RE: Please let it sink!
February 26, 2013 at 10:16 pm
(This post was last modified: February 26, 2013 at 10:38 pm by Cyberman.)
Actually, enormous care was taken to ensure Olympic-class liners were the safest ships at sea at that time. What we might regard as design flaws in hindsight had pretty sound reasoning behind them. The two major factors in the sinking were the failure of the 'watertight' compartments and the insufficient lifeboat complement.
Titanic was designed to remain afloat with any two of her sixteen compartments open to the sea, any three of the first five, or the first four. The iceberg sliced her hull and breached five compartments, an eventuality that at the time was unheard of. This is not to mention that such a compartment is only as watertight as its construction allows; Titanic's compartments had electrically-actuated doors to seal them off from each other. The presence of those doors might be called a design flaw but as a passenger liner, both passengers and crew need unrestricted access to all parts of the vessel. The public spaces took up large areas of the ship and so the doors were incorporated into the design to facilitate these requirements. Eventually, even under ideal conditions, such an arrangement will inevitably fail. Even that wasn't regarded as a problem, for the same reasons as the next point.
She carried sixteen rigid lifeboats and four collapsibles, twenty in all. This may seem inadequate and history bears that out, but it's important to bear in mind that the liner herself was intended to be her own lifeboat. The part of the ocean she was crossing was heavily and regularly served by ships of various companies, so the amount of time passengers and crew were expected to wait before rescue was, ideally, so short that it was regarded more of a risk to take to the sea in an open boat than to remain on board in relative safety. That's why, before the true nature of the danger was realised, the boats that were launched were half-laden at most. Indeed, for these reasons and others, Titanic was well within the Board of Trade regulations for a ship of her class. Many were actually of the opinion that she carried too many lifeboats.
What sealed her fate, apart from the missed or ignored ice warnings and the iceberg itself (which Titanic did not hit - in fact she was manouevred to avoid a collision and barely scraped its edge, in the manner of a tin opener), was the negligence of the Leyland line steamer Californian, at around ten miles to the North the closest ship by far. Had she responded to Titanic's distress rockets and Morse lamp, even (as regulations insisted) to investigate if there was any doubt as to their nature; had Evans, her wireless operator, even been woken to enquire about the matter; had the clockwork amplifier of her wireless equipment not wound down, giving radio silence to the untrained ear; most if not all of the lives would have been saved long before the RMS Carpathia arrived and rescued all those who were rescued.
Sorry that this has been so long. It's rather a pet subject of mine.
Material added with edit.
Titanic was designed to remain afloat with any two of her sixteen compartments open to the sea, any three of the first five, or the first four. The iceberg sliced her hull and breached five compartments, an eventuality that at the time was unheard of. This is not to mention that such a compartment is only as watertight as its construction allows; Titanic's compartments had electrically-actuated doors to seal them off from each other. The presence of those doors might be called a design flaw but as a passenger liner, both passengers and crew need unrestricted access to all parts of the vessel. The public spaces took up large areas of the ship and so the doors were incorporated into the design to facilitate these requirements. Eventually, even under ideal conditions, such an arrangement will inevitably fail. Even that wasn't regarded as a problem, for the same reasons as the next point.
She carried sixteen rigid lifeboats and four collapsibles, twenty in all. This may seem inadequate and history bears that out, but it's important to bear in mind that the liner herself was intended to be her own lifeboat. The part of the ocean she was crossing was heavily and regularly served by ships of various companies, so the amount of time passengers and crew were expected to wait before rescue was, ideally, so short that it was regarded more of a risk to take to the sea in an open boat than to remain on board in relative safety. That's why, before the true nature of the danger was realised, the boats that were launched were half-laden at most. Indeed, for these reasons and others, Titanic was well within the Board of Trade regulations for a ship of her class. Many were actually of the opinion that she carried too many lifeboats.
What sealed her fate, apart from the missed or ignored ice warnings and the iceberg itself (which Titanic did not hit - in fact she was manouevred to avoid a collision and barely scraped its edge, in the manner of a tin opener), was the negligence of the Leyland line steamer Californian, at around ten miles to the North the closest ship by far. Had she responded to Titanic's distress rockets and Morse lamp, even (as regulations insisted) to investigate if there was any doubt as to their nature; had Evans, her wireless operator, even been woken to enquire about the matter; had the clockwork amplifier of her wireless equipment not wound down, giving radio silence to the untrained ear; most if not all of the lives would have been saved long before the RMS Carpathia arrived and rescued all those who were rescued.
Sorry that this has been so long. It's rather a pet subject of mine.
Material added with edit.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
