School Ship

A **School Ship** is a specialized vessel that serves as a seagoing campus, equipped with self-sustaining facilities and semi-permanent housing for students and workers alike. Each school-ship is catered with the necessities built for long voyages including a dedicated farming areas, an array of electric generators (both renewable and nonrenewable), a desalination plant, and many more. School Ships came from a long history since Antiquity, it evolved multiple times throughout its 3,000 years of history.

Considered as a plowshare due to its origin often being used under the military, it wasn't until the early 1920s where the modern depiction of a school chip is used for a peaceful civilian application came about. And what considers as a "modern depiction" has no single depiction, with modern countries and international organization have different description of what a school ship is. For instance, the Royal Endeavour Society of London described school ships as the *"Large and prominent successors from Research Ships"*, while Historians affirmed that these ships are the gradual evolution of ancient seasteading.

Currently, under the International Maritime Organization, the International School Ship Authority (ISSA) is responsible for the regulation of school ships worldwide. Members of the ISSA are mandated to create their own Local Authorities, an example of this aforementioned authority is Japan's School Ships Committee, the United State's Bureau of Education Ships, and Germany's Federal Learning Stations. Due to the ISSA's extensive and complicated set of regulations and management, production of school ships drastically decreased in the opening years of the 21st century, thus making each of them special and are treated as historical pieces of humanity's ingenuity.

## Technicality of School Ships

### **General features**

School Ships are equipped with the crucial equipment necessary for long-term voyages. The ISSA's Shipbuilding Regulatory is responsible for overseeing the fulfillment of these requirements to each modern ships being created, though the requirements changes depending on the type of school ships being developed. For a school ship to function its responsibility, its surface deck must accommodate five elements: Housing for the occupants, commercial/industrial sectors, self-sufficient facilities, emergency services, and an academic institution.

* **Housing**: School Ships are essentially floating cities. They are seagoing settlements for students, sailors, and workers alike. So the Regulatory emphasizes this, therefore, its constructed decks have additional free spaces for additional construction when overpopulation arises, but a typical modern school ship can support from 30,000 to a maximum of 150,000 people. The architecture of the housing itself depends on the contractors and architects, but the Regulatory has guidelines like the materials used and the limit that a building can reach.
* **Commercial/Industrial**: School Ships offers both theoretical and hands-on experience within the context of its academic purpose, and so, the ships has its own businesses and even industries for students to work at. Though the regulation of this is often lax by the Regulatory, companies and businesses meanwhile would come and invest their money to these sectors. The reason behind it is due to them wanting to recruit skilled students who completed their on-the-job training to these said sectors. Businesses and industries in these sectors are typically privately-owned by the company, but there are some instances that they are owned by the school itself.
* **Self-Sufficient Facilities**: Electricity, drinkable water, and food sustenance is important for a school ship to have. Even though the ship can "technically" be resupplied either through port of call or supply ships for every end of the month, in calamities and disasters when the ship can't be moored to any ports, the ship must be able to feed its occupants and continue its operation even to these unfortunate times. Hence, the Regulatory emphasized that these ships must have an extensive network of facilities that allows the ship to be self-sufficient. From wind turbines converting energy towards massive indoor fishery farms, the ship **must** have the capacity to accommodate the basic needs of the occupants in every occasion.
* **Emergency Services**: Police stations, fire departments, and hospitals/clinics are important to the school as same as the academic institution to the ship. The Regulatory stated that these services are placed strategically across the multiple decks of the ship. Another thing that the Regulatory highlighted that the personnel of these services are full uniformed and professional adults, though OJT training can happen anytime, but in the need of emergency, these Adults are required to comply while on-training students aren't required to comply, though this rule depends on each station.
* **Academic Institution**: In order for a school ship to be classified as one, they must at least established a single (1) secondary school or a tertiary school, another requirement is that they need both general and maritime courses, and third, they have the capacity operate the entire ship with limited governance/guidance. This gives the importance of a future environment that a student must experienced after graduating, therefore the responsibilities for the institution to operate the ship is a massive undertaking responsibility. In case the Institution failed to meet its quota, the Local School Ship Authority would step up and conduct a series of procedures to the questioned institution and its governing school ship.

Additional features may include like an entire geographic landscape for greenery scenery, additional mode of transportations such as railways, an indoor dock for easy supplying operations, an airdrome, replicated historical buildings, and many more. Though, some school ships are considered to be one even though some of them don't fit the required five elements.

### Basic types of School Ships

According to the Classification Board of the ISSA, multiple types of school ships has been registered to their system. The list includes but not limited to:

* School Carrier - Most common type of school ships worldwide.
* School Cruiser - Second most common type of school ships.
* School Sub/Submersible Schools - Special school ships capable of oceanography.
* Library Ships - Seagoing libraries chartered by many think-tanks.
* Pontoon School - Only capable on rivers and coastlines.
* Hulk Academies - Completely stationed floating campuses.
* Concrete School Ship - Countries such as the Philippines, France, and the United States uses this variant.
* Wooden School Ship - Greece, Italy, and Venice used this variant.

### By Role

A **School Carrier** is the typical and most common variant of a school ship. It is called a "Carrier" in the first place due to the design of the ship reminiscent to the designs of Aircraft carriers. This principle of their reminiscent design is the reason of their namesake. Apart from their different designs, some had other utilities as well, an example for this is the **Submersible School** in which thanks to its special constructed hull, they can perform oceanography, and other maritime related courses that often is limited to the other variants. Both **Pontoon Schools** and **Hulk Academies** meanwhile are incapable of seafaring, but they offer the same amenities though it is small in its dimensions, with the latter completely moored to its port. **Concrete** and **Wooden School Ships** on the other hand are ships constructed with the aforementioned materials, though capable of seagoing, they are used as replication from antiquity or as a result of limited resources.

### Hull Identification

Several methods and systems of identification has been used in various of countries. For example, the SSA number is a unique identifier issued by the School Ship Authority for ships that are capable for seafaring outside its country of registration. Though as a rule of thumb, all school ships bear the name of its namesake based on its design of replication, an example of this is Japan's SSA-00121856 "Ark Royal" of St. Gloriana.