WARNING: Might not be exactly SFW due to ship porn (lol).
This is the SS
Imperator, pride of the Hamburg-Amerika line and one of the biggest competitors to the British giants Cunard and White Star (and, oddly enough, rumor that the Hamburg-Amerika Line building up to these behemoths alongside the
Kaiser class of Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) influenced White Star to create the
Olympic class). The
Imperator class was one of the LARGEST cruise liners of it's day (the
Imperator herself was clocked at 909 feet long from stem to stern, 913 with the eagle slapped at the bow, outdoing the
Olympic class by a fair margin while her sister, the
Bismark, was 956 feet long...), and were some of the most
modern ships of their day. The forerunner of the class -the Imperator herself- at the beginning of her career was known as a 'drunken roller' and was sent to dock after her first season to rectify this. Even with her initial shortcomings, she and others of her class were known as 'first class hotels' and would be shored up during World War 1 (or in the case of the
Vaterland, staying in dock in the US). The entire class were considered deficient in terms of the 'meta' of sorts for Trans-Atlantic shipping at the time, where it wasn't the rich that was the money maker but the
immigrants... but they did show that what would become associated with the cruise lines of today were viable (Germany, oddly enough, had a tendency to have this sort of thing happen to them... as the Zeppelin lines were the predecessors of the modern air line).
The Imperator and her sisters would be given to the Allies as war respirations (or in the case of the
Vaterland, seized in port), with the Imperator herself being given to Cunard Line with SS
Bismark and SS
Vaterland being given to White Star and United States Lines respectively as the
Majestic and
Leviathan respectively. The
Vaterland would become the
Olympic of the trio, as she kept carrying record breaking numbers of passengers into the 1920s but poor management kept screwing her over... which caused her to be scraped between 1935 and 1938...
... and to be honest, they're
beautiful ships for their era. The
Olympic and
Imperator classes had been neck and neck in terms of how beautiful ships of the era can be.