Build the Titanic!

[Skywalker_T-65]

And what is sad, is that despite how much people like to ridicule the Titanic's design, it actually acquitted itself quite well. The ship stayed (more or less) on an even keel, allowing the launching of all the lifeboats (granted it needed more, but that's not the point). Whereas more modern and 'safer' ships have a tendency to capsize. The Andrea Doria and Concordia come to mind. So thus, if you fix the stuff like the lifeboats and watertight doors, you can have a much better looking ship (compared to the 'box-o-fatness'...incidentally I like that description...that modern 'liners' are). Because, aside from the aforementioned problems, the Olympic class was a remarkably safe design. Just use modern materials and safety precautions and boom, you have a wonderful answer to the less than attractive cruise liners.

(As you can tell, I love the Olympic class, even if only the name ship actually had a career to speak of)

[fordlltwm]

Plus the Olympic herself was the only British merchant vessel in WW1 to sink an enemy vessel, a U-boat in fact. Okay, it was a merit of her enormous propellers having a massive suction effect on any surrounding vessels, which got her into trouble quite often and led to her eventual withdrawal and scrapping, but it still managed it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Sink-before-capsize is actually a serious design criterion for modern cruise ships. They're going to be trying very rigorously to find out what happened with the Costa Concordia though I think personally that superstructures have just gotten too big and emphasis on passenger comfort has overriden the kind of characteristics in a ship needed for survivability and disaster mitigation.

[Sky Captain]

I hope they build it. Modern cruise ship design are just plain ugly. If I had choice between going on a cruise on typical floating block of flats or oldschool ocean liner obviously I would choose a liner.

[D.Turtle]

Except that that stay on such an old-school ocean liner will be a LOT more expensive, as there will be a lot fewer people on it.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Yeah, that's the biggest problem with an old style ocean liner. They are much more expensive to be on. Oh well, still a nice idea.

[Sea Skimmer]

Andrea Doria did stay afloat for eleven hours with a very large hole in her that exceeded her allowable floodable length; I'd call that a much better performance then sinking in a few hours from about 100 square feet of hole as on Titanic. She capsized because her partly filled fuel tanks had not been ballasted as was required, which left her inherently unstable. Operational errors like this could capsize any major ship. She would have sunk even more slowly but the rapid initial list and a missing watertight door radically reduced her pumping capacity. The list lifted seawater intakes out of the water, and the reported missing floor knocked out much of the power plant that should have withstood the initial flooding.

Given the proven reckless incompetence of the skipper of Costa Concordia I can't help but wonder if similar mistakes in ballasting caused her capsizing; though she was just leaving port unlike Andrea Doria so would would expect tanks to be filled. However its possible she wasn't sailing with full tanks if the trip did not require it, and cruise liners have considerable other liquid loads in the form of potable water and grey/black water.

On that Titanic II drawing.. its funny because if that is accurate they've now gone from the original design having no.4 funnel as a dummy to no.1 being the dummy based on the air intakes. Personally I love every single four funnel liner even if more then one had a fake funnel, and I cant think of a three funnel that looks bad. Modern cruise ships look like apartment blocks.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It's not widely reported on, Skimmer, but Costa Concordia actually operated on a circulator route similar to a regular liner route, where you could board and disembark at any of the destination ports along the way, unlike a regular cruise. I don't believe she had necessarily actually taken out supplies and bunkerage in her last port of call. This is also why lifeboat drills hadn't been conducted. The voyage was over a fixed route but you could get on and off anywhere; they still only conducted the drills at one point, so it was possible to ride like 90% of the circle route and not be on board for the scheduled life boat drill.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Oh I know that Andrea Doria lasted a lot longer than the Titanic. I just have gotten used to people going 'LOLZ TITANIC IS TEH SUXOR!!' and I tend to try and defend it. Hence the pointing out of Titanic not capsizing...since people love saying that the design sucked and was horribly flawed (which aside from the watertight doors it wasn't).

I just didn't word it very well in that post...heh...

Still, it is impressive that despite the watertight door flaws that Titanic lasted as long as it did. And not capsizing was something of a miracle too.

[Sea Skimmer]

I recall seeing some stuff a while ago that said if Titanic had been in any kind of significant wave action, or suffered from a mass surge of passengers on deck she would have capsized near the end, once her foredeck was underwater. IIRC its also been found that she did begin listing towards the end, but breaking in half from the bottom ripping apart put a stop to it. Not an awful design no, but poorly built for sure. Not having swimming pools on top of the ship certainly is good in an accident though, Titanic's was IIRC below the water line. Cruise liners should really have provisions for emergency draining them if anything goes wrong though they would tend to spill if you took on a real serious list.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Yeah...it could be the best design in the world, but it wouldn't make a lick of difference if it isn't built well. And new Titanic info eh...I didn't know that the wave/passenger thing could have capsized her. I knew that Titanic was listing as she went down, just not quite to that extent. Oh well, learn something new every day.

[Sea Skimmer]

I can't find the study at the moment, I did find a bunch of others, but the issue wasn't that she had that serious of a list but simply that almost no stability margin left. That means a slight force could tip her over, but the sea was flat calm and the passengers didn't panic until the bitter end.

[Irbis]

Trash compactor? Does it include a Dianoga in it?

Also, looking at that drawing and dummy funnels... I wonder, can the fake ones be turned into something useful? Say, a kick-ass suite with the best view on anything floating that isn't top of the island on a CVN? Obviously, taking pains it still looks like a funnel from outside. Or would that be a bad idea?

[Skywalker_T-65]

Unless they seriously reinforce the dummy funnels...no that wouldn't be a good idea. As it stands, the funnels aren't meant to hold any weight, which making them into some sort of suite would most definitely do. Personally, while I would freely ride the ship (Titanic II or not) I wouldn't book a funnel suite.

(If they were actually brave enough to even try it...or would that be a case of 'stupid not brave'?)

[Norseman]

They could use the fake funnels to hide the GPS systems and other modern antennas, so to avoid spoiling the old timey look. At least that's what I'd like to do if it was at all possible.

[eion]

Hmm...if that is a legit drawing right there it shows they are taking it seriously. And for the record I happen to think the Olympic class ships are beautiful myself. But that's just my opinion.

It's Popular Mechanics circa. 2000, if I recall correctly.

[Ahriman238]

Hasn't this been done before? I seem to recall hearing about a Titanic II that sank literally half an hour after touching water for the first time.

As for design problems, I've heard of two. First, I remember a documentary about the Titanic in which a theory was posed that one reason it sank was because the boilers were poorly placed and were either damaged from the iceberg, or critically malfunctioned at just the wrong time.

The second was that the ship could not reverse very quickly, the main engine going only forward and the auxiliaries for maneuvering could only slow the ship somewhat if the main engine weren't cut first.

[Sea Skimmer]

As for design problems, I've heard of two. First, I remember a documentary about the Titanic in which a theory was posed that one reason it sank was because the boilers were poorly placed and were either damaged from the iceberg, or critically malfunctioned at just the wrong time.

The ship was doomed as soon as the hole was finished being torn, the power plant functioned well for as long as could be expected. One thing the crew might have tried was lowering mats over the gashes but this would have only slowed her sinking. I have no idea if the required material existed on board; sails would work well but of course she wouldn't have any.

The second was that the ship could not reverse very quickly, the main engine going only forward and the auxiliaries for maneuvering could only slow the ship somewhat if the main engine weren't cut first.

Going into reverse was the probable cause of the accident in the first place. Had full ahead been maintained the ship would have turned more quickly and almost certainly completely avoided the iceberg given how glancing the blow already was. It is true that the center line shaft which was turbine driven could not be reversed, but irrelevant. Had meanwhile Titanic simply not turned and plowed into the iceberg with her bow, she would have certainly not sunk. She might have been damaged enough to need an entirely new bow though.

One of the real flaws was that the steel quality was poor, but for reasons that would not be understood until after the Second World War concerning how brittle it became in very cold water. We now know from ultrasonic scans of the hull that the actual hole in titanic was actually a series of small narrow gashes, most likely caused by rivets and plates cracking rather than being smashed clear through by the ice, because they were brittle. If she had been made of much more modern grades of steel, the hull most likely would have been dished in without failing.

[Ahriman238]

Going into reverse was the probable cause of the accident in the first place. Had full ahead been maintained the ship would have turned more quickly and almost certainly completely avoided the iceberg given how glancing the blow already was. It is true that the center line shaft which was turbine driven could not be reversed, but irrelevant. Had meanwhile Titanic simply not turned and plowed into the iceberg with her bow, she would have certainly not sunk. She might have been damaged enough to need an entirely new bow though.

One of the real flaws was that the steel quality was poor, but for reasons that would not be understood until after the Second World War concerning how brittle it became in very cold water. We now know from ultrasonic scans of the hull that the actual hole in titanic was actually a series of small narrow gashes, most likely caused by rivets and plates cracking rather than being smashed clear through by the ice, because they were brittle. If she had been made of much more modern grades of steel, the hull most likely would have been dished in without failing.

I admit, I did not know any of this. I'm impressed and more than little curious. How has the quality of steel improved in the last 70 years?

[montypython]

Going into reverse was the probable cause of the accident in the first place. Had full ahead been maintained the ship would have turned more quickly and almost certainly completely avoided the iceberg given how glancing the blow already was. It is true that the center line shaft which was turbine driven could not be reversed, but irrelevant. Had meanwhile Titanic simply not turned and plowed into the iceberg with her bow, she would have certainly not sunk. She might have been damaged enough to need an entirely new bow though.

One of the real flaws was that the steel quality was poor, but for reasons that would not be understood until after the Second World War concerning how brittle it became in very cold water. We now know from ultrasonic scans of the hull that the actual hole in titanic was actually a series of small narrow gashes, most likely caused by rivets and plates cracking rather than being smashed clear through by the ice, because they were brittle. If she had been made of much more modern grades of steel, the hull most likely would have been dished in without failing.

I admit, I did not know any of this. I'm impressed and more than little curious. How has the quality of steel improved in the last 70 years?

Here's an image of the steel stress test between modern steel (left) and Titanic steel (right):



And some interesting article links:
iron vs steel rivets
Causes and Effects of the Rapid Sinking of the Titanic
The Royal Mail Ship Titanic: Did a Metallurgical Failure Cause a Night to Remember?

[The Spartan]

The short version is that sulfur (and other) inclusions in the steel raised it's ductile-to-brittle transition temperature to a point higher than the water they were in.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah, it's actually kind of terrifying how impressively steel has improved in the past hundred years. The best shipbuilding steel available in 1912 was SCHIFFBAUSTAHL III, a German metal--very close to the British equivalent, though--used in submarines and battleships and other high end applications (as a structural steel, armour is a different matter entirely). It had a yield strength of 51ksi. That's the same of modern mild steel. Tensile strength was 80ksi. Titanic was not built out of this; it was built out of a steel only somewhat half as good as SCHIFFBAUSTAHL III. Modern steel--take INCONEL 718 for example--can obtain yield strengths, conversely, as high as 150ksi for applications like nuclear reactor and aircraft engine components, and there are certainly steels better than INCONEL 718 out there now (though not by much--there are limits) since it was invented in the 1960s.

Then there's the sulphur concentration issue that the Spartan mentions, then there's another issue: A machine was used to stamp-punch the holes in the plate for the rivets instead of the time-consuming process of drilling them by hand. This caused much more serious work-hardening, making the material more brittle around the plates. The engineers of the time knew this was a problem but did not consider it important for civilian applications, because they did not understand that the cold water caused a ductile-to-brittle transition, and even with the work hardening from punching the rivets the ship would have been fine by the safety calculations available to them in those days. However, it's important to note that the two Cunarders of the period, Lusitania and Mauritania, were not built using this method and so had much less brittle plates and rivet-plate connections, because the admiralty insisted (they were providing a subsidy to have them built on a basis which would allow conversion to war use) on using the more expensive and labour-intensive drilling process to put the rivet holes into the plates precisely to avoid the problems associated with work-hardening them, so that the ships would be have more structural strength for their envisioned role as Armed Merchant Cruisers with 6-inch guns in wartime.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As an addendum, if we could mine iridium in space in sufficient quantities to use it as an alloying material in steel, I'd wager we could triple yield strengths yet again, but the planetary stock of iridium is much, much to small for that to be feasible.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Make the Hindenburg resupply airship carry food supplies and be captained by a man named Donner, for extra hilarity.

And let Deanna Troi take the helm

[LaCroix]

The fact that the did rivet it hydraulically was another factor - the stress of pulling the plates together tightly was never relieved - the whole sections were under tension like a guitar string, and micro-cracks were already present at the time of building. In combination with the cold, whole sections of the hull were practically just waiting to fly apart - very much like the Liberty Freighters in WW2. (Nil Ductility Transition problem)

And apart from the fact that each of the plates riveted onto her frame was already pre-perforated to ease ripping, she had literally thousands of small leaks in sections where the hull itself was only dented. Due to the impact, the rivet-holes had been deformed and allowed water to gush in.

I heard estimates that if the plates had been welded, she would have stayed afloat for at least twice as long as she did. Or maybe not, for welding was very much still an experimental method back then.

Still, just building the ship out of modern steel and with modern welding tech would result in a ship that would have made it back to England after the same collision.