire State Building is tall and they build this entire thing ready to go in less than two years that boggles my mind and in this shop I build everything like a bricklayer one thing at a time each based on the previous step and then I eventually get an object but a cruise ship like the sun princess is built in a fundamentally different way it's built simultaneously where every part is built somewhere else and then brought together it's an incredible feat of systems management and there's no better system to show you how this works than with the passenger cabins there are over 2 000 of them and every single one in its completeness with electrics and plumbing and everything is built off-site brought in and installed let's let them walk us through this process because it is fascinating it looks like unbroken space but this is all going to be cabins in a very short period of time [Music] as gargantuan as they are everything on a cruise ship is fighting for space it is the premium and the business end of the whole Enterprise are the cabins how do you fill as many people as possible on the ship while at the same time allowing them all to feel like they have spacious surroundings there are ways to solve this problem with actual space and also with perceived space and here's the cool thing about how princess solves that problem they don't do it on the ship they do it here I'm standing in a mock-up hallway with four different room types and these have been built to allow the engineers at princess to find the extra space to see how the rooms lay out and allow each one to feel like it has as much room as possible for the passengers James tell me about why this process is so important of mocking these rooms up out here well because on computer screen on Bits of Paper it all looks good it looks perfect we signed it off we say this is going to be fantastic and then we know in reality once we get on board and we put them in there maybe things don't fit quite like we thought or don't quite look like we thought or cardinal sin we haven't used all the space that we want and so that's why we come here we build them one-to-one real time not just the cabin itself but the supporting ship structure so you can see we've got the steel elements ducting pipe work everything going through to make sure everything is being accounted for as we put it all together so you've chosen like a specific part of the ship where the duct worked is moving through and you're taking a look at all of it and how it fits together exactly all of it so key part is the design the interior design and critiquing that and how that's all going to work but kind of more interesting is on how it's going to fit within the ship structure as a whole because as you probably know it's like a cabin prefab educated unit that slides into the ship right so that's the other thing that's blowing my mind is that the cabins themselves are like cassettes that you will build out in a building off on the site and then they'll be transported and slotted in exactly yes and so when you're dealing with that being slotted in there obviously ship as huge as we've got here loads of space kind of sort of in theory but we use every last square inch of that space so and that's what the cabinets do and so as you're sliding them in we've got to make sure we've got enough room to actually slide in but the tolerances are tiny so that's great but of course our friends at the shipyard like to make sure they've got a lot a lot of room a lot of wiggle room we'll get it in there and we want to make sure we get the absolute most space out of it actually we work together to try and get the most space out right to be honest but that's why we do it were you able in this mock-up to find some more space yeah there were a couple areas we found little tweaks here and there but there's one area that we did find quite a bit more space now I know we can't look into the cabins because you haven't worked out the Interiors yet that's fine but can you show me where you found more space I'm really dying to see that sure do we want to walk over to it yeah yeah foreign it's like stepping into a movie set yeah it pretty much is so this is what we were talking about before one of the areas we actually found quite a lot more space and this isn't a cabin door this isn't a cabin door as you can see by the signage this is where we've got some firefighting equipment back here but we also have the functional piece of the cabin so the wet unit all the plumbing the electrical okay it's all accessible here the reason why if there's an issue we can access it here without disturbing something of course you want to be able to do that exactly but you looked in here we looked to see part of the whole model room mock-up idea yeah let's make sure we've got all the best fit of everything and we haven't wasted any space and what we did in here wait you found extra space in here doesn't look like there's a lot yeah it's very tight but as you can see oh there is a little bit of extra space that and that's what you're looking for and that's enough to add a few inches to a cabin that's enough to add a few inches and in this particular case the inches were put on the entrance Corridor so it was a little tight it felt a little cozy as you walked in yeah and that could be recovered instead of just having it as wasted space you know I'm sure the you know the ducting and the electrical equipment would like the space itself but it doesn't need it our guests would prefer it so after all the drawings and the cad drawings and the the the fabrication that's already happened for these cabins you can find space and adjust the build of the cabins uh uh live as it were while you're installing exactly so these are done uh Advanced enough that we can influence the whole sort of production line of the cabins so yeah it just shows the value of doing it not just from the design standpoint have we chosen the materials correctly have we put the soap dispenser in the right spot but also for the real mechanical part of it make sure we've used the space to the best way possible I mean I also imagine that I mean this is not a nominal expense to do all this mocking up but for the sister ships that you will eventually build from this this institutional knowledge carries forward absolutely right and we keep this too so we need to come back and refresh we need to revisit something didn't work well on board we wanted to change it make it different we've got these still here for a time being so we can do it all again and you can also do all sorts of different design choices and try out different looks and things like that exactly right that's a level of flexibility I didn't expect on a project of this complexity yes many areas there's no flexibility yeah we make the decision we go main engine Choice once that's done yeah we're not doing a mock-up for those but here absolutely and when you think of the quantity it happens on board even that little amount of space if you you multiply it over all of the cabins yeah adds up to quite a lot this is so cool I you know you were saying earlier when we were talking that you started out designing military ships but it's so clear from where you talk about it that you just love this kind of problem solving oh yeah this is the good stuff I love this I have built architectural models 24 scale of every space I've ever lived in because it helps me put the space into my body and understand it it's also where I've often found how the HVAC is routed in houses but I can see that the utility to doing this is just inestimable it's amazing absolutely and just when you ramp up the scale from that small scale whatever might be on your computer screen even even just in that sort of model scale then you get to this you find everything and speaking of scale uh there's over 2 000 passenger cabins and another five six hundred crew cabins it's even a little bit more than that but yeah yeah exactly exactly so it's a lot a lot of cabin so every last little bit makes all the difference and when you're dealing with those numbers got to make sure it's right [Music] everything about the scale of these ships blows my mind elevators for one this thing has 22 decks and there are elevators that serve up to 15 decks at once makes 15 stops and that's not even the elevator that I'm most impressed by because this yellow platform here is a temporary elevator that is installed just so that the cabins can be loaded on one at a time like cassettes and then one guy can receive the cabin up there and roll it into place and install it with these super super tight tolerances but I just love the idea of temporary elevators that that is like infrastructure for convenience and installation and then it's all going to go away and get installed on another ship that is cool but James I just keep I'm really Blown Away by all the doors to this ship all the different doors that are shaped like the hull and like all the different entrances but this is the specific main embarkation entrance is that correct exactly right yeah there's loads of doors we've got garbage doors we've got uh embarkation doors for machinery for our food for the baggage for the theater crew for the theater absolutely we've got doors for everything but this is unique absolutely so what's really neat about this one is the size I mean if you just look at it it's three decks high so we're going from deck three deck four deck five and we're providing embarkation into the same point of the ship but from all these different levels and that's brand new for princess absolutely right yeah so we couldn't just go and buy this right off the market we had to go and sort of spec it out and work with a few vendors with our partners at the shipyard as well and go out and have this develop for us so we're seeing part of it coming in obviously be far more impressive once we're done but it's there where we're at right now but before this what would happen is you come into different ports and have to bring people in at different levels exactly when the ships were much smaller and the ports were a bit more consistent and able to deal with it it wasn't such a problem because you could have just the one embarkation area so everybody could come in you could put your gangways out in a very traditional fashion and know that it would work but now with the variety of ports that we like to go to with the size of this ship I mean they're all different sizes all different so we've got title ranges to worry about we've got different Pier Heights to about some places we've got a nice sort of airliner style Jet Bridge that attaches to the ship other places is almost like this yeah and we have gangways just going across so to be flexible that's why we went for this one it really feels it really feels like the sun princess is a platform for a gigantic number of new technologies for princess there are a lot yeah and a lot of them are sort of small tweaks so you would look at it and say well this isn't you know the ship isn't going to rise up on thrusters and fly around the world it's not like that but there's lots of individual ones that do that and as a whole it's going to be quite impressive it's going to be a change for a princess for our team on board hopefully for our guests too hopefully we're gonna look at it and say yeah this is great so I'm curious about how these systems come in because this wasn't built in place it was built somewhere else and brought into here yeah like most of the systems on the ship it's really impractical to build them in place and when you go through the ship you can feel how sort of tight and narrow a lot of the engineering spaces are we used every last bit of space on board this is the thing that blows my mind that this is 10 months of work and it seems only possible because instead of building it like Legos the way we think of normal building you guys are building everything concurrently and then just bringing it all together yeah lots of systems sub systems and even big sections of the ship built all concurrently out here in the shipyard or in the supplier factories and all brought together at once to sort of be loaded on and create this giant structure in that short period of time that you mentioned so how many different how do you know how many different factories you have contributing parts to this oh that would be very difficult to answer there are a lot of different factories and their suppliers and some sub supplies but of course we've got our our key key ones and when we think of the ship as a as a big structure big steel structure we've got two big suppliers obviously fin cantieri here in Mount Falcone but there's also the shipyard in Romania in tochio Romania who supplied a significant part of the ship already built and delivered it to this Dry Dock ready for all the other pieces to be built around it and from what I understand they're already building apart for the next version of this that's going to come in yeah we're not even done with this one we just launched this ship and still we've got another ship already well underway the LNG tanks there being fitted into the ship and so already well underway in progress yeah someone was telling me that this Dry Dock will be empty only for a few days before the next ship starts getting welded yeah that's incredible the uh the number of dry docks that you can build these large ships in they're very few in the world so they are in high demand so they like to get us out as quickly as possible and get the next one next project going and have that built up so there'll be a long time for this ship to be alongside the key nearby right and we'll do all the fitting out and all the beautiful work on board for the the public area outfitting and make sure the cabins are up to scratch but this Prime steel the good hardcore bit yeah yeah it's pretty quick it's this 10 months here and we get in and out next one comes along I had it's like the pyramids in a quarter of the time okay so I'm picturing you have a team of people that are monitoring how stuff is being built in other places and making sure it's getting here on time roughly but then how how often does something come in and it doesn't quite fit and you've got to adjust just a little bit how do you is it got to be so much contingency planning there is and there's a a lot of um I'm just going to say banging of Steel sure so as we put the pieces together the tolerances are very good they're very tight and they come together very nicely because spaces at such a premium absolutely even this large absolute premium and over the years we found that we've been able to dial those contingencies back because once we have the final product we go in and we say that's just empty space right we could have used that for something else we could have actually run more piping through there been more efficient with how we do our cable runs and hopefully the ultimate goal is to provide more space back for the guests on board thank you have another bar have another restaurant it's all about building that institutional knowledge so that you guys don't have to constantly do that contingency exactly if you were to start from scratch without any of that you would have to build in such huge amount of contingency because you'd just be unaware of where everything goes but nowadays with uh when you compare to shipbuilding of old where there was a lot of experience there was a lot of sort of let's have the guy come on and whoever got there first got to put his stuff through right so you had a hole maybe this big yeah if the guy with the the water pipe comes through well he's getting that and then the guy with the cables well he's gonna have to go find another hole and cut it in the bulkhead now with all the 3D modeling that we do everything is exactly modeled out so we know exactly how much space we need for each of the systems and there's no longer like in the ship building of hold and I'm talking like the 30s and 40s and 50s there's no longer that fight between the trades of well I'm gonna get there first to put my stuff in and you're gonna have to wait now it's all very precisely controlled and modeled out ahead of time it also speaks to I mean everyone I've been meeting has been working for princess for a long time you know I think the shortest is about nine years and you know is up to 20 years that's really important for holding on to that kind of knowledge isn't it it is that team continuity yeah well I mean it's it's cruising so it's kind of fun to work for it exactly so people do like to be here do like to be part of this team and these kind of projects I mean they're just a joy to be a part of I've been with Princess for 15 years before that I was a naval architecture that's my background so I kind of love the big steel structures that's what I like doing so um it's great to be a part of this do you have a favorite part about the building of the ship the part that gets you really excited so that's a good so I um a lot of Naval Architects will tell you they want to design the next America's Cup yacht that sort of a Formula One type thing yeah yeah yeah not me not you no I like the big steel ship so I like the fact that this is as large as it is while also being Panama compliant which is kind of crazy really when you think about it that this size of ship is still going to be able to get through the the new Panama company not the Teddy Roosevelt locks but the uh the new ones but to be able to put as much sort of volume into this to allow all the different experiences on board while also given that flexibility to go through the Panama Canal which is a great experience to do and by itself but just with repositioning between east and west coast and doing all of that it's it's fantastic flexibility and great for the ship really so with all these new systems the LNG and the air lubrication systems the modularity this new embarkation door you guys must do a ton of testing to make sure all these systems are already robust when you're installing them so sometimes I would say too much testing would you like to be really sure yeah a lot of it's going to work some of it's very sort of fundamental and needs a little bit less testing but you mentioned the air lubrication system yeah we did some testing on that we've done some real life testing we've done model testing we've done computational fluid Dynamic testing a lot of testing to make sure it works because it's a it's not just a big investment but it's a complicated piece of Machinery yeah to have on board with the the air compressors the piping through the double bottom and all those air release units I think we've got 14 across the flat bottom seven compressors yeah we need to make sure it it's going to do what we want it to do and we're quite sure it will so gaytona was giving me a tour of the underside of the boat when I first got here and I just had no idea how many different systems from the nose to the thrusters to the stabilizers to the air lubrication to even these the propellers on their yeah I can't remember what the name of those I am quite excited by it because princess has been a little traditional with our shaft lines and propellers like you see on most ships so yeah azipods aren't new technology but they're new technology for us and what's really important ship this size it will bring maneuverability and it will bring efficiency I mean I think that most people would look at a company making things this big and think of them as as super risk-averse but it feels like all of this Innovation is coming from a place of like yeah let's keep trying new things and keep on trying to make it better that's really exciting yeah we've got lots of teams who are looking at the future what we can do differently on the next ship and what we can retrofit on the fleet currently and what should really be a future technology that we're we're building on to the next platforms putting into our next ship building contracts so there may be something that you guys install in this ship that works so well you might retrofit it into an older ship and yeah by that system absolutely we do that all the time once we've proven it somewhere if we can make make it work elsewhere and it suits the platform suits the mission yeah absolutely there is one fact I heard during the ceremony yesterday that blew my mind is this true that you're also using the LNG and Boyle's law to create air conditioning from the LNG yeah so there's a heat recovery system so absolutely right we've got a couple of absorption chillers on board first time that we've been doing it that is so cool I think it's good I mean the gas is a gas it still it does the same thing that any other air conditioning gas does but I just love that you're using the fuel we look at every opportunity to use and reuse and reuse because I mean the easiest thing when we're heating something up why let that go to waste yeah yeah so James is just a thrilling thank you so much glad to be here [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 123,497

Keywords: tested, cruise ship, adam savage, princess cruise, princess cruise ship tour, sun princess cruise ship, sun princess 2024, sun princess cruise ship tour, sun princess construction, sun princess glass dome, sun princess glass sphere, adam savage princess, adam savage cruise ship, adam savage ship, adam savage discovery princess, princess dome ship, how cruise ships are built, how cruise ship cabins are made, how cruise ship cabins are built

Id: Q3T_Up8q_r4

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023