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The Floating City

The idea of a floating city with capable of carrying over 100,000 people including a working commercial airport and even a train might seem ludicrous but this is exactly what engineer and Freedom Ship International company founder, Norman Nixon, had proposed a decade ago.

The Freedom Ship, as it is called, is a gigantic concept vessel unlike anything in existence today. 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 shopping malls, and a full 1.7 million square foot (160,000 m²) floor set aside for various companies to showcase their products. In terms of weight the Jordan Jahre, a supertanker and the largest ship afloat has a displacement of 564,739 tons the Freedom Ship is planned to have a displacement of about 2.7 million tons.  

With current day technology there is no way of building the Freedom Ship in a conventional shipyard. Instead the vessel will be build like a barge reducing the stress of its enormous weight. The Freedom Ship will be constructed of 520 airtight steel compartments. Each will measure 80 feet tall, 50 to 100 feet wide and 50 to 120 ft. long. The assembly process will start ashore and after about two years the Freedom will be ready to head to sea to continue its construction as it goes.  

The Freedom Ship is planned to circle the globe once every 2-3 years stopping in many of the world’s shoreline cities as well as many resorts along the way. Passengers will arrive to the city using ships, helicopters and aircrafts capable of landing on the full size runway located on top of the Freedom Ship. The cost of the entire project is estimated at a whooping 6 billion dollars. 

Although the Freedom Ship concept was proposed in the mid 1990’s, to date Freedom Ship International was not able to raise the funds to start building the project. 

More information on the floating city concept can be found on Freedom Ship International website.

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