Please let it sink!

[Cato]

No worries. One unterseeboot can ensure proper reenactment.

[Shell B]

Stimbo, the watertight compartments are exactly what I am talking about. The ship should not have sank. It just was not as safe as they tried to make it. It was not the only Olympic-class liner to sink, either.

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And next week some random German will rebuild the Hindenburg

Feel free to put that in the epic posts thread, on me.

[Cyberman]

All true of course, though the ship's engineers also had the use of bilge pumps to at least buy more time even if not to save the ship entirely. It was mainly a combination of factors, each one individually survivable, that did for the ship; bear in mind that they were exceptional circumstances. For instance, it's likely that the extreme coldness of the air had a smothering effect on the distress rockets' report, dragging the soundwaves down to the sea before they got more than half a mile.

It has been postulated that, had First Officer William Murdoch (commanding at the time) ordered the ship to maintain course, albeit with engines full astern, instead of porting around it as he did, she would have rammed the berg head on, obviously killing everyone in the bow sections, but ultimately might have remained seaworthy long enough for a full rescue, Californian notwithstanding. However, simulations have since shown that she would have foundered much sooner than she did, possibly within the hour, with the loss of all aboard. Besides which, it would take a brave man indeed to deliberately order his ship directly into an iceberg.

As for safety, all this guff about being unsinkable seems to have sprung up as a popular rumour after the event; the White Star Line don't appear to have made any mention of such a thing in any of their literature*. It must be said that her older sister Olympic served right up to 1935, though after safety modifications demanded as a result of the Board of Trade and US Senate inquiries. However it took either a mine or a torpedo (no-one's sure which) to take down her younger sibling Britannic in 1916.

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(* It's a bit like the tale of "Nearer My God To Thee" as the band played on. On the one hand, the hymn doesn't appear in the band's repertoire, which mostly consisted of ragtime numbers which many survivors spoke of hearing and which kept up their spirits. On the other hand, it was apparently the favourite hymn of bandleader Wallace Hartley, who could conceivably have requested it himself. So maybe the legend has some veracity after all.)

[Zen Badger]

No worries. One unterseeboot can ensure proper reenactment.

That was the Lusitania.....

[KichigaiNeko]

Who the fuck is stupid enough to get on that thing?

An obese Aussie

[Angrboda]

Design flaws are usually only observed in hindsight, making such observations little more than an artifact of hindsight. The unknown design flaws of any other ship (or means of travel) might be even greater. It's basically unknown. (Although people may argue inductively based on performance; such arguments tend to be questionable, seeing that the comparison is toward an "exceptional" event.)

I've had a thought on occasion which seems to parallel this in some ways. My thought was that we should just rebuild the twin towers. ("That'd show 'em.") But then the new twin towers would just become a magnet for any brown skinned radical just out of flight school. (Forgive the stereotype. It was needed for comedic purposes.) Ultimately, our brain's logic doesn't square with reality, and even if it were shown to be as safe as any other craft (with any improvements added), human nature would still be leery of sailing on her. (Though there are a few freaks for whom this would be a macabre attraction rather than a repellant.) A similar situation occurs in trying to sell a house where a horrific tragedy, say a multiple homicide, has occurred. (And I just read this in Shermer, but I forget offhand what fact of human psychology explains this. Anyone?)

[Shell B]

The point is that they have the benefit of hindsight. I thought that was rather obvious, given the topic of the thread.

[Question Mark]

War, starvation, global economic calapse, etc and this douchebag decide ehh fuck it lets rebuild a really big ship that sank once already.

It's what rich douchebags do. Hell...at least this fuck actually would be a job creator!

If we want to create jobs, what we need to build is a Death Star. I think Peter Mandleson is already working on the blue prints.

[Angrboda]

It's what rich douchebags do. Hell...at least this fuck actually would be a job creator!

If we want to create jobs, what we need to build is a Death Star. I think Peter Mandleson is already working on the blue prints.

For some reason I'm reminded of a game my friends in college used to play. It was, for lack of a better name, the game of assassination. Basically, the point of the game was to kill off all the other players by, basically, virtually assassinating them; for example, the way it might work is to put a note under the gas cap of someone's car that read, "I put contact poison on your gas cap; you are now dead." (I'm not sure if there were any rules about killing innocent bystanders or not.) For some reason, my parents always thought of me as the irresponsible one. If only they knew.

Always a killing to be made in killing. Why don't we hire one half of the people to kill off the other half, and pay them off in swag?

[Gooders1002]

From what I heard it's 98% the same except its slightly bigger (to fit with modern safety laws) and had some of the flaws ironed out as well as modern navigation equipment and more lifeboats and WIFI. It's also going to be diesel powered instead of coal.