I'll cut to the chase:

It should be fairly obvious that if you're going to make something *big* on the surface of this planet, you're going to have to build it on the ocean.

As for off the surface, zero gravity always helps. Currently, the Mir space station holds the record, although it is debatable whether it could be converted to become an object that goes anywhere (like, say, Mars).

In the new cable TV series Crusade, the Excalibur is around 6600 feet long (just over 2 kilometres). (Crusade is the follow-up series to Babylon 5. B5 is around 8 kilometres long, although it, like Mir, is not self-propelled.)

-- Thomas M. Terashima (tom@nucleus.com), June 18, 1999

Answers

Ummm, what exactley does the Mir space station have to do with Titanic?!

-- JoshH (Josh1@ntcnet.com), June 20, 1999.

Josh:

Mir is related to Titanic only tangentially. For a while, there was a rumour that James Cameron wanted to shoot a film, in part, onboard Mir. Consider that there were a series of near-disasters onboard Mir which were very Cameron-like in theme: basically, the new guy tries to park a big truck (the remotely-controlled Progress resupply ship) and crashes it into the loading dock; intense, frantic action as the crew tries to save the station against the hard vacuum of space.

{-e-}

-- Thomas M. Terashima (root@fullahead.to), June 23, 1999.