Home Page

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Comparing RMS Titanic With Modern Cruise Ships

Left: Young enthusiast with a white cardboard model of the Titanic stands in the ticketing line, waiting to see DMTC's "Titanic - The Musical" (May 4, 2012).


Before completely departing from the subject of RMS Titanic, one question has been gnawing at me: How does the Titanic compare with modern cruise ships?

There is only one cruise ship I'm familiar with: The Princess Sapphire (which I cruised on in Nov-Dec, 2010). So, I'll compare the Titanic to the Princess Sapphire.

Here are a few statistics regarding both the Titanic and the Princess Sapphire.

Year Christened:
Tt: 1912
PS: 2004

Gross Tonnage (gross tons):
Tt: 46,328
PS: 116,000

Total Length:
Tt: 268.0 meters
PS: 290.0 meters

Maximum breadth:
Tt: 28.0 meters
PS: 41.5 meters

Height (above water surface: meters):
Tt: 18.4 meters
PS: 54.0 meters

Total number of passengers:
Tt: 3,547
PS: 3,078

The RMS Titanic required 825 tons of coal per day. That is an average of 19 pounds of coal a second (like a cement bag's worth of coal a second).

Left: Sapphire Princess, with parasailer.

So, the Princess Sapphire is roughly 2.5 times bigger than the Titanic. It's only slightly longer, but it's 50% wider, and 3 times taller than the Titanic. Nevertheless, despite its smaller size, the Titanic carried 17% more people than the Princess Sapphire is intended to carry.

On average, the modern cruiser gets roughly 2.5 times more space than the folks on the Titanic did.

Ah, luxury!

No comments:

Post a Comment