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Watch the Third-Biggest Cruise Ship Ever Built Take to the Seas

Its surf simulator might be dry, but this gyrocopter-shot video gives some sense of scale.

When the Quantum of the Seas cruise ship was announced, its proportions and luxurious amenities sounded like an opulent fever dream. But here it is, in real life, the largest ship ever constructed in Germany, and a member of the second-largest class of cruise ships ever built. Because the ship is longer than the Chrysler Building is high, the video was shot from an gyrocopter, the Smartcar of the skies.

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The QotS actually left the nearly 220-year-old Meyer Werft shipyard in Papenberg back in September, and made a 26-mile trip up the River Ems to the North Sea, backwards. It just arrived at the Bremerhaven container terminal where it will spend the rest of October being outfitted with its surfing and skydiving simulators, robots, and tooth-whitening facilities.

Yep, it's a big ship. Image: HenSti/Wikipedia

You can actually see the empty Flowrider® surf simulator around 2:11 in the video above. The shot also includes people walking around on the deck, which gives you some sense of scale here. Spoiler alert: it's nuts.

On the opposite end of the vehicular spectrum, according to Mike Schuler at gCaptain, this QotS footage was shot from a gyrocopter by Nils Kallmeyer at Kallis Video Production. For those who don't know what a gyrocopter is, it's one of these:

Image: Huhu Uet/Wikipedia

Fully loaded, a gyrocopter weighs about 990 pounds and seats two. The Quantum has a displacement of 168,666 gross tons, and has room for nearly 5,000. The Quantum is approximately 2,500 gyrocopters big.

The apt comparison that the gyrocopter video affords is between the QotS and the container ships that it passes in Bremerhaven. Despite having 18 decks, the Quantum looks almost reasonable as it passes the Maersk container ships there, although there's really no denying that the thing looks like a high-rise apartment building that floats. Of course, what is a container ship other than a floating warehouse or freight train—except much bigger?

If anything, it's more impressive that the biggest container ships are still bigger than the Quantum. Proof, I guess, that a cruise may be a good experience, but buying stuff is still the world-wide priority.