Queen Mary 2

Queen Mary 2 is routinely mistaken for a cruise ship, and the difference is the entire point of her existence. A cruise ship is a resort that moves between calm ports; an ocean liner is a vehicle built to hold a schedule across the North Atlantic in January. QM2 has forty percent more steel in her hull than a comparable cruise ship, a bow like a knife, a 10-metre draft, and four diesels plus two gas turbines driving her at speeds no cruise ship attempts.

She was built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique — the same Saint-Nazaire yard as the Normandie and the France before her — and delivered in December 2003 as the largest ocean liner ever constructed, a record she still holds because nobody has built another one since.

More than two decades on she still runs the scheduled Southampton–New York crossing her ancestors ran for Cunard since 1840, carrying kennels for transatlantic dogs, the only planetarium at sea, and passengers who want seven days where the ship is the destination and the ocean is the show.