I promise this isn’t the same as asking “If an airplane’s black box is indestructible, why don’t they make the whole plane out of it?”
But there are icebreaker ships that sail into ice to break it up. Their hulls stand up to ice pretty well. Why didn’t they make the Titanic out of it, or any of these large ships? You’d think something that costs millions would be worth an extra buck or two in order to protect it, especially if one means to sail in cold, frozen actic waters
Or do they do this already and I’m woefully behind on my shipbuilding knowledge?
With modern navigational equipment just how much of a real world threat are icebergs to commercial shipping that would have to spend money to reinforce ships against them?
What was the last time a modern ship hit an iceberg?
I also thought icebreakers were not so much about reinforcing the hull (which they do to some extent) to enable it to plow through ice but rather design the ship so the bow rides up over the ice. Then the weight of the ship bearing down cracks the ice making a passage.
But yeah, an icebreaker ramming an iceberg is probably still bad for the icebreaker. Like running into a wall.
Also, the Titanic went down because the iceberg hit the side. Icebreaker bows are reinforced but is the whole hull likewise reinforced?
I suspect that an iceberg-piercing armored prow would have been too heavy. The Titanic was made to be fast, one of the biggest selling points of a ticket on the Titanic was that it was one of the fastest possible ways to get across the Atlantic at the time. Armoring it well enough to survive running into ice at full speed would probably have slowed it down quite a bit.
Titanic could very probably have survived the collision with the iceberg if she had hit it head on. The glancing impact caused the first 6 compartments to flood, and the ship was only designed to stay afloat with 4 flooded. An icebreaker type hull would have been expensive and unnecessary, but a double hulled construction might have saved the ship.
I’ve read this too. A head on collision would have been bad but almost certainly the ship would have stayed afloat. Turning doomed the ship. Perversely the order to reverse some of the propellers also aided in its doom. Those propellers do not shift into reverse that fast. The loss of water being pushed past the rudder meant the rudder lost some ability to turn the ship. Had they stayed at full speed it might have turned in time (remember it was a glancing blow, they only needed to turn a bit more and would have just missed).
That said the crew responded appropriately. Hindsight is all well and fine but no one would be thinking the best option is to ram the iceberg.
So many little things lined up against the Titanic that night it boggles the mind.
Didn’t Cervantice say “whether the icebreaker hits the iceberg or the iceberg hits the iceberg, it’s going to be bad for the icebreaker”? I think it was about Frozen Panza talking about hitting his wife back.
Plus, how many ships have gone down because they hit an iceberg? I remember reading somewhere that Titanic is the only known major ship that sank because of an iceberg collision - don’t know if that’s accurate or not?
Actually there were quite a few ships lost to icebergs before Titanic, but security was increased afterwards with among other things better monitoring of icebergs near shipping lanes and warnings over wireless telegraphs. http://www.webtitanic.net/frameice.html
