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By Norman Muvavarirwa

The building of what will become the world’s largest cruise ship has started. The construction of the vessel is being undertaken at the STX shipyard, at the port of Saint Nazaire on France’s Atlantic coast situated at the mouth of the river Loire.

The Saint Nazaire shipyards are well known for building two of the twentieth century’s ocean liners, the SS Normandie , which made its maiden voyage in 1935, and the SS France, launched in 1960.

On Monday this week Royal Caribbean chairman and CEO Richard Fain pressed a button to cut the first piece of steel for what he called Oasis 3 and what the STX Europe shipyard in France has branded A34.

Fain, Royal Caribbean president Adam Goldstein and executive vice-president Harri Kulovaara, together with STX chief executive Laurent Castaing and operations director Jean Yves Jaouen signed the first piece, a silhouette of the ship.

The ship will be a near-identical sister to Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas. Keel-laying will take place in April next year and the 227,700 GRT vessel will be delivered in spring 2016.

The name of new liner has not been announced. It will join two existing Oasis class ships in the Royal Caribbean fleet, Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, after the estimated delivery date in summer 2016.

Fain and Goldstein reservedly revealed other details.

Fain said, “We have a few things up our sleeve but we will keep them close to our vest. There is an opportunity to tweak some things, but we are not fundamentally changing a successful design.”

Builders STX issued a fact sheet which discloses that the cruiser   will be 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with a beam of 60 meters (197 feet). 60,000 metric tonnes of steel will be used in the ship’s construction with the total cost coming in at around 1 billion euros ($1.35 billion). The new ship will have a maximum capacity of 6,360 passengers 42 more than Allure. The new vessel will be 2.15m longer than its predecessors

In 1986 STX chief executive Laurent Castaing was an apprentice at the yard when Sovereign of the Seas, its first ship for Royal was built.

He said “60,000 tons of steel will be used to create 400,000 pieces of the puzzle that forms the structure of the ship.”

Fain also said that Oasis and Allure were both built in Turku, Finland. They have, become the most successful and the most popular vessels in the fleet.

“Oasis 3, with its French touch, will become just as successful and will be even more energy-efficient.”

A yard spokeswoman said a giant new crane would enable Oasis 3 to be constructed in 90 individual blocks, whereas the earlier two ships were made up of 160 blocks.

Royal Caribbean has an option to order a fourth Oasis-class vessel in the next 12 months. It is also building three slightly smaller Quantum-class ships at the Meyer-Werft yard in Papenburg, Germany.

There are 300 people currently working on the project in Saint-Nazaire and the number will grow to more than 2,000 in the coming months. Two military vessels being constructed for the Russian Navy have to be completed before the first blocks of A34 are laid in the yard’s dry-dock, which also saw the construction of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2.

STX Europe’s facility at Saint Nazaire is one of only around four or five shipyards in the world capable of handling such a monster of the seas. The new order means full employment for almost all of STX France’s employees in the coming year of 2014. Many employees at the French shipyard were laid off as ship orders went down.

The new cruise ship is the first of Royal Caribbean’s Oasis class stable to be built out with Finland’s STX Europe shipyards. Construction at Saint Nazaire continues a historic tradition of building ocean-going ships at the French shipyard.

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