Continuing from your comparison with the Titanic, something that crosses my mind sometimes when I think of ebay, taken from Iain M. Banks Sci-Fi space opera "Consider Phlebas".
At the beginning of the war between the Culture and the Idirans, the Culture is being beaten heavily, retreating and evacuating planets and orbitals (constructed "O" shaped living spaces for billions, orbiting suns).
One of these "O"s features a vast canal encircling its circumference, against one rim wall. This is plied by luxurious, city sized pleasure cruisers continuously circling the "O" in a never ending journey to nowhere.
After being evacuated, one of these is landed on by a rag-tag, down-at-heel bunch of mercenaries / traders / smugglers who are hoping to do a bit of "salvaging" before the "O" is destroyed by the Culture to prevent it falling into enemy hands.
It takes them a while to realise that what they assumed was the main hull is, only one arm of a double-hulled vessel and the cloud bank it is coasting into is not natural. It is actually the result of its huge mass and inertia crashing the bow-end of the behemoth into the rim-wall at considerable speed.
The alarm, panic and flight back to their shuttle-craft, as decks start to buckle and everything they hope to gain is crushed into wreckage that they only just manage to avoid becoming part of, sometimes seems rather apt.
Several of the Culture novels are prefaced by quotes from T. S. Elliot's "The Waste Land", the significance of which would, I think, have added another layer of meaning to the series if it had been completed. Sadly it never was.
