I caught a little of the flick on cable; and was wondering: suppose the lookout hadn’t sighted the iceberg in time, and the helmsman hadn’t turned the ship? Then RMS TITANIC would have crashed into the iceberg head-on. What would have happened? I assume a bunch of people would have been killed by the impact, and the bow totally destroyed. However, would the ship have survived?
On another angle, is there any reason to think TITANIC may have gotten stuck into the iceberg? I can imagine passengers fleeing onto the berg-could they have survived in this way?
Lots of open-ended specualtion available on this one.
[ul][li] I do not believe that the Titanic was on a “head on” course for the iceberg. It has been my understanding that it was going to be a glancing side impact, regardless, but that the attempt to miss the berg simply changed the angle and location at which it struck.[/li]
[li] There has been speculation that a head on collision would have resulted in the crumpling of the ship foreward of the first or second watertight bulkhead, leaving the rest of the hull intact. It is possible, of course. It is also possible, however, (based on the “shattering” effect that occurred to the hull due to the way the steel was created and the temperature of the water), that a direct crushing blow to the bow would have caused even more of the hull to fracture, causing the ship to sink more quickly.[/li]
[li] To escape onto the iceberg, some flat portion of berg would have had to have been low enough for a transfer of people from the ship to the berg. I had thought that the berg was higher than the ship’s rail and vertical, (with no idea whether the top of the berg was flat or steeply angled), so that possibility remains in the realm of pure conjecture. [/li]
Aside from a single photograph taking several days after the sinking, speculated to have been the collision berg, we really have no idea about the berg’s ability to absorb an impact without either remaining intact or shattering, so questions about the ship hanging up ojn the berg also remain open to wide speculation.[/ul]
I am not a naval engineer, but I would have thought that the outlook for any vessel that hits what amounts to an immovable, incompressible object at twenty mph head-on is not good. If someone has enough time on their hands to work out the kinetic energy the Titanic would have had to dissipate, I’m sure it would bee a truly impressive number.
4*10[sup]10[/sup] ft-lb which is equivalent to about 2.3 tons of dynamite.
Care to show your work?
What a maroon. Let me try that again. The answer is 1.3*10[sup]9[/sup] ft-lb or 135 lb of dynamite.
Also, keep in mind that the titanic was not hitting an immovable object. It was hitting a very massive, but object with considerable inertia that was nonetheless free-floating in water. Similarly, I’m not sure whether “incompressible object” is fair description, because it conjures images of a rigid body, while ice melting would be rather brittle *and ductile at that velocity, and therefore capable of substantial deformation. [Water is considered incompressible --less compressible than ice-- but a submarine’s hull can sustain years of continuous 20 knot “impact” with water with only cosmetic damage.
I believe that the underwater ice ledge posited by wreck analysts could well have given the ship a good start on “grounding itself” in a head on collision. The strength of the bow and keel could have helped it “cut into” the ledge and berg before they shattered and crumpled. – and the crumpling might help it lock in and increase the mating surface with the ice by sacrificing a region of low cross section for an interface of higher cross section. The iceberg’s buoyancy might well have helped the ship remain afloat long enough for their radio calls to be heard, and a much more effective rescue to take place.
Equally ironically, it’s possible that after a head-on collision the ship would have been better served if the Captain had ordered forward power after the collision to hold the damaged ship against the iceberg – but I wonder if any Captain would entertain that notion until it was too late, and the bow had already sunk significantly. That’s just a wild-eyed speculation – but I like the cartoon image of the Titanic arriving in North America, months later pushing the Iceberg (with a skeleton crew and a few underway refuelings – which, yes, I very much doubt Titanic was equipped to do)
Here’s my calculation.
From Wikipedia, the Titanic displaced 52,310 long tons, which is 5.315x10[sup]7[/sup] kg. I couldn’t find the impact speed, but taking your 20 mph, it’s 8.941 m/s. Kinetic energy is 1/2 m v[sup]2[/sup] = 2.124x10[sup]9[/sup] J. That converts to 0.5077 tons of TNT. By way of comparison, that’s equivalent to a little less than two Mk-48 torpedoes.