this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Max speed of the Titanic was 21 knots. Average cruise ship speed is 20 knots.
Very different technology in use though, modern ocean liners run at over 30 knots.
What modern ocean liners even exist? They just scrapped the SS United States because it spent 50 years in dock after jet planes replaced ocean liners.
Cunard still runs transatlantic liner service. The QM2 is built as a combination ocean liner/cruise ship and does serve the north atlantic route on a schedule.
Only remaining ocean liner is the QM2 with cruising speed of 26kt, still slower than the SS United States which did 30kt.
She's not quite scrapped yet. She got evicted from her pier last year, and bought by Okaloosa County, FL. They plan to sink her off the coast of Dustin to create the world's largest artificial reef sometime next year.
I would imagine the delay is due to prepping her to be towed from Philly to The Gulf of Mexico.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_United_States
That's because the Olympic class liners were built with a power plant optimised for fuel efficiency, not speed.
They had two reciprocating triple expansion engines and a low pressure turbine driven by the exhaust steam from the reciprocating engines' low pressure cylinders.
Fully turbine driven liners of the same era would easily clock service speeds well beyond 25 knots, at the expense of burning way more coal.
I too subscribe to Oceanliner Designs on YT.
what's that in parsecs?
One, eventually.
I was curious so I just typed it into Wolfram Alpha.
~90.5 million years for the Titanic's 21 knots.
If it started now and remained underwater, just continually circling in the ocean, then when it finished it would have gone 6.39 trillion leagues under the sea.