RMS Olympic and sold at auction before she was scrapped, and now adorn buildings and a cruise ship. By contrast with "Olympic", the other two ships in the class, "Titanic" and , did not have long service lives. "Titanic" collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage and sank, while "Britannic" struck a mine and sank in the Kea Channel in Greece in 1916. "Britannic" never served her intended role as a passenger ship. Built in Belfast, Ireland, "Olympic" was the first of the three s – the others were and . They were by far the largest
German hospital ship Ophelia raising suspicions as her supposed task of searching for German survivors was not completed. Under Article 4 of Hague Convention X, hospital ships cannot be seized but they can be inspected by enemy craft. The British Admiralty seized the "Ophelia" as a prize of war, rather than as a hospital ship. Their reasons for doubting her status as a hospital ship were the dumping of documents by the crew, the transmission of a coded message before the boarding, and the destruction of the ship's wireless set. Furthermore, the ship was not included in the list of hospital ships that were