What Was Murdoch Trying To Do?
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Cairo-5 — 10 years ago(February 28, 2016 02:12 AM)
My skepticism was completely reasonable. I invited comment on an interesting issue, but was not obligated to blindly accept seemingly nonsensical statements.
The issue was technical as to how the individual components of the navigational system work together. Initially the other poster and I were using the same words to refer to different things. We were each correct in what we were stating but simply expressing it in different ways, which gave the appearance of a disagreement that wasn't really there. By conducting a polite discussion we quickly resolved the matter.
Politeness. That's a quality you would benefit from acquiring.
It's easier to be an individual than a god.
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Cybersharp — 14 years ago(February 07, 2012 06:57 PM)
Theres really no good place to insert this response, so Ill just stick it here.
The conversation seemed to have gotten waylaid by the differences in directives and procedures between White Stars rudder commands and modern terminology. The real issue was what was Murdochs intention and how well was it executed.
Lets start with exactly what a port around is, using todays terminology and what the logical sequence would be, based on the accounts of many later ships captains. First, the sequence of commands would be: Hard to port - all stop - hard to starboard and then a reverse. if a last correction is needed.
The idea is to turn the ships head to port, allowing the head to reach a point well past the object to be avoided; then stop engines and make a determination of the exact instant to turn the head back to starboard and allow the wash and inertia of the ship to bring the head back while swinging the stern out of the way. The last possible correction would be a reverse with the appropriate steering necessary to alter the effects of the earlier maneuvers. Since this is a long accepted procedure, and since there is some evidence which indicates that Murdoch himself had used it earlier in his career, we need to offer some reliable evidence that this was not what was carried out during this incident.
This is what we seem to have on both sides of the issue.- The testimony of two men, who seem to be trying to reinforce their earlier statements regarding a conversation between two other officers who did not survive the incident.
- The testimony of one man who recounts the series of commands, when it seems almost humanly impossible to do so retrospectively.
- The testimony of someone in engineering who seems to come very close to supporting the sequence of commands commonly associated with a simple port around procedure.
Testimony can be couched in such a way as to elicit a response which is in agreement with the opinion of the questioner. Note that in the series of questions associated with Californians captain, the questioning stops when the desired answers are gotten. The series of questions does not acknowledge the fact that there is a significant difference between a command and execution. The questions raise a hypothetical scenario, but do not go on to the pragmatic limitations and risks of actually attempting such a procedure in real time, under actual emergency conditions. Poor timing in the execution of engine reversal would possibly lead to complete disaster, and certainly undermine the effects of the steering maneuvers, which would certainly be the prime focus of the person having to make split second decisions.
My own conclusions, based on everything Ive read from a wide variety of sources is:
1.The iceberg was spotted somewhere between 3 and 3 and one half minutes before the Titanic struck it. - Murdoch attempted a simple port around procedure.
- The Titanic was never aimed directly at the iceberg, and Murdochs maneuver, while being well executed, had relatively minimal effect on the positioning of the ship when it actually impacted.
I also think that Frederick Fleet is the lost soul in the mix. It is commonly thought that his muddled testimony is the product of pressure being applied by White Star. I believe in a odd way, it may have been just the opposite. He refused to be pressured into repeating White Stars lies under oath, but he also knew that he could not refute the testimony of others (safely) so he came up with his series of non-answers, knowing that it would not influence the balance either way. He was right.
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Petronius Arbiter II — 13 years ago(April 11, 2012 10:39 PM)
"State of the art ship design."
Really? Hull made out of cheap thin steel? "Water-tight compartments" that weren't really water-tight, because the bulkheads separating them didn't go all the way to the top? Not nearly enough lifeboats for the number of passengers and crew Titanic carried?
Was this
really
state-of-the-art design at the time? If so, then every last ship that plied the North Atlantic during iceberg season was a potential disaster waiting to happen. But I'm having a hard time believing that the thinness of the hull, or the cheap fragile steel, was even part of the design, could it have been that White Star ordered that as a cost-cutting measure
after
the blueprints were drawn up?
I still have a hard time getting over those so-called water-tight compartments. Couldn't the designers have been bright enough to figure out that once a compartment filled up, the water would just spill over into the next compartment, and the next one after that, and so on? If the bulkheads had gone all the way to deck above, the Titanic probably would never have sunk.
"I don't deduce, I observe." -
chimaera1249 — 13 years ago(April 12, 2012 04:55 AM)
White Star didn't really have input on the materials. Harland and Wolff used the same steel they used on other ships, including
Olympic
, which had a fine career. It wasn't fragile, and was perfectly acceptable for the time.
The bulkheads
were
watertight and did work. When
Olympic
was hit by the
Hawke
in 1911, two compartements were opened and flooded, yet she was able to get back to port to offload and get some quick repairs and then get back to Belfast for complete repairs. All the compartments went up past the water line, D-Deck at the bow and stern, and E-Deck amidship. Based on the ship's floodable length calculations, this was enough, for up to the first 4 compartments, or any two (for an excellent article about this: see
http://www.titanicology.com/FloodingByCompartment.html
). In a incident in the allowed conditions, the compartments would flood to the waterline, where the pressure would equalize and the ship would stop flooding. In the disaster, the damage was just more than the design could withstand, and water pulled the ship down to the point where water could enter in the ship through non-watertight areas. By the way, the bulkheads
did
extend the deck above, they didn't just stop in beween decks.