The Great Ships

Kurt Hockenbury was kind enough to send over a link to "The Triumph of the Passenger Ship"*. It's an amazing online collection at the University of Southern Maine covering the history of great liners that once sailed the seas, from their earliest days to the pinnacle of their development in the mid-20th century.  The exhibit is filled with useful resources ranging from copies of liner ephemera to detailed deckplans.

This is just a small section from one of the four cutaway views available. Unless you have naval experience it's hard to appreciate just how jam-packed an ocean going vessel actually is. These give you a good idea of the immensity of a ship's working spaces.

I would humbly suggest that a love of deckplans is one of the defining characteristics of gamers. In many ways a ship is just a floating dungeon, filled with potential adventure while being isolated enough to allow some control over story developments.

Being able to cross the ocean in a matter of hours is an amazing technological achievement. That said, seeing the luxurious appointments of a smoking room like this demonstrates that we gave something up in the process. Including the very idea of a room dedicated solely to smoking tobacco.


* Mr. Hockenbury actually sent this to me back in May. Somehow I managed to draft the post and then forget about it. My apologies to him for the delay.