Could Titanic's Sinking Have Been Delayed If

Never saw it. Never want to see it. Movies that appeal to teenage girls never seem to appeal to me.

Your question sounds like homework. I don't do other people's homework either. Good luck with it.

Thanks for answering. It was the most responsive answer, and also a well-deserved hint to do prior research on the web. I posted impetuously.

Redfred,

Wouldn't it be more relevant to compare the weight of the passengers to the weight of water taken on, then there is also the moment to consider about the centre of buoyancy at the time.

It is probably still insufficient to affect the outcome ..... thus my muse about flooding one or two compartments at the stern to try to hold the bows high enough to stop the water flooding over the top of the flooded foward compartment bulkheads. .... but that probably wouldn't have worked either.

The suggestion of getting a Tarpaulin over the damage and pulled tight to reduce the inflow to a point where the pumps could handle it was interesting ..... not much different to what Captain Cook did to save the Endeavour near the Endeavour River in far north Queensland in 1770 - that may have worked, and they had the time to try it ..... if not the presence of mind to do so...........

You've taken leave of your senses!

It's dark.

There's no power.

The rip in the hull is 200 feet long. It's freezing above, and below the water. Men cannot work below the surface and live.

The in-rushing water would have strained them through the hull with hydraulic pressure, even if they could had gotten close.

The ship was doomed, period.

I understand that the entire gash may not have been open. There's the small detail of finding it from the outside, in the dark, in unsurvivable working conditions, and then not being killed by the inrushing water.

The ship was doomed.

I think you need to see the recent nation geoghaphic special that goes over exactly what happens.

To change the orientation of the ship one must move the mass of the ship and all contained in it. The water pouring into the doomed sinking ship will add to the mass to be moved that I calculated above. So moving people, deck chairs and any other movable mass will not do anything to change the final fate or even appreciably delay sinking. The only thing that could work is to limit the amount of water (mass) entering the ship. Truly water tight doors and tarps, curtains, bed sheets, or dinner table cloths reducing the rate of water entering the ship by partially plugging the holes so pumps might be able to remove water fast enough may have made a difference. (Sigh) I thought that this would be obvious.

As for the tarp plugging speculation, nobody here knows how deep below the frigid water line was the hull breach. It is possible but highly unlikely that this started close to the water line that external plugging might have been originally possible but further sinking made the outside unreachable. I propose that it is more likely that the breach was well below the water line because as we should all know, most of an iceberg is underwater.

There is one subtle aspect of this disaster that asking the passengers to move to any part of the ship may have been helpful to the captain. It would show how many of the passengers and crew were willing to initially follow his lead. But then there's Aesop's fable of the boy who cried wolf.

if you saw the gash on the side, i think it wouldn't have changed much

...and the quality of the steel used for the hull plates, and the quality of the rivets, and the training of the captain, and the quality of forward-vision systems...

Yeah if the captain would have had the quick response to turn the ship and run it a ground on top of the iceberg. That's is if the iceberg was as big as the one they showed in the movie. But I wasn't there. So can say. Then hind sight has aways been 20/20. Any survivors here that can give a first hand account?

So, was Titanic's sinking faked, like the moon landings?

Nope. Titantic done actually wernt to the Moon and them astronots done drownded jes loike in da movie. I seen it! Cain't wait ta see wot they done this time in 3 dee. Reckon that hole done got bigger meanwiles an betcha thangs all got rusted an everthang too, ya reckon? Aint none o that wuz faked, cep that Coke bottle. [humming 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy']

The Titanic never sank in the first place. It was a hoax. The wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic was constructed by the movie producers, and only to perpetuate the myth, which was originally invented by the New York Times, in order to increase circulation during a long and tenacious slump in sales.

The Lusitania however, did sink, but not at the south-west coast of Ireland, and not by a German torpedo. It was hauled to rest there after the fact, and the place was carfully chosen in order to gather as many reporters and photographers with relative ease, after there were no convincing evidence left to munch on, from the alleged disaster of the Titanic.

The Lusitania was deliberately sunk by the passengers as a necessary sacrifice, in order to drag the Yanks to the battlefield in Europe - After all, Americans hate war - as we all know.

In both incidents, Cunard Line, the owners, had nothing to do with any of all that, or as they were reported to have said so convincingly: "I know nothing about nothing - I'm not even from here but from there, so there" - end of quote.

Those were hard times back then, not like today, with all that nine-eleven, the Apollo mission, the Columbia shuttle, or the Japanese Tsunami. Back then you had to convince the public that the disaster actually happened, but today with all that new-age virtual media, it's only a few Photoshop brush-strokes away.

I should know - I was there on both incidents, especially on the non-sinking of the Titanic - and I'm not Leonardo DiCaprio - as weird as it may sound.

Nor am I kate Winslet - for what it's worth

This thread is really going off the rails. I think we need a new thread that deals specifically with conspiracy theories. It would be a good one.

How they start. Why people believe them. Why they never seem to go away, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, why people that are either engineers or pretend engineers continue to buy into them.............................

Sh^t, the list is endless.

Oh NO!

That's even worse. Now we'll have all sorts of dumb theories about how theories become pseudo-facts and then we'll have to talk about how to analyze those into a probable theory on the original motivation of the conspiracy, such as 9-11 or the Titanic or the collapse of the dollar next week.

Now you've got me confused.

I agree. The formation and proliferation of conspiracy theories is a much more interesting subject to discuss, than any conspiracy theory by itself, and even much, much more interesting than the sinking of the Titanic, because unlike the sinking of the Titanic, there still is time ahead to do something about conspiracy theories, before we all turn into new-age mushy zombies, with no distinction whatsoever between the real and the fabricated, between the imagined and the measurable.

What's next?

- Could Nine-Eleven be avoided with proper RFID tagging search in airports ?

- Could time-travel be specific enough to set arrival-resolution measured in nano-seconds ?

I will now put my pyramid-shaped tin foil hat, and listen to some Crystal-Energy Vibes

I'm sorry. I think I shouldn't be that sarcastic. Such topics can invoke the nasty troll in me, and that troll is not forum material. I should have known better.

Just under four hours after the disaster the RMS Carpathia arrived in the area and began rescuing survivors. At 8:30 she picked up the last lifeboat with survivors and left the area bound for New York.

It wouldn't have mattered. It may have prolonged the sinking by a little, but given the fact that hypothermia set in within minutes for those in the water, it's moot. The launching of the lifeboats was also botched.

An interesting article and graphic in the NYTimes reporting how: "two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe."

That's right. Blame the moon.

GAwd! :)

It was only the rivets in the very forward part of the bow that were made from wrought iron, the rest were steel rivets. The reason for this is that wrought iron rivets are easier to work than steel rivets and because of the cramped space in the bow section they couldn't work the steel rivets properly to form a seal so they used the softer wrought iron rivets instead.

question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built - a ship declared to be unsinkable - could have ended so terribly.

Maybe that explains it.....................Murphy's Law hadn't been discovered yet.

Only the press of the time ever said the ship was unsinkable. It's made of steel, it's going to sink. Duh!

The best solution to save more of the passengers and crew I ever heard was to come alongside the iceberg itself and use it as a life raft. It would have been cold, but warmer than in the sea!

I listened to an interview the other day with a descendant of one of the bridge crew. She said that family lore had the helmsman turn the wrong way, as there was a change in regulations occurring that meant port and starboard was reversed, but he had been assigned from a post in the Pacific where the change had not yet taken place.

I had never heard of such a thing. Any truth in it?

PS, I'm quite keen on port, anyone tried starboard?

I had never heard of that.........................interesting.

http://www.boatsafe.com/nauticalknowhow/titanic.htm

A lot of your course of action would depend on the distance ahead that you see the iceberg. In a heavy fog in the North Atlantic the visibility might well have been very limited. I remember reading somewhere that the QE2 needed something like 2 miles to come to a complete stop from full ahead. I don't remember if that was based on going to Full Astern with all engines or just gliding to a stop after shutting down the engines.The momentum based on her gross weight of around 70,000 tons (or maybe tonnes) carries it pretty far.

Assuming that the turning radius was shorter than the distance away Hard to Port should have been followed by Port Engines Stop and then Port engines Full Reverse with a double jingle for Emergency Full Reverse to swing it faster to Port.

If it was Dead Ahead coming up out of the mist All engines in reverse and maintain course would probably have stove in the bow up to the 2nd or 3rd watertight compartment but the ship could have stayed afloat. The trouble is for a Captain to head straight into an iceberg is generally not in the training manual as an option.

The initial flaw was probably in not reducing speed in a thick fog so you could stop in time. Hard to beat a speed record when if you slow down though.

The optical illusion is known as Fata Morgana and is well documented:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_%28mirage%29

During its sea trials the Titanic underwent a "crash stop" where the engines went from "full ahead" to "full stern" and stopped in just under a half mile and 3 min 15 sec:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic

Forget about moving people around to balance the boat, it took on 13,700 tons of water within 45 minutes of the initial impact, 15 times faster than it could be pumped out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic

Lots of good stuff about Titanic in Wikipedia which at least has some source citations.

I remember sailing into Adelaide and then leaving for a run up to Port Pirie. I remember going ashore in Port Pirie and walking on a dirt Main Street with a train track down the middle, with saloon like swinging doors on the Pub or should I say Hotel entrance. I felt a little like I was transported back to the American Wild West. It was 1960 and I was a young man of 18. It was very hot and dusty. Best beer in the world down under. It's a shame we can't import the real stuff. We did stock up on Forsters for the long trip back, 30 days back to the Canal Zone and unfortunately no stop at Tahiti on the way back. Still enjoy a good bottle of Forsters but it still doesn't cut it as a good cold schooner in the Pub.

Aluminum ingots practically piled as far as the eye could see. Largest smelter under one roof as it was described to me.

The main point that I wanted to make though is if the Titanic was leaving the Gulf Stream, water about 70-75 degrees F and entering the Labrador Current, temp about 35-40 F, one would wonder about optical peculiarities. Could your seeing across the Gulf of St. Vincent be a prism effect from say a cool evening air/breeze over the warm water causing condensation with water droplets in the air thus acting as magnifying effect or telescopic effect the way two prisms work in a periscope?

We had the dusty streets and swinging saloon doors in the American Wild West (and still do in places, like Detroit) but, back then you wouldn't have gotten any beer. It was whiskey or nothing, and it wasn't until Lucas Electric Ltd. invented refrigerators that they stocked any warm beer...

You don't need water droplets forming to get the effect, in fact they would form fog making it impossible to see more than a few metres.

However the cold water cools the air directly above it making it denser and light travels slower in denser air. This is called a temperature inversion as normally the air cools as you get higher but in this case it warms as you get higher.

The end result is that the light rays are bent downwards towards the earth rather than upwards as seen in a mirage.

Since the light is bent downwards it can actually make the horizon appear to be much further away than it otherwise would and hence allow you to see the silos over 66 km away when normally the furthest you can see is about 10 km.

In fact it the temperature inversion is just right and the resultant curvature in the light matches the curve in the earth then the visible horizon can be as far away as the temperature inversion exist which with the Labrador current could be hundreds of kilometres. The only problem with this is that it would make it impossible to discern where the sky ended and the sea started with the two being melded together. So some stars would appear below the horizon while a ship at least up to 65 km away would appear above the horizon. The twinkling of the stars would then make it pretty much impossible to discern any sort of Morse lamp as it would be intermingled with twinkling stars, or in other words what happened to the crew on the California.

It also means that the California may have been the 30 nautical miles away they stated they were hence making them believe what they saw wasn't the Titanic because under normal conditions it would be too far away to see.

An optical 'waveguide' of sorts. I saw this effect over the dry lake bed at Edwards AFB (where the first shuttles landed). Very strange effect: you could see the rocket lab on the far side of the lake, but above and inverted as if the sky were a mirror! Here, in winter usually, we have a similar effect in terms of a temp. inversion forming an acoustic waveguide of sorts. On one winter night several years ago it sounded like a passing train was just outside the house in spite of the tracks being more than 7 km away! Very still and cold layer of air near the ground capped by warmer air above.

"... a ship declared to be unsinkable - could have ended so terribly."

Nature has a way of keeping us humble, non?

Never seen it. Why? Well, I know how it ends.

Me, too. The ship sinks.

That was brought up by the experts on the recent National Geographic program they had a team of engineers, accounts from eye witnesses, videos and photos of the wreckage and the wreckage field. It was a pretty interesting program. The director of the Titanic was on it even shooting down parts of his movie. At the end they did a full computer animation from the gash al the way to the end with the wreckage field.

I think a factor was the "British" additude at the time, "this ship is sink proof" possibly delaying appropiate action by the Captain.

Yes, but, the Italian Captain had something other than the ship's safety in mind at the time he ran it aground.

There was no little tart in the wheelhouse of the Titanic at the time it hit the iceberg.

Captain SMITH was not ITALIAN what ship are you referring to??? That Italian cattle boat in the Med.

The gash was just too long and nobody ever said it was unsinkable if that was so then both its sister ships would have been too

Del was referring to the Costa Concordia.

"More bogus wiki. The true quote : "the Captain of the Titanic threatened to shoot any man that would not put down the seat in consideration of a woman or child"."

Sounds like a British colloquialism, "put down the seat in consideration".

What does that mean?

A man enters the bank with a pistol, and rushes to the teller demanding all the money be put in a bag.

The teller looks at him and almost gags laughing "Are you kidding me? - this is a water-pistol !"

"Yes it is" - says the man - "But it's filled with water from the Thames"

but very, very long

I have often wondered:

If they had flooded one or two compartments in the stern, could the ship have been saved......

I don't have enough information to evaluate the idea, nor the inclination or time to search for it.

Neither have I heard the idea suggested elsewhere ......

Not likely. Not possible.

The biggest mistake the captain made was to order an all stop, moving the weight may have helped and would been worth while, on top of that I would of found the nearest land mass or boat and ordered full steam ahead towards that object. This ship took some time to sink and if they had been traveling during that time they just might had been close enough to save even more lives. They also had enough wood on board this vessel that they could of built some really nice rafts fairly quickly. Seems to me they were in such shock of the event happening that they lost their basic survival skills built in to most humans.

Seems unlikely based on a massive ship getting heavier by the minute. About as likely as the Pirates of the Caribbean ship-flip from Hell.

Wolf this sounded like a good idea, but there's a couple issues; 1) It's difficult to have cooperation under this type of duress. 2) The rip was actually along midway of the Starboard side, so in this case probably not. But I think had they been properly prepared most passengers would have been saved, as it took several hours for this vessel to descend. This is also an example of what not to do by ignoring your engineers and their warnings by removing and/or modifying the bulkheads in order to make way for a large dance hall or something along those lines . They actually believed the ship was indestructable, vital mistake number 1. If I have the details or anything convoluted please feel free to correct me. Best Regards.

Am I correct in thinking that the water tight compartments were not actually watertight? That the bulkheads were open at the top?

Absolutely, positively, 100% correct.

Another nail in the "unsinkable" coffin!

I always thought if they took tarps from the cargo hold, weighed down one end and lowered them over the side vertically, they could seal the holes enough to buy some time. I remember a story about a ship in WW1 being saved by mattresses this way. Of course, unless one of use builds a time machine, none of these ideas are any good now. And even if you did build a time machine, you would have to be on that ship and convince them that you know what is going to happen and your idea will fix it.