Everything you need to know about HMS Queen Elizabeth

But the immense size of the new pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is unprecedented.

Some of the numbers behind the navy’s two new flagships are mind-boggling.

The supercarrier, and her sister ship HMS Prince of Wales, weighs a staggering 65,000 tonnes.

Individually, they are heavier than the entire fleet of the navy’s state-of-the-art Type 45 destroyers – there are six of these vessels which combined displace about 44,100 tonnes.

The mighty warship’s flight deck alone – which is the size of about three football fields – has enough space to squeeze 470 double decker buses on to it.

At 280m, HMS Queen Elizabeth is also longer than the Houses of Parliament.

And her length is greater than the height of the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, which comes in at about 170m.

The construction of both of the carriers is the most expensive project in the navy, costing £6.2bn for both of the new warships.

Inside each of them there is about 226 miles of piping.

While their colossal water tanks are able to convert sea water into about 500 tonnes of drinking water everyday.

Both are capable of taking on a range of different aircraft, from the new fifth-generation stealth fighters, the F-35B Lightning II, to the tried and tested Chinhook helicopters, Merlin Mk2 and Apache gunships. Not only is Queen Elizabeth big – she is loud too.

Her 162-decibel fog horn can be heard from two miles away. The horn is more than twice as loud as a jet engine taking off.

And Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship HMS Prince of Wales, can travel. They have a range of 10,000 nautical miles, meaning they can travel from Portsmouth to Florida and back in one sitting with enough reserves to almost make another trip from the UK to the US.

At full capacity, she is a floating town, capable of housing and feeding 1,600 military personnel.

During the peak of the construction phase, about 10,000 people from across the UK were employed.

More than 51 million manhours have been put into the Queen Elizabeth-class project.

Both of the ships are made up of more than 3,000 compartments, spread across 17 decks.