Just before the Titanic saw the Iceberg, she was racing through the Ice field at 20 knots plus speed (as was the standard practice at the time). WHat would happen if she has not tried to avoid the iceberg and not slowed down, basically if the first indication something was wrong was the ship hitting the berg head on.
On another forum, there is quite a lot of discussion what would happen. What has been discussed and in my not so expert opinion?
50,000 tons of ship suddenly coming to a stop in a second or two means at the least everything forward of the funnel being crushed.
A massive shock wave will travel through the length of the ship, damaging the hull, perhaps popping enough rivets to cause uncontrollable sinking.
The internal machinery will be torn loose, causing lots of damage internally, starting fires (and with coal dust, possibly a big explosion???) and also damaging the hull.
Any of that realistic? Would she sink quickly with few survivors?
Even in a best case scenario, I am guessing there would be hundreds of casualties caused at once after a collision. I would also hazard a guess that the funnels and the mast would collapse very quickly after the collision, taking out the antenna for communications and the ability to launch lifeboats. I suspect the massive casualties directly caused would make launching lifeboats impossible. Loss of electrical power and hydraulics. No pumps. Possibly fires? How many would get off?
I suspect even a Nimitz or *Ford * class carrier would have a very lousy morning if she hit an iceberg at speed full on.
Sinking would be a result of seams opening up. A head on strike could cause that anywhere along the body of the ship. Possibly if the opening were limited to the front of the ship the bulkheads there may have been sufficient to keep the ship sinking faster than water could be pumped out, but the massive damage throughout the ship may have made any remediation impossible. If the poor quality of rivets was to blame for the actual sinking the head on collision probably would have resulted in more serious breaches of the hull causing it to sink much faster.
I think your opening guesses are wrong. Mainly because you seem to be thinking of an iceberg as being the same as a mountain. Ice bergs float, and would give way somewhat, so the ship wouldn’t come to an instant halt. How much less than a full stop, would depend on the size and density of the berg.
The entire ship would not have stopped, the front end of it would have crumpled. Other ships HAVE plowed into objects at speed, head on, and did not have the degree of trouble you imagine.
I’ve seen this argued a number of times, but I haven’t seen a thorough structural analysis or any tests, just gabbing. To come up with a definitive answer, would require a lot more than calculating the tonnage of the Titanic, the assumed speed, and the size of the berg. We’d also need details of construction and quality of materials which we don’t have, though some people have tried to find out about that.
Other smaller ships, such as the MS Stockholm, have hit things head on and survived. Would the much larger size of the Titanic cause a different result? That would depend on whether the structure of the larger ship was adjusted accordingly or not.
Exactly how the Titanic sunk is still a matter of debate, and unfortunately, the evidence that would prove the case one way or another is buried underneath the sand at the bottom of the ocean.
Back when the prevailing theory was that the iceberg tore a huge gash in the hull, computer simulations showed that a head-on collision would have only damaged the front compartments and that enough compartments would have remained intact for the ship to remain afloat.
Now that we know the rivets were weak, the question becomes how much damage would a head-on collision really have done to the ship, and with this it’s just guesswork. If it causes some minor leaking throughout the ship, they could probably pump out the water as fast as it was coming and and the ship stays afloat. If you end up with massive cracks throughout the ship, it’s doomed, and might even sink faster than it did.
Best guess, the ship either stays afloat or sinks slowly enough that help arrives before it sinks, and you don’t have a major disaster with a huge loss of life.
SWAG
It would not be an instant stop. I do not believe the ship would be crushed back to the funnels. There have been ships hit piers at a high rate of speed that were not crushed back to the funnels.
The bow and a number of bulkheads would collapse. Several water tight bulk would be lost, but not as many compartments would be compromised.
I doubt that the boilers would shake loose of their foundations. But the funnels may not stand up and may completely fall or part of the funnels may be destroyed. And I believe the boilers were natural draft so there could be boiler flair backs into the fire rooms.
Not sure about the main engines. I heard of one story about a ship where the engines moved a lot in a accident and righted back into position. So they may stay on their foundations. But I would bet some auxiliary machinery would break loose, there by breaking steam lines.
Hull plates would be loose over the length of the ship. More flooding forward than aft. But the bilge pumps may be able to keep up with the flooding if enough water tight compartments still existed.
Fires would be more electrical that coal dust.
Everything would depend on the crew.
Figure that only a small number of the members of the engineering watch would survive. And the unlicensed crew members would be in the crew’s quarters forward so many of them would not survive. The surviving crew would have to respond. The engine room would be hot and full of steam, the boiler rooms hot, full of steam and coal dust and possibly fire.
Electricity would be lost moments after hitting the iceberg. Not sure what type of emergency generators the Titanic had but assume she had some. So emergency lighting may come on.
There would be no reason the surviving life boats could not be launched. It may have been difficult though. And there was not enough life boats any way.
With in moments of hitting the iceberg hundred of lives would be lost.
It is a swag if she would sink quickly or would be towed back to port and cut up for scrap iron.
Mast and funnels were held up by stays. Would they survive intact in a 20-knot collision?
As for ships that have hit piers , they were typically ships trying to stop. In the OP its postulated the ship never sees the 'Berg until it hits.
HMS King George V hit a destroyer at speed and that left a 40 foot long gash just above the waterline and took months to repair. Against a massive wall of ice many times its size would Titanic really suffer less damage then she did in real life?
I can’t model what would have happened to the ship, but 46,000 horsepower in 1908? That’s phenomenal. A quick bit of googling says that it technically did take a full century, from the first commercially successfully steamboat in 1811 to the Titanic. Still an amazing feat to even build one.
Going by the figures in this thread (50,000 ton ship, 75,000,000 ton iceberg) gives the iceberg weighing 1,500 times as much as the ship. That is like a person who weighs 150 pounds being hit by something that weighs 1.6 ounces. Some googling for ball weights shows that is almost the exact weight of a golf ball. How far do you think a 150 pound person would be moved if they were hit by a golf ball moving at 26 miles per hour? What about if the person was submerged 90 percent in water, which would greatly dampen any dragging backwards?
I think I agree on the bottom line of ‘hard to say for sure’. But, the latter day examination of rivet material was to explain why the 'berg made such a long gash substantial enough to overcome the capacity of the pumps in more compartment than the ship’s design allowed to be flooded and still stay afloat. The idea of massive rivet failure from shock with no physical contact with the iceberg is purely speculative, and if I had to bet I’d bet against it.
As has been correctly pointed out, the iceberg was so much heavier than the ship as to be an essentially immovable object in simplified Newtonian collision terms. It was like hitting a wall. However the crushing the forward structure of the ship would have absorbed a lot of that energy, the parts aft of the ‘crush zone’ would not have come to an instant stop. Plus there’d have been some though less absorption from the ice cracking around the point of impact. So again I’d bet against the idea of shock causing serious flooding aft of the crush zone, and more likely the conventional wisdom the ship would have survived a head on is still correct.
This. the berg is effectively an infinite immovable absolutely rigid mass.
20 knots sounds like a lot, but it’s only roughly 10 meters per second. 1G is 9.8 meters/sec/sec. So following impact, if the ship’s forward-most 10 meters takes 1 second to crush down to utterly flat, the entire rest of the ship (260 meters worth) comes to a halt having experienced no deformation and 1G of deceleration for one second. Big deal.
Anyone standing up will have fallen down. Anyone sitting or laying down will be fine. Unless they were in that forward-most 10 meters of ship in which case they’ll be a thin layer of red ooze sandwiched between two plates of primitive brittle steel.
I can see those forces possibly breaking loose some very dense machinery items and badly braced plumbing. And it may well spring some rivets and plates randomly all around the ship.
More realistically, a longer length of ship will be less thoroughly crushed. And therefore stopping the rest of the ship will take more than one second, exposing the entire non-crushed ship portion to less than 1G of aftwards acceleration.
And since that front section was in a separate watertight compartment (though apparently these compartments were not sealed at the top), the ship might have taken longer to sink. Just a few more hours, and everyone who survived the collision might have made it off the ship safely. So if you were a time traveler on the titanic that fateful night with a silenced weapon, you could save 1500 people by shooting the lookout, right?
There have been any number of collisions at full speed between ships. Admittedly, hitting another ship is softer. Nonetheless, a complete head on is suprisingly survivable. The damage is usually limited to forward compartments, leaving most bouyancy unaffacted.
Further - and this is a biggie - a lot of problems with ship damage arise from lack of stability caused by flooding of one side. To give a recent example, the Costa Concordia wasn’t lost due to water ingress as such which was, by the standards of a ship that size, relatively modest. It was lost because it turned over.
Hitting something head on tends to lead to *symmetrical * flooding of forward compartments, leaving the rest of the ship stable.
Missed Edit Time Limit
Secondly, even if the ship can remain afloat, after a head on collision, what about fires, electrical or otherwise? Coal dust can be devastatingly explosive in some easily reached fire conditions. Would lifeboats even remain launchable? Would injuries to the crew (the forward compartments contained most of the engineering crew, so they at least are goners) limit what kind of damage control can we realistically see?
Machinary coming loose would not be good news. Or boilers bursting. Electrical power loss as well.
On one side. That’s the point. You get flooding on one side and the ship wants to turn over. Then you have to try to flood the other side to stay upright. And then you have free surface effects and then, oh my…
I’m not an expert on the Titanic (and a hellava lot of people sitting in armchairs seem to be, not talking about you, AK84) but I don’t see any particular reason for a fire. Again, there have been plenty of massive head on ship collisions without fires. From a quick google it seems that the nearest bunker to the bow was 200ft back. There is no way that the heavy crumpling damage would have extended back that far.
A point to bear in mind is that ships are not built (or fitted out) like Bangladeshi apartment blocks. They are *designed *to be thrown around by storm seas. A sudden deceleration doesn’t thrown the engine off its mounts or cause an instant coal explosion. If it did, the ship wouldn’t survive its first low grade Atlantic storm.
Yes. No. Wouldn’t happen.
Lifeboats launchable? Sure, why not? They weren’t in the crumple zone. And as I’ve said the vessel would probably stay upright in a head on. Severe list is very often the key problem with launching lifeboats.
Machinery coming loose? Boilers bursting? Why? As **LSLGuy **calculated above, there really wouldn’t have been some tremendous deceleration. Maybe 1G. Maybe. That’s no different to the forces that throw a ship around in a heavy sea. They don’t build ships so the machinery goes for a waltz in the first big storm.
Injuries to the crew? Doubtful. The first 40 feet of the ship were just forepeak tank. I doubt you are going to get much crumpling beyond that but even if you do it’s not going to kill a vast number of the crew. At least one entire shift of the engineering crew would have been on duty not in their bunks in the forward part of the ship.
Let’s get some perspective here:
This is the SS Arizona (1879)- a notably fast ship by the standards of the day - after hitting an iceberg. Sailed into port, no issues. Going slower than titanic. No casualties, survived and repaired
this is the Stockholmafter it hit the Andrea Doria. Bow totally smooshed. Five killed. Repaired, still in service.
There is no particular reason of which I am aware to assume that - assuming the Titanic hit the iceberg head on and remained watertight behind the compartments immediate affected by a pug-dogged bow - it would have had other serious issues due to loss of life, fire, explosion etc.
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