Steampunk Air Ship

A friend of mine has been designing and working on making an ship for several years. I myself am not an engineer, just working on fundraising and getting numbers together. I was wondering if anyone could tell me

1) How much this would cost (a general idea is fine, of course)
2) What would be the most efficient method of creating it (apparatus for flight, building materials, etc.)
3) In your opinion, the best way to go about making an airship.

For our first one, we were thinking of making something that can hold around 6 people. Eventually, we want to have cruise ship size ships in the air.

I want to say again that I'm not an engineer, so if I said anything ridiculous (aside from the airship thing) I apologize. Thanks for any help I get with this :)

Giving you some leeway considering you aren't an engineer, the first thing you will learn about us is that we respond best to specific questions with specific answers. Your questions are way to general to get any kind of useful response here. You said your friend has been working on this for years. If there are some specific technical questions he has, we might be able to respond usefully to those. But asking for an overall general approach to the whole thing is way beyond the scope of any professional online forum.

I will however share my own opinion, as an engineer and a pilot. Many, many people have tried and to my knowledge none have ever succeeded in producing a practical steam powered lighter-than-air vehicle. The problem usually comes down to two issues: liquid water is pretty heavy, and the weight of the components required to contain steam and to convert its high pressure into useful work are also significant.

Okay, sorry that was very general considering I didn't even mention the method of flight. I don't quite understand everything involved, but he said that he wants to build it using extremely light pipes (aluminum or pvc) filled with a lighter than air gas. He wants it to look like a Spanish galleon. He ultimately wants to build something the size of a cruise ship, but right now he's trying to make single person "ships".

Cost estimates can be done by weight... For example, do an estimated part count and then assign a weitgh to each part.

Then, determine the weitgh per pound of each part.