This page features all of my longform research articles, both academic and extracurricular. I invite questions, comments, and discussion, which may be directed to my email (winston@winstonclapper.com). They are listed in order from newest to oldest, with every newly-released article being added here.
This paper, which served as my undergraduate capstone thesis paper, covers the spread of the Catholic Church throughout Europe. Through their use of intimidation, influence, and legal enforcement, they were able to cement their dominance and ensure their survival at the peak for centuries to come. The full paper and associated presentation slides are available below for review and comment.
There is a distinct trail of continuous improvement in Royal Caribbean ship designs which originates from the design of 1995’s Legend of the Seas and evolves through the subsequent classes of ‘smaller’ ships. Ever the innovators in their field, Royal Caribbean also used opportunities for new ships for their other brands. This has notably affected Celebrity’s ships, but also those of TUI to a certain extent, and experiences gained from those designs are reflected in later Royal Caribbean-branded ships. Without knowledge yet on the cancelled ‘Project Discovery,’ the new Royal Caribbean ship design in the vicinity of 90,000 gross tons, this continuum of design ends with various outstretched branches.
Note: This article was published before Project Discovery was revived and four ships ordered from Chantiers de l'Atlantique. It has not been updated yet, pending further details to be released regarding that project.
The design and construction of any ship of size is an amazing accomplishment of which anyone would be proud, but the Quantum of the Seas project surely took that a step further. It is a huge credit to her designers and builders that, despite her size, she retains all the grace, sleek well-designed lines, and character normally reserved for ships half her tonnage. Ten years after her delivery, she remains competitive, with features that ensure she attracts much of her capacity of passengers on most sailings. The entire process of her design and construction will be presented here for the first time in full, with commentary provided on aspects of the shipyard and source vessel as deemed pertinent.
For over 115 years, structures have been erected over slipways and drydocks in an attempt to minimize the number of cranes and improve shipbuilding timelines. The earliest of these structures, gantries, first manifested in the second half of 1908 in Belfast, and quickly spread to Germany, where they took hold in the years before and after the First World War. However, the development of large cross-drydock cranes which could roll from one end of the building dock to the other made the gantries obsolete. In the 1970s and 1980s, such structures reemerged, first in Finland and then in Germany. This time, they sought to provide shelter for shipbuilding projects in sometimes harsh climates, and actually featured the large cranes which eradicated their predecessors. At present, three of these covered drydocks are in active operation, all of them in Germany.