Ships Monthly - 20 years of Queen Mary 2

[Rob Lightbody]

Ships Monthly is worth a read this month, as its got a nice big feature by our very own Stephen Payne about Queen Mary 2's first 20 years at sea.



Some of my favourite tit-bits / reminders

• She was designed for at least 40 years of service life, and is more popular than ever, so has as secure a future as its possible to imagine just now.
• She was designed for a service speed of 26 knots and a crossing of 6 days (rather than 28.5 / 5 days for QE2 / Queen Mary / Queen Elizabeth) but at her current 7 nights, only 21 knots is required.
• Learning from QE2 and her resilience on her diesel-electric setup, Queen Mary 2 is able to maintain her 26 knot service speed with only 3 pods running due to her large margins built into her.  This was proven during 2006 when she damaged a pod and ran without it, on schedule.

I will also just mention how I read my shipping magazines.  I use a marvellous app called "Readly" which costs just £10 a month.  I then have a very cheap Amazon "Fire" 10" tablet (which cost me £70) and using that I can read an entire world of magazines.  I read dozens of car magazines, as well as the shipping ones and all sorts of other things -highly recommended!