Ship #534, so called as it was the 534th ship laid down at John Brown's yard at Clydebank. Later, officially named "Queen Mary".
So how do you get over 80,000 tons moving? Remember, this is a luxury liner, not a slow freighter, and when pressed into troop carrier service and pushed to the limit it managed 32.5 knots, or a little over 37 mph. Most German u-boat torpedoes weren't even this fast. The liner, during the war, was nicknamed 'The Gray Ghost', and was usually un-escorted as it was faster than any escort would have been.
The power required for this was supplied by steam in the form of oil fired boilers. Imagine a large boiler, double ended. A large structure, nearly 31 feet tall. To burn the oil, it isn't merely squirted in like a home furnace, instead a forced draft is supplied by means of five foot diameter fans, four at each end of the boiler. The fuel is the most economical type, namely heavy bunker oil. This stuff is almost like tar, so thick that it barely flows. To use it as fuel, it is pumped through screens to catch debris, then steam heated to thin it out and filtered again before being forcefully injected through the burner nozzles.
There are 24 of these large boilers, arranged in four boiler rooms. There is an additional boiler room but not for driving the engines; these are the auxiliary boilers to run the ship itself, generating electric power, running pumps, providing heat and hot water and powering the water purification room. The electrical generators alone will power a town of 100,000 people. But the main boilers generate steam for the propellers that are driven by steam turbines, fed by 700 degree (f) steam at 400 psi.
Turbines like this were geared to drive the four props. Finely balanced, they were very delicate. Even when docked and the propellers weren't needed, these turbines had an auxiliary motor that kept them slowly rotating, about 30 times per hour, to prevent distortion from parts getting too hot or cool. Including the bearings, these turbines are 70 feet long and generate, in total, 160,000 horsepower.
At 1,018 feet in length, this ship was carefully engineered at every step, with thousands of models being used to test hull shape and equipment locations.
Even the bridge was built with aerodynamics in mind; at speed, the airflow over the superstructure would keep rain off the bridge deck.
That huge size looks nicely proportioned, it's hard to tell from here that those huge exhaust funnels were wide enough to fit three locomotives side by side.
16,683 people were once packed aboard during troop movements, no ship has ever beat this record. To make room, everything was utilized, even the swimming pools were emptied and filled with sleeping bunk beds. During the war, she was painted grey.
Of course the ship was mainly built of steel, but with 50 different kinds of wood used throughout, it was known as 'The Ship Of Wood'. Thin layers of wood veneer were applied to the steel structure for a warm look.
Quick fun fact: over 3600 tons of steel rivets were used to build this ship!