"Mike Coslo" wrote


Now was this true, or was it just a story, a fictional tale, or a
fable if you wish, obviously exaggerated, and only intended to
illustrate a point.


The amateur sailors name is Gerry Spiess. Hails from near me, White
Bear Lake, Minnesota, and in 1979 sailed his 10-foot boat homebrewed
(out of used plywood) sailboat, "Yankee Girl" from Norfolk, Virginia to
Falmouth, England.

73, de Hans, K0HB

Mike Coslo wrote in message ...
N2EY wrote:
In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

(N2EY) wrote in message
...

In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

The fundamental problem was that they were going too fast for the
conditions.
That's an operational mistake, not an engineering mistake.

No, it was first and foremost an engineering screwup, if the rudder
had been properly sized the ship would have turned harder/quicker at
any speed and would have missed the iceberg. Particularly since the
collision was only a sideswipe.

*Maybe* Murdock had to reverse rudder so the stern wouldn't hit the berg
too.

Titanic was "state of the art" for its time.

So were the World Trade Center towers which were designed to survive
if an airliner plowed into them. But the engineers who designed the
towers didn't factor in the fact that airliners are not just
structural impact loads, the carry fuel too. Oops.

So their collapse was fundamentally an engineering screwup?

Other ships of that era with properly designed rudders would have
turned away from the berg and missed it with room to spare.

Perhaps if the rudder had been larger, the Titanic might have turned
away
quicker and missed the berg. But that's really irrelevant.
The ship was clearly
going too fast for conditions.

There's no "might have beens" about it. Unless you can explain why a
larger rudder wouldn't have turned the Titanic quicker so that it
missed the berg.

Simple. In a ship like Titanic, putting the rudder over isn't like steering
the front wheels of a car. In landlubber terms . . .

Save it for the landlubbers.

massive snip

You've snipped the part where I prove my points, of course.

Hey kids! Trying to blame the loss of the Titanic on the rudder, while
certainly an interesting point, is only one point. The rudder was what
the rudder was. It functioned as well as it could, which was no well
enough. That is a different matter.

Yep.

If I roll down the street in a loaded 18 wheeler at 100 plus miles per
hour, and try to stop within 300 feet - it will not happen. The brakes
are simply not up to the task. Does this mean that the brakes are poorly
designed or defective? Not even. I was operating my 18 wheeler way
outside it's design parameters.

Which does not mean there's anything wrong with your 18 wheeler,
either, except for the loose nut holding the steering wheel....;-).

Did the pilot and Captain not know the handling characteristics of the
ship? They should have.

There was no pilot.

Most of the officers were transferred as a unit from Olympic, which
was Titanic's older and slightly shorter sister. Captain Smith was
Olympic's captain before Titanic, and was certainly familiar with her
characteristics. He was routinely assigned to the newest White Star
ships to essentially "write the book" on them.

In fact, Smith was the senior captain of the whole White Star line,
and was supposed to retire before April 1912. He was persuaded by
Ismay to do just one more round trip, closing out his career with the
first voyage of Titanic.

Frankly that BBC story smacked of the "Everything you think you know is
wrong" sort of tale. The guy that was the hero is actually the coward,
and the guy they called the coward was actually the hero, blah, blah,
blah....

Some new data has come to light since the wreck was found. For
example, it was not known with certainty before that the ship broke in
two. The brittleness of the steel, particularly the rivets, was
documented from actual samples.

If the Titanic had not been simply scaled up from smaller designs, it
probably would have been a better ship.

OTOH, tried-and-proven methods are not abandoned lightly.

If the metal was better, it
would have probably not suffered the extent of damage, If the ships
compartments not been *open at the top*, it wouldn't have had a
cascading effect of water going over the top of one compartment, then
starting to flood the next compartment, tilting the ship more, and
exacerbating the problem until the water filled all the compartments and
it sunk. Watertight doors at the bottom meant nothing when the water
just went over the top.

Yep.

Odd that in all the arguments, that one is overlooked.

No, it isn't. See below.

I would
postulate that the number one reason that the Titanic sunk at all is
that the compartments had the open top design. Were they sealed, the
Ship would probably just taken on a major list, and ridden low in the
water. But almost all the people would have survived.

A "sealed top" design would be impractical - and completely
unnecessary. It was known soon after the disaster that if the
watertight bulkheads (transverse walls between compartments) were just
*one deck* higher, the overflow would not have occurred. But the
bulkheads did not go one deck higher.

By the way, ya want the list of ships I've been on during sinuous
coursing anti-submarine drills at 30+ kts? Ever stand on the deck of a
ship which is bigger the Titanic doing multiple banked s-turns turns
at combat power speeds? There's some "rudder ops" which will get ya
yer sea legs real quick . . .

Big deal. Were you driving the things? Did they do the tests with a hull,
rudder and propulsion system identical to Titanic's? Didn't think so.

Sounds like fun as long as it is a drill! ;^)

Sure!

Titanic and sisters were primarily designed to be liners, not military ships.
Sister Olympic not only evaded a torpedo attack in WW1, but chased down, rammed
and sank the attacking submarine. Kinda says something about rudder size and
manueverability...

Now answer my question and thankew.

Simple:

Suppose you're driving a car in conditions where your range of vision is 200
feet. And suppose it takes that car 10 feet to stop for every 10 mph of speed.


How fast do you drive the car under those conditions? If you go 50 mph and hit
something, is that an engineering screwup? Or is it a simple case of going too
fast for conditions?

I say it's simply going too fast. Better brakes, better headlights, etc., might
permit higher safe speeds, but if they're not in use, it's fundamentally the
driver's responsibility to operate at a speed safe for the conditions
encountered.


HAR! I didn't read the whole letter before replying, and see that you
used a similar example!

It's exactly the same principle is why. They were outdriving their
vision, which is suicide in any mode of transport that depends on
seeing what's ahead.

The rudder was sufficient to maneuver the ship at a certain rate at a
certain speed. Was the Titanic not very maneuverable? Possibly. Is an 18
wheeler as maneuverable as a 'Vette? Not hardly. But if the 18 wheeler
tries to head down a winding mountain road at the same speeds the "Vette
can, and it crashes, it isn't the designer's fault.

Exactly!

The designer was aboard Titanic, and went down with her.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the book and film "A Night
To Remember".

73 de Jim, N2EY

Mike Coslo wrote in message ...
N2EY wrote:
In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:


Odd that in all the arguments, that one is overlooked. I would
postulate that the number one reason that the Titanic sunk at all is
that the compartments had the open top design. Were they sealed, the
Ship would probably just taken on a major list, and ridden low in the
water. But almost all the people would have survived.

Boink! Good show Mike! Another engineering screwup.


- mike KB3EIA -

w3rv

KØHB wrote:

"Mike Coslo" wrote


Now was this true, or was it just a story, a fictional tale, or a
fable if you wish, obviously exaggerated, and only intended to
illustrate a point.



The amateur sailors name is Gerry Spiess. Hails from near me, White
Bear Lake, Minnesota, and in 1979 sailed his 10-foot boat homebrewed
(out of used plywood) sailboat, "Yankee Girl" from Norfolk, Virginia to
Falmouth, England.

Talk about brass cojones!

- Mike KB3EIA -

In article , Robert Casey
writes:

One could sumise that if all the other ships in the area were
taking it slow, Titanic should have taken heed and go slow
as well. One doesn't have to have knowledge of a field to
realize that. I'm sure that the ship's owners would have preferred
and understood a late but intact Titanic at the destination.
Maybe the ship was "unsinkable" but I wouldn't want to test
that with paying passangers aboard.

Robert, I will agree with you, but what happened to the Titanic
NINETY-TWO YEARS AGO isn't really a subject of this
newsgroup and doesn't come close (maybe a couple of light-
years) to amateur radio policy. :-)

Well, except to some who wish to turn this newsgroup into
a quasi-private Chat Room involving their own desires and
preferences...and to have them damn all others for not thinking
and feeling as they do. [yourself excluded]

For the bleeding-heart imaginary sailors aboard, I won't cry
great crocodile tears of a thousand-plus humans who perished
on the Titanic in 1912. Nope. I'll just reflect that the subject
made a LOT of money for Linda Hamilton's ex-husband and
employed many Mexican laborers on the set of "Titanic"...
many many years later with a little gilt statuette awarded for
Best Motion Picture to the producer-director. No crying great
tears on-stage on that Oscar Night.

Boeing doesn't test fly
new aircraft with commercial paying passengers.

Not many aircraft companies were busy working out Test
Proceedures for test-flying new aircraft in 1912... :-)

Boeing innovated the pre-flight checklist around 1940 or
thereabouts after they lost a prototype Flying Fortress (and
their chief test pilot) on takeoff.

Not to worry. U.S. amateur radio regulations are Up To Date.
They still require all amateurs to test for beloved morse code
cognition capability in order to have priveleges of operating
below 30 MHz...in the ham bands. It seems that some amateurs
bent on constantly re-living the past (in almost anything) think
that morse code skill is still the epitome of "radio operation" in
the year 2004. Very "progressive." State of the Art.

"Brian Kelly" wrote

Some of them claim that the architects screwed up when they failed to
factor in the prospect of fuel explosions in addition to the aircraft
impact loads. Apparently analyses are showing that if one or another
of the tower's steel stucture had been properly insulated it might
have not come down. There's a congressionally-mandated technical
report in the works which gets into the topic in depth which should be
released soon and is reported to pass out some spankings.

Typical 'government out of control' bull****.

Instead of blaming the radical towel-heads who creamed the towers, lets
spank the engineers who designed it several decades earlier when the
idea of driving jet airliners into office buildings was unthinkable.
"Congressionally-mandated" is just another term for politicians pushing
the right buttons to get a few more seconds of visibility on the evening
news and having some impressive paperwork to wave at their constituents
on the campaign trail.

73, de Hans, K0HB

Brian Kelly wrote:
(N2EY) wrote in message om...

Mike Coslo wrote in message ...

N2EY wrote:



Titanic was "state of the art" for its time.

So were the World Trade Center towers which were designed to survive
if an airliner plowed into them. But the engineers who designed the
towers didn't factor in the fact that airliners are not just
structural impact loads, the carry fuel too. Oops.



So their collapse was fundamentally an engineering screwup?


Comes up as a major screwup to me. We'll see how the pros call it.
Some of them claim that the architects screwed up when they failed to
factor in the prospect of fuel explosions in addition to the aircraft
impact loads. Apparently analyses are showing that if one or another
of the tower's steel stucture had been properly insulated it might
have not come down. There's a congressionally-mandated technical
report in the works which gets into the topic in depth which should be
released soon and is reported to pass out some spankings.

I was at a presentation made by the head of the engineering team that
investigated the Twin towers disaster. He said that too many people
aproached it from the wrong angle They ask why did the towers fall so
quickly. A better question would have been how did they stay up so long.

Engineers so often get tarred and feathered when this sort of thing
happens.

What we really need is for engineers to accomodate ALL possible
scenarios, both KNOWN and UNKNOWN. 8^)

- Mike KB3EIA -

In article . net, "KØHB"
writes:

"N2EY" wrote

The fundamental problem was that they were going too fast for the
conditions.
That's an operational mistake, not an engineering mistake.

I agree with Jim.

Thanks, Hans.

A few years ago an AMATEUR sailor from landlocked Minnesota safely
crossed the Atlantic in a 10-foot wooden boat. He obviously understood
the seakeeping capabilities of his vessel and practiced good seamanship.

Gerry Spiess, a schoolteacher. The 3800 mile trip took 54 days in 1979.

Interesting list of similar trips (look behind the first window that opens):

http://www.famoussmallboats.com/locm...tfreebies.html

Spiess wrote a book about his trip - "Alone Against The Atlantic"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...-9316516-62481
41?v=glance

I've gotta check the Radnor library. If they don't have it, a donation may be
in order....

But that's not the end of the story. In 1981, Gerry Spiess took "Yankee Girl"
to the Pacific, and successfully sailed from California to Australia.

How did he fit enough supplies for such a voyage in such a small boat? Doesn't
seem to be enough room, but he did it.

How big was his boat? Judge for yourself:

http://www.famoussmallboats.com/Graphics/speiss1c.jpg

Built of recycled plywood....

The loss of the Titanic, crewed by PROFESSIONAL sailors, can be laid
squarely at the feet at their obvious ignorance of the seakeeping
capabilities of their vessel and poor seamanship.

My point exactly.

The chain of events is full of apparently "little" mistakes, any one of which
would have changed the outcome completely.

It's made even worse by the fact that they were among the most experienced
available, and many of them (including the captain) had experience with
Titanic's sister ship, Olympic. So it wasn't even a matter of a new class of
ship whose characteristics aren't fully known yet.

73 de Jim, N2EY

N2EY wrote:

In article . net, "KØHB"
writes:

"N2EY" wrote

But that's not the end of the story. In 1981, Gerry Spiess took "Yankee Girl"
to the Pacific, and successfully sailed from California to Australia.

How did he fit enough supplies for such a voyage in such a small boat? Doesn't
seem to be enough room, but he did it.

How big was his boat? Judge for yourself:

http://www.famoussmallboats.com/Graphics/speiss1c.jpg

Built of recycled plywood....

Uh oh. He's liable to get a "kluge letter" from California. ;-)

Dave K8MN