The Paradox of Power....

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Here, Huggy. I'm discussing the issue of the power of the storm that would have been required to flood the earth in this thread:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-36296-page-8.html

Read about the basic math (it's really just multiplication and division of simple figures) that will show you why the story cannot be true, and why Boru said to turn firehoses on the model.

---

According to NOVA, the Chinese claim is that the ships were 400' long, not 600', and that it's considered questionable because (yep, no steel structural supports were part of Chinese shipbuilding technology in the 1400s) of the problem of hogging.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/anc...orers.html

The accounts aren't only from the Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship

Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in their translated accounts described multi-masted ships carrying 500 to 1000 passengers. Niccolò Da Conti, a contemporary of Zheng He, was also an eyewitness of ships in Southeast Asia, claiming to have seen 5 masted junks of about 2000 tons burthen. A 'B' Class trading junk (c.55m long) from Xiamen in the third decade of the 19th century was wrecked in the entrance to Selat Gelasa, Indonesia, carrying c.1600 crew and passengers. Zheng He's fleet included 300 ships, including 62 treasure ships, some of which were said to have been 137 m (450 ft) long and 55 m (180 ft) wide. There are even some sources that claim some of the treasure ships might have been as long as 180 m (600 ft). On the ships, there were more than 2800 people, including navigators, explorers, sailors, doctors, workers, and soldiers. Chinese records assert that Zheng He's fleet travelled extensively, sailing as far as East Africa.

Here's the thing, Just because we don't understand how something was built doesn't mean it didn't happen. If we had no surviving examples of the pyramids, you'd be hard pressed to prove that they could be build using modern technology, let alone ancient.

It's not about the claims being made. Tensile strength is the ability of a material (usually metal or wood) to resist pulling/shearing forces without failure (breaking). We know the tensile strengths of all sorts of material, from different kinds and sizes of wood beam to different forumulations of steel, bronze, etc. From that, it's a straightforward set of tensor calculus equations to determine at what point the materials will fail. We use these figures in building bridges, pipelines, cars, skyscrapers, houses, parking garages, and (you guessed it) ships.

A number of Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs will do these calculations for you, if you select what material you're using and input the dimensions. Engineers use it every day to make sure the new pressure fittings on a valve that carries toxic material is not likely to fail (sometimes there are microscopic faults in the material, and it may fail below--but not above--its measured tensile rating), poisoning us all and causing the company to go out of business. It's what my dad does for a living, matter of fact. He's a Process Engineer for a chemical plant that works with several components of rocket fuel, among other sundry nastiness. A spill would be Bad News™.

Because we know what amount of force the wooden beams will handle, we know the maximum size you can build a ship made of wood (even the strongest wood, and even with metal reinforcement) before the stresses of cresting waves and other motions at sea cause the ship to tear the beams that hold it together. The forces are just too strong for the material. It's a more complex equation, but it's still as straightforward in mathematical terms as 1+1=2. It's physics, plain and simple.

The point is, it doesn't matter what the Chinese claim, or who wrote down what they claim. We know  it is impossible to build a ship wooden ship that can sail successfully across an ocean that is any longer than 300 feet, and you can't get over about 250 feet without serious metal beam and joint reinforcement. That means the Chinese were bragging. Making it up for propaganda's sake. I don't doubt that the Chinese had very large junks, and that they sailed a long way around the world (we know they reached Africa, at least). But that's a far cry from an impossible-sized treasure ship sailing clear across the Pacific which, despite its name, is an extremely violent sea.

So the problem is not that we don't understand how it was built; the problem is that we understand what it takes to build a ship of a given size, and what it takes is steel.