Lego to release a 9,090-piece scale model of the Titanic

But Legos float

This could be somewhat unpopular as an opinion, but Titanic's sinking has been romanticized greatly, fueled partly by a slew of Hollywood movies. There were several great ships marking their firsts - Titanic was just one of them of its time.

If we delve into 20th century maritime history, passenger accounts & disaster records of ships such as SS Lusitania or MV Wilhelm Gustloff were far more shocking to read, as compared to RMS Titanic.

They make boat sets with little weighted keel pieces that will give them enough weight to sit nicely in the water; this might have some form of ballast inside it somewhere...

No disrespect intended, but I really enjoyed reading this in Comic Book Guy's voice.

I'm 50 and hence rather older than several films on the subject. Titanic has always been held up as the ship wreck within my lifetime for several reasons. I think the key one is the notion that she was considered unsinkable and yet sank on her maiden voyage. In Belfast, where she was built, they like to say she was fine when she left there. Schadenfreude.

When she left Soton for NY, there was a long, slow burning fire in one of her coal bunkers. Apparently this was fairly common in steam ships. This ship was absolutely massive for the time and let's face it a set of steam engines/turbines of that size, powered by coal are essentially explosions waiting to happen in many places. That's basically how they work too. Then you stick it on an extremely unforgiving ocean and plough a track over several 1000 miles at a pretty high speed. Add crew and passengers and a huge number of distractions and other operational things like plumbing and you have a recipe for disaster simmering away.

How the crew avoided going mad on these monstrous Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg for the left pond) contraptions is absolutely beyond me. I'm not too surprised that she hit an iceberg if the boss decided to head into an ice field, just to shave a few hours on the crossing time. This is a vessel that steers like an iceberg and is basically staffed by crew who are already half maddened by the complexity of stopping her from exploding or worrying about the pre dinner champagne being too warm.

She also had a few other firsts and I think that she sent the first SOS over wireless, all this stuff adds to the story. Add in a few conspiracies (was she really the Olympic - that's a no for me) and that is really why she gets top billing. The films are a result not a cause.