The first thousand four hundred and ninety-eight chapters epoch-making luxury liner: Pacific
When the Pacific Shipping Company received a notice from the Royal Assets Division, asking them to build a large-tonnage passenger ship, and also said that this was a political task that could not be shied away from, their hearts collapsed.
Why?
No money!
Although Pacific Shipping Company is a royal family property and is wholly owned by the Royal Family Assets Division, not every company with the name of a royal family property can become bigger and stronger.
Such is the case with Pacific Lines!
Its main business is freight, and although its name is Pacific, it has actually been running coastal routes. Its cargo ships basically travel to various coastal areas in the country. In recent years, it has also begun to participate in the Fuso route.
As for passenger transportation, although it does exist, it is not large in scale.
More importantly, the strength gap between Pacific Shipping Company and several other domestic shipping giants is not small.
Today's domestic shipping giants are Yangtze River Shipping Company and Feng Shipping Company. These two companies are very large in size, and they are among the top two in the country in terms of freight and passenger ships.
Even in ocean transportation, they are at the forefront, especially the Yangtze River Shipping Company, whose ocean-going ships are responsible for the transportation business of many domestic trading companies.
In the field of large-tonnage passenger transport, the Yangtze River Shipping Company occupies a leading position. It has more than a dozen ships of over 1,000 tons to perform coastal passenger ship tasks. The golden passenger route from Guangzhou to Shanghai has always been the Yangtze River Shipping Company.
Good show.
However, as for Pacific Shipping Company, their passenger ship market is currently limited to ordinary passenger transportation business of small and medium-sized ships. On the Yangtze River route, its scale is not even among the top five. That is, on the Xijiang route in the Pearl River Basin, it is barely
Definitely the top three.
The scale is small, so the money is naturally not much.
Now that the superiors directly asked them to build a large-tonnage ocean liner, at least three to four thousand tons, they were all stunned.
Entering the ocean passenger transport field?
It seems like no one is doing this these days!
Feng Shipping Company and Yangtze River Shipping Company have competed for so many years, and their passenger transportation field is not bad, but they still have no ocean liner business. Their passenger routes are generally concentrated on inland routes and coastal routes.
At present, in the domestic passenger transport business, Yangtze River Shipping Company occupies at least more than 40% of the market share, and Feng Shipping Company also grabs more than 30% of the market share. As for other companies, they can only divide the remaining 100%.
Thirty percent of the market share.
However, the above-mentioned passenger transport markets are only limited to the inland river passenger transport market and coastal passenger transport market, and there is no ocean passenger transport market.
Because contemporary ocean voyages are still mainly based on cargo, except for the immigration ships organized by the Immigration and Reclamation Division, there are no pure ocean-going passenger ships. People who need ocean travel often travel on merchant ships of major overseas trading companies.
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On the one hand, the market for ocean-going passenger transport is very small, and on the other hand, it is also related to the high cost of building and operating ocean-going ships.
If an ocean-going ship simply performs shipping and earns some freight, it will lose money. For most ocean-going ships, the profit is not the freight itself, but the profit on the goods.
Now that a large-tonnage passenger ship has been built and put into operation, running on Fuso, Nanyang or some Indian routes, to be honest, the Pacific Shipping Company has to wonder, where did it get so many passengers?
By then, it is estimated that it will not even be able to maintain operations, let alone recover the cost of shipbuilding.
The funds required to build such a large-tonnage ocean liner today are very huge.
A sail-powered wooden passenger ship of about a thousand tons equipped with a steam engine, the hull and decoration together cost at least more than 100,000 yuan. If the decoration is more luxurious, it is possible to reach 200,000 yuan or more.
Not to mention that they were asked to build an ocean liner of three to four thousand tons. Such a large ship, even if it is just an ordinary passenger ship, costs at least three to four hundred thousand. If you add luxurious decoration, I am afraid it will not cost sixty-seven thousand.
Wan Liang can't be obtained.
Of course, you can also not use luxurious decoration, just build an ordinary hull, and then carry more guests.
But these days, even though there are fewer people traveling on sea ships, it is impossible to carry thousands of people every time.
In fact, most of the people who take sea ships to overseas territories these days are middle- and upper-class people, such as officials and businessmen who travel between overseas territories and the empire.
Ordinary people will not run around in both directions.
If anything, it’s immigration!
However, these immigrants who go overseas currently take the immigration ships organized by the Immigration and Reclamation Department. The tickets for these immigration ships are very cheap. Sometimes, in order to attract immigrants, the tickets are even provided free of charge.
Therefore, the passenger base of contemporary ocean voyages is still relatively small. Ordinary people will not take sea ships to travel if they have nothing to do. Most of them are middle and upper class. These people are not very sensitive to ship tickets. The Yangtze River Shipping Company’s Guangzhou to Shanghai
The one-way fare of a luxury liner starts at more than ten yuan, and the first-class fare reaches several hundred yuan, but ordinary middle- and upper-class people can also accept this price.
Of course, it is different if it is inland river passenger transport. Most of the passengers in inland river passenger transport are ordinary people, so the ticket prices are relatively low. Feng Shipping Company is taking advantage of its low cost to expand
Large-scale inland river passenger transport has grabbed a large amount of market share from the Yangtze River Shipping Company.
To be honest, the management of Pacific Shipping Company did not know why their superiors suddenly asked them to order a passenger ship of three to four thousand tons. This is a typical loss-making transaction.
But if you don’t understand, you still don’t understand. The tasks ordered by the superiors still need to be completed.
The senior executives of Pacific Shipping Company analyzed and analyzed, and they all came to a very pessimistic conclusion. Regardless of whether it was the Fuso route or the Nanyang route, or the route to India or even North America, there were not enough passengers.
How can such a large passenger ship be maintained?
In the end, after many choices, I could only focus on domestic coastal routes.
Anyway, the superiors only asked them to build and operate such large-tonnage ocean liner, and did not say that they had to operate the Fuso or Nanyang routes. It was also possible to build an ocean liner and then operate domestic coastal routes.
Since we want to implement domestic coastal routes, we must compete with the two giants of Yangtze River Shipping and Feng Shipping. Yangtze Shipping Company takes the route of luxury liner on coastal routes, while Feng Shipping Company is just the opposite.
They are taking the route of low-cost passenger ships. Each side chooses a direction and then competes, and then they both want to occupy the other side's market share.
To put it simply, Fung Shipping is trying to develop in the direction of luxury passenger ships, and Yangtze River Shipping is also trying to open up the low-cost shipping market.
After referring to the strategies of these two companies, Pacific Shipping Company decided to have a one-size-fits-all approach!
Anyway, the ship they plan to build is large enough. Although they don’t even have a specific design, there is a strict upper limit. It should start at least 3,000 tons, and it is best to be able to reach 4,000 tons.
Considering that this is a political task, if you can make it bigger, don't make it small. As long as the technology is passed, it will definitely start with 4,000 tons.
The huge hull of 4,000 tons is enough to provide enough space, and then it is divided into first, second and third class cabins, and first class luxury cabins are used to serve the rich and powerful. The fare is set at a few hundred yuan. As for the second class cabin, aim at
The tickets are for ordinary middle-class passengers. They are not expensive at tens of yuan, but they are not cheap either. In addition, there are third-class cabins, which are for ordinary passengers. The fare depends on the distance of the flight and is about more than ten yuan.
This kind of positioning also positions this passenger ship as a luxury passenger ship, and the cost of building a luxury passenger ship is obviously more expensive than that of an ordinary passenger ship. It is estimated that such a ship will cost at least 600,000, or even 700,000 to buy it.
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Pacific Shipping Company can't get out so much money. What should I do? Let's complain to the boss.
However, what surprised them was that when the officials of the Royal Family Assets Division heard about this, they downplayed it and said, "Isn't it just six to seven hundred thousand, and approved it!"
The officials of the Royal Assets Department knew that this task was personally ordered by the Holy Emperor, and it was a serious political task. It did not matter whether the ship was useful or not, whether it was a loss or not, it had to be built.
As for Pacific Shipping Company's lack of money, it doesn't matter. Anyway, this company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Royal Assets Division. If there is no money in the company, the Imperial Assets Division can directly allocate funds.
The royal family has a great business, and its subordinates have many kinds of assets. If they squeeze here and there, they can squeeze out the six to seven million yuan.
After receiving the funding commitment from the superiors, the people of the Pacific Shipping Company could no longer control it so much. They directly found relevant experts from the Department of Shipping at the Royal Institute of Technology to design a large ocean-going luxury liner.
Since this ship will be the largest, most advanced, and even the most luxurious passenger ship in the history of the empire, the Pacific Shipping Company directly used the company name as the name of this epoch-making passenger ship, calling it the 'Pacific'
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The standard displacement of the Pacific will reach 4,200 tons, and it is expected to carry more than a thousand passengers. In fact, there is still huge room for expansion in this number of passengers, but in terms of the trade-off between the number of passengers and comfort, the Pacific
No. chose comfort.
This also means that even the second-class cabins on the Pacific are very luxurious in terms of space and comfort, no less than the first-class cabins on other thousand-ton luxury liners today.
In order to build this huge passenger ship and ensure that the hull will not disintegrate when sailing and can withstand storms, shipbuilding experts from the Royal Institute of Technology used a large amount of steel structure when designing the ship to ensure the strength of the hull structure.
In order to propel this ship with a huge displacement, we will continue to use sail devices and use both motors and sails to propel this huge ship. Not to mention the sails, let’s talk about its steam power. The designers are going to stuff six combustion engines into the ship.
The coal boiler and two high-power steam engines use twin propellers for propulsion. The total power is expected to reach 1,500 horsepower, which is larger than the power unit of the Navy's new generation 2,000-ton battleship.
The huge steam power is enough to allow this ship to reach a speed of twelve knots!
Of course, as a luxury passenger ship, ordinary passengers don't really care about power. Anyway, as long as they are not too slow, what most people value is the comfort of the ride.
And at this point, the Pacific can definitely kill all contemporary ships in an instant!