[BengalTiger]

"Iceberg, right ahead!"

[Nuke]

ah yes, the original shipment of fail.

[Sololop]

Being in Halifax, a city relatively close to the site of the accident, the city seems obsessed about it. Not to mention all the radios having weird bogus conflicting stories about facts.

[Trivial Psychic]

Another 5+ years and you can "celebrate" the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion.

[Sololop]

Yep, another great shipping disaster. Only much less documented.

[Nuke]

i saw a pretty good documentary on pbs the other night about the actions of the engineering crew, and how they managed to keep the lights on till the very last minute, at the expense of their own lives. sad that the rest of the crew pissed it away and utterly failed at maxing out the lifeboat capacities. and there was that one that james cameron did that really nitpicked the entire sequence of events as we had previously understood them and as portrayed in his movie. so theres a lot of good titanic related material on tv these days. which is good because nothing else seems to be on right now.

[Mongoose]

Discovery was rerunning several specials about the construction and voyage today.  One of them was Cameron leading an expedition down to the site.  It was admittedly really cool to see them send the mini-sub probe into the Turkish baths...the tiling on the walls was all intact.

[Dark Hunter]

Yep, another great shipping disaster. Only much less documented.

That's a bit surprising to me. You'd think the world's largest non-nuclear explosion would get some recognition.

[BengalTiger]

ah yes, the original shipment of fail.

I'd say it was a ship of fail, the shipment (other than this one person who wanted every new ship to reach NYC faster than the previous one) was fine.

The bean counters also failed quite badly, getting the ship to be designed with aesthetics (long corridors not obstructed by bulkheads, few life boats for a better view of the ocean) in mind...

And about those other disasters- there was also an Earth shattering kaboom in Texas city:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster

[NGTM-1R]

I'd say it was a ship of fail, the shipment (other than this one person who wanted every new ship to reach NYC faster than the previous one) was fine.

Then you'd be dead wrong.

The breakdown of the people who died, for example, shows some interesting trends. The vast majority were second-class males. So too does the behavior of the crew. They could have, for example, just rammed the damn iceburg safely...but the crossing would have been much slower and they had a schedule to keep. They could have taken into account the visibility and slowed down, but scheduling.

Really if the OOD had done anything beside attempting a turn at full ahead, it probably would have gone better. Ideally they would have backed full and put the rudder over for a soft ram head on and lost nothing important save the top fifteen knots of speed, but even if they'd simply done a maximum emergency turn by reversing half the screws and running the others forward in addition to rudder orders, the ship would probably have taken much less damage and floated long enough for the Carpathia to arrive and get everyone off safely.

There was nothing grandly wrong with the Titanic's raw design. If there was a failure in the ship, it was a failure of imagination to realize they should have idiot-proofed it in spite of the professionals that were supposed to use it.

[Dragon]

Yep, another great shipping disaster. Only much less documented.

That's a bit surprising to me. You'd think the world's largest non-nuclear explosion would get some recognition.

Actually, that isn't the current record holder. IIRC, the world's largest man-made non-nuclear explosions was the second launch of the Soviet N1 rocket, at 7kt. That's half of the Little Boy's yield: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)#Launch_history
It was, however, the largest man-made explosion in history until Trinity nuclear test.

[Nuke]

I'd say it was a ship of fail, the shipment (other than this one person who wanted every new ship to reach NYC faster than the previous one) was fine.

Then you'd be dead wrong.

The breakdown of the people who died, for example, shows some interesting trends. The vast majority were second-class males. So too does the behavior of the crew. They could have, for example, just rammed the damn iceburg safely...but the crossing would have been much slower and they had a schedule to keep. They could have taken into account the visibility and slowed down, but scheduling.

Really if the OOD had done anything beside attempting a turn at full ahead, it probably would have gone better. Ideally they would have backed full and put the rudder over for a soft ram head on and lost nothing important save the top fifteen knots of speed, but even if they'd simply done a maximum emergency turn by reversing half the screws and running the others forward in addition to rudder orders, the ship would probably have taken much less damage and floated long enough for the Carpathia to arrive and get everyone off safely.

There was nothing grandly wrong with the Titanic's raw design. If there was a failure in the ship, it was a failure of imagination to realize they should have idiot-proofed it in spite of the professionals that were supposed to use it.

i should point out the largest group of survivors is male crew. there were 192 crewmen in the boats. granted the lifeboats needed trained sailors who knew what they were doing, so as to keep the survivors alive till help got there, but why so many? its no surprise the white star line fired them all and left them stranded in new york without any pay. many third class men made it to life boats, more than first and second combined. total number of children lost was only 53, had men, especially crew, stepped aside they could have saved all the children, and thats disregarding the fact that many of the boats were not being filled all the way. second class men had no problem stepping aside, as only 8% of them lived. the whole chart is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic

ramming it would have worked. but the problem with the avoidance maneuver was that he shut down the center screw and put the other 2 engines in reverse. the center screw could not be reversed, as it was powered by the steam turbine and didnt have a reverse transmission. this cut flow over the rudder to nothing, not to mention turbulence form the engines being in reverse would have reduced its effectiveness. making it a very useless device. also the rudder would take about 30 seconds to actuate to one extreme or the other, so it had considerable lag time. the center screw would have had to stay at full speed for maximum rudder effect. i would have just cut the other 2 engines, for clean flow over the rudder. this gives you some vectored thrust. not sure if that would have saved the ship, but thats how id do it. differential thrust may have worked too, but i dont think it would have been as effective as just using the center screw and rudder. could have even combined the differential thrust with full center+rudder, but i presume that would have created turbulence which would have reduced the rudders effectiveness.

[BengalTiger]

I'd say it was a ship of fail, the shipment (other than this one person who wanted every new ship to reach NYC faster than the previous one) was fine.

Then you'd be dead wrong.

The breakdown of the people who died, for example, shows some interesting trends. The vast majority were second-class males. So too does the behavior of the crew. They could have, for example, just rammed the damn iceburg safely...but the crossing would have been much slower and they had a schedule to keep. They could have taken into account the visibility and slowed down, but scheduling.

Really if the OOD had done anything beside attempting a turn at full ahead, it probably would have gone better. Ideally they would have backed full and put the rudder over for a soft ram head on and lost nothing important save the top fifteen knots of speed, but even if they'd simply done a maximum emergency turn by reversing half the screws and running the others forward in addition to rudder orders, the ship would probably have taken much less damage and floated long enough for the Carpathia to arrive and get everyone off safely.

There was nothing grandly wrong with the Titanic's raw design. If there was a failure in the ship, it was a failure of imagination to realize they should have idiot-proofed it in spite of the professionals that were supposed to use it.

Here's a pretty interesting theory about why the lookouts didn't see the ice berg sticking out above the horizon, from miles away:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWnwIQQ0mJc&feature=related

While ramming the 'berg head on would only flood the first 1 or 2 compartments and saved the ship (proving it's unsinkable and giving White Star some major league PR)- the loss of "nothing important" would have been the whole front of the boat, possibly with a broken keel (the Titanic needed some 800 meters to stop from full speed*, so in the 300 or so meters it had** it would slow down to no less than some 15 knots***). Such a ship might be good for scrap.
The second compartment was also where the engine crew had their quarters, see deck F and G:
http://www.titanic-whitestarships.com/MGY_Tech_Facts.htm

Guess who's paying for not avoiding the iceberg, wrecking the ship and probably killing a couple dozen firemen and greasers?

The crew also most likely didn't practice full speed slaloms during trials, so they didn't know just how good or how bad the Titanic turned, or where to put the throttle controls to get the best results.

*-"Titanic, Birth of a Legend"
**- wikipedia article on the sinking
***- who wants a cookie, calculate the real speed, this is a rough estimate.