In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

No officer in their right mind is going to plow straight ahead into an
iceberg to "save the ship".

Sure they would - if they knew that the ship could not turn in time, and
would sink as a result.

That's a pair of compounded far-fetched what-if's which defy common
sense. I'm not into endless streams of what-if's, they can go anywhere
as has been the case for 92 years so far in the case of the loss of
the Titanic and "prove" nothing. We're into an engineering screwup
here, not what-if's.

Not at all.

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

Recently there was a lawsuit in Lancaster County where a motorcyclist sued an
Amish buggy driver. Seems the buggy's horse balked at crossing a bridge, and
just stopped. Car came up behind the buggy driver and stopped too.

But the two stopped vehicles were around a blind curve. Motorcyclist comes
around the blind curve, swerves to avoid the stopped car, bike falls over and
both he and the bike are pretty banged up.

Now he says it was the buggy driver's fault, because he should not have hitched
up a horse that might balk at crossing a bridge. He says the fact that he came
around a blind curve at a speed where he couldn't safely control his motorcycle
has no bearing on the accident.

The court ruled otherwise.

You stated "there was nothing wrong with its (Titanic's)design and
construction." My position is that the Titanic apparently did have a
major design flaw which led directly to it's loss, it's rudder was
undersized.

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

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society...tanic_02.shtml

The rudder was grossly undersized so the
Titanic did not respond to the helm soon enough and swiped the ice.

Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, was essentiaaly the same ship. A few feet
shorter and less luxurious, but the same basic design. Olympic went into
service first, and much of her crew was transferred to Titanic because of
their experience.

No complaints of a grossly undersized rudder.

See above link. Argue with them.

I've already said that if the rudder were bigger, the collision might have been
avoided.

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, the rudder is at the stern, and
depending on a lot of variables, putting the rudder left (to make a left turn)
can make the stern of the ship go right.

In reality, once Mr. Murdock got the bow of Titanic pointed in the right
direction, he ordered the rudder reversed to avoid having the stern hit the
berg.

After the disaster, sister ship Olympic was heavily modified - bulkheads
extended, double hull installed, and of course more lifeboats added. The third
ship of the class, Britannic (originally to have been named Gigantic) was still
under construction in 1912, and its design was similarly modified.

No mention of any rudder modifications.

Britannic never entered service as a passenger ship - she was converted into a
hospital ship during WW1. The British govt. had some sort of deal where they
helped finance the Olympic class, with the understanding that they would carry
the mail [R.M.S. means Royal Mail Ship], and that in wartime they could be
converted to military use if needed.

Britannic's main use was to transport wounded back from Gallipoli. On her
seventh trip, she struck a mine near Greece and sank even faster than Titanic
had, despite all the improvements. Open portholes are generally blamed.
Fortunately she was headed *towards* Gallipoli and wasn't carrying wounded, so
most of those onboard survived. She lies on her side in about 400 feet of
water, and was found in the 1970s by Jacques Cousteau.

Olympic ("Old Reliable" to her crew) was in service for 25 years, being
scrapped in 1937. During WW1 she served as a troop transport, and on one trip
not only evaded being torpedoed but chased, rammed and sank the attacking
U-boat.

---

And now a trivia question, if anyone is still reading this far:

In both "A Night To Remember" and "Titanic", when the berg is sighted, the
command "hard a starboard" is given. Yet the ship turns to the left (port). And
this is not a cinematic mistake. What's the explanation?

73 de Jim, N2EY


73 de Jim, N2EY