Sounds like the “number of souls aboard” is probably comparable, but in terms of size (both vertical and horizontal) - when you are riding on a typical Carnival ship (I know there are others - Royal, NCL, etc, but Carnival is the only one I have experience with) - are we talking the same ‘ballpark’?
Today’s ships are built to a different proportion. The smaller Carnival ships are still heavier than Titanic as far as displacement, but titanic was far longer. The wiki page for Titanic and some of the Carnival ships well give you a lot if info tonnage, ship length, capacity, and so on. Titanic’s page is quite an interesting read, too.
The larger Carnival ships are a bit longer, vastly taller, and occupy twice the volume. I don’t see numbers on displacement, but I think the modern ships are a bit lighter for their size – still heavier than Titanic, but not as much as their size would seem to indicate.
Bear in mind that Carnival actually operates 11 cruise brands; of the 24 or so ships running under the Carnival name, most appear to be larger than Titanic in every way, all are greater in capacity, and some can carry twice as many passengers.
List of the world’s largest cruise ships.
Titanic had around 2200 passengers and crew. Every ship on that list is larger. Royal Caribbean dominates the top of the list. Carnival ships are at the bottom.
This question could be answered on a number of dimensions, but broadly the Titanic was large for its day but not large by today’s standards.
The trend is towards cruise vessels that are much beamier than ships of the Titanic’s day, and with massive, high and full width accommodation, giving them far, far greater enclosed volume and consequently much greater GT (or GRT, but there isn’t much difference in those measures).
The smaller Carnival vessels are bit shorter, but much wider and much bulkier and consquently have a GT 40% more than Titanic, and could take about as many passengers (in far more comfort). The larger Carnival vessels dwarf the Titanic in every dimension. The Titanic wouldn’t make the top 27 largest cruise vessels in significant dimension.
The one dimension where Titanic beats most of these modern ships is in draft (draught) – the vertical distance from the waterline to the keel of the ship. Effectively, these ships ride much higher in the water than Titanic did. So they are comparatively top-heavy, thus more prone to tipping over sideways, like the Costa Concordia did. Rather a problem, as that makes it very hard to launch lifeboats. Titanic stayed fairly stable in the water until near the end – they were actually able to launch all the lifeboats from her (just not filled well).
Compairing a Liner passenger ship to a Cruise ship is like compairing apple and oranges.
The Titanic was a going to be a Passenger Liner on Liner service. That is going back and forth accross the Alantic between fixed ports. The Titanic had different levels of passenger service from 1st class to steerage. The Titanic also carried some cargo.
A Cruise ship has one level of service, but different types of cabins. They are not onliner service but passengers get on in one port travel to several ports and the return to the boarding port. Also cruise ships do not carry cargo.
Also the Titanic engines were 46,000 HP, many cruise ships are 80,000 HP or more.
different ships, different uses, different times.
I’d want to see calculations and analysis before I accepted this, and it isn’t just a matter of draft.
Costa Concordia had a draft about 22% less than Titanic but had about 26% more beam. And you just can’t tell by looking at a ship and without knowing the relative densities what their stability is. Later cruise ships look top heavy but they generally are not. Their cumbersome upper parts are mostly air, and below the waterline they are very massive.
Costa Concordia will have rolled where Titanic did not because of the pattern and degree of flooding each experienced.
If you say that Titanic would not have rolled if it had experienced the same pattern and level of flooding as did the Costa Concordia then that is very interesting but I will only believe a word of it if you can produce an analysis by a qualified naval architect with experience in damage and flooding calculations. And I doubt that is available yet for the Costa.
Here’s a graphic overlay of Titanic vs Oasis of the Seas. Really shows how much more incredibly massive they are today! Here’s the page it’s from, with more comparisons…
Wow—the figures quoted by Duckster sure make the Titanic seem small compared to even non-cruise passenger ships of today. For example, it’s about the same size as the Stena Line ferries that run between Harwich in Britain and Hook of Holland.
When I took the QE2 to France in 1980 they still had different classes of service - 1st and regular. With different dining rooms.
I saw an article with a picture of a first class cabin on the Titanic. It was much smaller than cabins today, even inside ones, and did not have a bathroom. Definitely quite different.
Titanic displaced about 52,000 tons, compared to about 100,000 for the largest cruise ships. This is a measure of mass rather than volume, unlike the figures for gross tonnage and gross registered tonnage. Their top speeds were about the same.
Some first class staterooms did have attached bathrooms, and the suits would still be considered luxurious (except for the electronics, and lack of showers) by todays standards. Which makes all those plans to build a replica of the Titanic and run in as a cruise ship that were floating around after the movie came out all the more idiotic. Who the hell is going to pay to spend a vacation at sea w/ Edwardian plumbing? To say nothing of how pointless recreating 2nd Class & Steerage areas would be.
Interesting trivia I didn’t know until recently: The Titanic was carrying 1,317 passengers on the maiden (and last) voyage, but it was actually designed to accommodate 2,566 passengers. To quote wikipedia:
So the disaster could have been much worse.
It is also interesting that ships like the Titanic were only economically viable, because of the huge demand for 3rd class service (Europe-USA). The period of 1890-1920 was one in which millions of people migrated from Erope to Canada and the USA. When this trade died out, there were not enough rich people to make huge liners like Titanic profitable. THe last big trans-Atlantic liners (ships like the Andrea Doria) were making big losses by the 1950’s-cheap airline tickets drove them out of business.
There is also the fact that the “Titanic” was the second ship of its class for the White Star line, the “Olympic” having debuted earlier. Who remembers the second person to do something?
Also a collision the “Olympic” had with the “Hawke” forced the shipyard to delay building the “Titanic” to repair the “Olympic” and get it back in service. It is also possible that the Olympic-Hawke collision gave people a sense of false security in how safe the ship was…it survived having two compartments flooded, not imaging sideswipping an iceberg could flood several compartments over 300 feet.
-
It was the first ship of its class to sink. You are right, nobody much remembers the second one to do so.
-
IIRC, the experience was the Republic and that took more than a day to sink, with the only deaths being caused in the original collision. That caused the opinion of the day to be that ships were themselves large lifeboats (and that is what Ismay told the British inquiry) with the lifeboats nothing but ferries.
-
Off topic, but on TV the other day there was a Naval expert who claimed that the kind of damage that Titanic took is not survivable even for modern vessels, which is surprising to say the least.
And more’s the pity - there’s another great story there: Violet Jessop - Wikipedia