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!