[OT ish] Titanic - New Evidence

I missed that :-)

I switched to something else before it got very technical and my PVR recording seems to have failed.

Among the things which really annoyed me, if it was really such a raging fire, why was it not evident from smoke at the top? Presumably the combustion rate was limited by air access from leaks at the stokers' hatches? I suppose they didn't flood it with water because of the risks from hydrogen production. While it was in the dock, could they not have extinguished it with nitrogen (possibly even carbon dioxide)?

I don't doubt that it could have red hot at the heart of the fire, which might have been adjacent to a bulkhead but obviously not at the hull plates. Not convinced about the suggestion that the heat had somehow made the outer plates prone to cracking.

I thought the current theory was that the bulkheads were "open at the top", so that they flooded successively, it wasn't necessary for many to fail.

I've seen a few Titanic documentaries recently (our little boy is obsessed with it, for some reason), and several of them mention the fire. I expect the documentary is claiming that it deserves more emphasis?

I don't see why everyone is so critical of the programme. Yes, it could have been shorter, but it does seem plausible. I found it interesting.

John

I would certainly watch it, if I could (I'll watch anything Titanic-related), but I guess it's too late now :-)

I wonder if the loons that claim that a coal fire weakened the steel hull of the Titanic are the same loons who claim that a jet fuel fire couldn't weaken the steel beams of the WTC.

En el artículo , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com escribió:

It was the endless repetition of the CGI animations I found irritating. The whole thing could have been done well in half an hour, but I suppose C4 have airtime to fill.

And treating your audience as thick grates too.

How does a cast iron rivet work?

The claim was also that the far bunker wall (from the PoV of the stokers) was indeed the hull. So the hull plates would have been heated too. Depends where the combustion was, I suppose. The claim was that the bunker was three stories high and so took a while to empty. The method of emptying was simply taking the coal out at the bottom as usual and shoving it into the boiler fire. If the fire was high up, the bunker take a long time to empty and you might have expected people to notice a red-hot patch on the hull. If the fire was much lower down, it would presumably be below sea-level. I don't know what the effect on a steel plate is if one side is trying to be red hot and the other is trying to be at -1C (sea temp).

The claim was also that the reason they continued at full speed was that they had to burn all this coal = had to make all this steam = had to shove the steam through the engines. The Winky article has a lot to say, though, about steam being vented once the ship stopped, so the boilers wouldn't explode.

I wondered about smoke from the bunker fire, too.

A coal fire could of create weakness - not the hull but in the bulkheads

- of a ship.

The hull, unlike the twin towers, is immersed in rather large amount of cold water.

There is no evidence that any bulkheads were damaged by fire however.

I wonder if the loons that that claim that a coal fire weakened the steel hull of the Titanic just like a jet fuel fire weakened the steel beams of the WTC, are the same loons who think that water is dangerously inflammable, because the Hindenburg was full of hydrogen, and so is water.

There's a good James Cameron documentary out there about Titanic. It's mostly about what he would change in the film if he did it now (he seems to have done quite a lot of research before and since the film). There's a piece at the end where the experts wonder if everyone could be saved, and there were a few interesting ideas. Someone said they could have sailed into a nearby floating ice field further north, and everyone could have stepped out onto that. There were other suggestions I can't remember, but most interesting was the idea that they could throw all the lifejackets into the leaking section, and hope that they would keep it afloat.

Wrought iron then. I'm not a metallurgist and I did say "IIRC" above. This from the Winky article (from which one might conclude that the question of the rivets is controversial):

The plates in the central 60% of the hull were held together with triple rows of mild steel rivets, but the plates in the bow and stern were held together with double rows of wrought iron rivets which were ? according to materials scientists Tim Foecke and Jennifer McCarty ? near their stress limits even before the collision.[45][46] These "Best" or No. 3 iron rivets had a high level of slag inclusions, making them more brittle than the more usual "Best-Best" No. 4 iron rivets, and more prone to snapping when put under stress, particularly in extreme cold.[47][48] But Tom McCluskie, a retired archivist of Harland & Wolff, pointed out that Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, was riveted with the same iron and served without incident for nearly 25 years, surviving several major collisions, including being rammed by a British cruiser.[49] When the Olympic rammed and sank the U-boat U-103 with her bow, the stem was twisted and hull plates on the starboard side were buckled without impairing the hull's integrity.[49][50]

Thanks for that. I did know there were various grades of steel rivets - but wondered about cast iron ones. ;-)

They could also have issued the third-class passengers with teaspoons and told them to bale...

Well, it helps to keep oneself busy, I suppose. It's interesting that

THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN EVERY DAY THOUGH.

Yes. Allegedly the first design for these vessels was for all the watertight bulkheads to extend to promenade deck level but the Marketing Department of the White Star Line vetoed this on the basis that they could not be allowed to intrude into the public First Class areas. Thus they were cut down in the central section.

Once the water reached the top of the first of these cut down bulkheads, the water simply flowed over the top into the next compartment, and so on.

From this point onwards, the vessel was doomed.

So the Titanic was sunk by the Marketing Department of the White Star Line!

I've always hated Marketing Departments ...

En el artículo , Dan S. MacAbre escribió:

In message , newshound writes

I suspect flooding it was no an option.

I suspect that the opening at the bottom of the bunker wasn't designed to be either air tight or water tight. Putting water in would have meant that it would have just flooded out of the bottom into the boiler room, not a good thing. Likewise pumping in a gas.

Adrian