Cruise Ship Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF for Kids

Cruise Ship: History & Fun Facts

From Ocean Crossing to Floating Vacation

Early 20th-century ocean liners like the Titanic and Queen Mary were built mainly to carry passengers quickly between continents before airplanes took over that job. Speed mattered so much on those old crossings that shipping lines competed for the Blue Riband, an unofficial prize awarded to whichever liner crossed the Atlantic the fastest, with the record eventually dropping to under four days.

Once air travel became the faster option for crossing oceans, shipbuilders redesigned these giant vessels into floating resorts meant for the voyage itself to be the vacation. That shift started in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, when lines like Norwegian Caribbean Line and Carnival began building ships around swimming pools, casinos, and lounges instead of fast, narrow hulls built purely for speed.

How a Ship This Heavy Stays Afloat

A cruise ship's hull displaces an enormous volume of water, and because the ship's total weight is less than the weight of the water it pushes aside, buoyancy keeps it floating even though it is built from thousands of tons of steel. This same principle, discovered by the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes, explains why a solid steel coin sinks instantly while a hollow steel ship the length of three football fields stays on the surface.

Engineers also divide the hull into sealed watertight compartments so a leak in one section will not sink the entire vessel. A single tall funnel, like the one puffing smoke on this coloring page, vents exhaust from the engines high above the decks so fumes blow away from passengers relaxing on the pool deck below.

Steering and Stabilizing a Giant Hull

Modern cruise ships often skip a traditional propeller shaft entirely and instead use pod-mounted thrusters that swivel a full 360 degrees under the hull, letting the captain spin the entire ship in place without a single tugboat's help. Fin-shaped stabilizers extend from the sides below the waterline and tilt automatically to counter rolling waves, which is a big part of why walking across a cruise ship deck rarely feels like walking on a boat at all.

Small Cities That Sail the Ocean

The largest cruise ships afloat today carry more than 6,000 passengers plus thousands of crew, making them larger in population than many small towns, complete with their own restaurants, theaters, and water parks onboard. Some of the biggest ships pack in ice rinks, rock climbing walls, and multi-story water slides that wrap around the funnel, turning what used to be simple deck space into a full amusement park at sea.

Some ships are so big that stacking their length upright would rival the height of the world's tallest skyscrapers. Building one of these ships takes several years from the first steel cut to the final paint job, with thousands of workers in a shipyard assembling giant prefabricated hull sections before welding them together into a single seagoing vessel.

Christening a new cruise ship still often includes the old maritime tradition of smashing a bottle of champagne against the hull for good luck, a custom sailors have followed in one form or another for centuries. Once launched, a ship like the one drawn here can spend 25 years or longer in service, moving between different cruise lines and getting entire decks rebuilt long before its hull is ever retired.