Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part III

[Vixen]

If this reasoning works, we can eliminate explosives at the bow visor as the cause. Do you agree?

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No, because a professor in Materials Science (Westermann) and three other metallurgy labs (Braidwood) have found evidence of damage in the metal structure consistent with explosives deformation.

 

[Vixen]

Would such strikes be above the waterline?

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Using the Wilhelm Gustloff as an example: certainly. Perhaps more by accident than design.

 

[JayUtah]

A multi-pronged attack was the Soviet leitmotiv.

Even the British Royal Navy used to employ more than one form of attack: double-headed hammers and cannonballs to sink a ship in days of yore.

Doesn't address my question.

 

[phiwum]

There was water on the car deck but by all accounts that was quite normal in rainy weather. One of the crew on the Estonia, said he saw water up to the car tyres. Even the JAIC said that even if the car decks were filled with a maximum volume of water, that would not of itself be enough to capsize the boat .

I'd be interested in where JAIC said this as well. Thanks again.

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[Vixen]

That drawing by a survivor that you use to argue the ramp was still up shows water gushing around the sides of the ramp. Doesn't that matter?

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He shows it gushing in at the sides. He doesn't show the top open, or water coming in at the top. Videos and photos clearly show a red mattress and various bedding near the car ramp, which were obviously used by the crew to stem water leaking in and which the JAIC weirdly describes as some kind of random clothing storage kept in the car deck (What...?).

 

[JayUtah]

No, because a professor in Materials Science (Westermann) and three other metallurgy labs (Braidwood) have found evidence of damage in the metal structure consistent with explosives deformation.

Asked and answered. Claims made by others on the basis of Westermann's findings are not the same as claims made by Westermann. Westermann explicitly declined to endorse the explosives theory. Her claims showed little more than the signs of welded construction.

You report Braidwood via Wilson, and the actual lab results are not known. And as previously shown, the alleged findings are consistent with a number of things.

 

[JayUtah]

We are referencing Archimedes here.

No, we are not. Archimedes discusses buoyancy, not stability. How many times are you going to keep trying to conflate these two dissimilar topics? We know the "ship will inevitably turn turtle" comes from Bjorkman and only from him. Do you think we don't know where you're getting your misinformation?

 

[Vixen]

You don't know what you're talking about.

And FYI - once again - your "displacement of air" gambit is both ignorant and incorrect. The cause - the only cause - of ships sinking is if the total mass of the vessel at the moment of sinking exceeds the buoyancy limit of the vessel at the moment of sinking.

As I've already pointed out to you twice now, by way of an example: the placement of a relatively small volume of an extremely heavy substance would cause a ship to sink like a stone - irrespective of the fact that there would have been almost the same volume of "air in the superstructure" before and after the weights were added. If the addition of the weights meant that the total mass of the ship now exceeded its buoyancy limit, it would sink. With a hull full of air.

The Estonia had a total buoyancy equivalent to 18,000 tonnes in its hull.

Even the JAIC admit a car deck full off water would not be enough to cause it to capsize.

 

[JayUtah]

He shows it gushing in at the sides. He doesn't show the top open, or water coming in at the top.

Irrelevant. The evidence shows the car ramp was not sufficient to keep water out. What happens when the car deck floods to a small degree, regardless of the source? How does that affect roll stability?

 

[JayUtah]

The Estonia had a total buoyancy equivalent to 18,000 tonnes in its hull.

Oh, do show us this math.

Even the JAIC admit a car deck full off water would not be enough to cause it to capsize.

Every single investigative body that has studied the sinking of a car ferry notes the effect of the undivided car deck on stability and flood rate. Are you smarter than all of them?

 

[JayUtah]

...and negative shift in the centre of gravity.

What is a "negative shift in the centre of gravity?" Show me what that math looks like.

You do not remain in a state of inertia. Something has to give.

Now imagine that a significant contributor to a ship's center of gravity is water governed by the free surface effect. How will changing the orientation of the container of that water affect the center of gravity? How will compartmentalization of that container alter that effect?

 

[Vixen]

I'd be interested in where JAIC said this as well. Thanks again.

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Section 12.6.1 of the Final Report:
“Even though the list developed rapidly, the water on the car deck would not alone be sufficient to make the ship capsize and lose its survivability. As long as the hull was intact
and watertight below and above the car deck, the residual stability with water on the car deck
would not have been significantly changed at large heel angles (figure 12.12). Capsize could
only have been completed through water entering other areas of the vessel.”

 

[JayUtah]

Section 12.6.1 of the Final Report:
“Even though the list developed rapidly, the water on the car deck would not alone be sufficient to make the ship capsize and lose its survivability. As long as the hull was intact
and watertight below and above the car deck, the residual stability with water on the car deck
would not have been significantly changed at large heel angles (figure 12.12). Capsize could
only have been completed through water entering other areas of the vessel.”

That doesn't say the car deck could be full of water and not cause capsize. They're talking about the water they observed or estimated to be there, not the ultimate scenario. And they do put conditions on their estimate of stability.

 

[LondonJohn]

The negative buoyancy and negative shift in the centre of gravity. Imagine you are walking along. Your body's centre of gravity keeps you perfectly balanced. Then imagine an unseen hole in the ground introduces an element of instability in that it causes your right foot to miss its stride. Your centre of gravity is no longer balanced, pitching you to one side, causing you to either stumble, to use your arms, shoulders and other side of the body to regain balance, or you fall over completely. You do not remain in a state of inertia. Something has to give.

Oh good lord. It just gets better and better*.

Your musings on the interaction between a centre of gravity, balance and buoyancy, and the way you translate your musings on to what you believe must have happened to the Estonian, are scientifically-illiterate. Please don't insult us with these horrible attempts at justification/rationalisation of your moribund PoV.

London John's fond belief The Herald of Free Enterprise was forever fated to lie on its side, unhindered by the bank it lay on, shows continues to cause amusement.

Ehm..... what now? Are you claiming that the HOFE would have done something other than lie on its side in perpetuity, had it not been dismantled for scrap? Or are you claiming that had the sandbank not "intervened", the HOFE would necessarily have turned upside-down in the water, rather than sinking in a 90-degree-capsized attitude?

Because either way, you're wrong. I'm glad, however, that you find your own scientific ignorance amusing.




* More and more embarrassing.

 

[whoanellie]

TImagine you are walking along. Your body's centre of gravity keeps you perfectly balanced. Then imagine an unseen hole in the ground introduces an element of instability in that it causes your right foot to miss its stride. Your centre of gravity is no longer balanced, pitching you to one side, causing you to either stumble, to use your arms, shoulders and other side of the body to regain balance, or you fall over completely. You do not remain in a state of inertia. Something has to give.

This is utter nonsense. Your center of gravity does not keep you balanced. If you stumble, your center of gravity does not become unbalanced.

What do you think happens to your center of gravity when you stumble? I'd be very interested in your answer.

What the heck do you mean by a 'negative shift' in one's center of gravity?

 

[phiwum]

He shows it gushing in at the sides. He doesn't show the top open, or water coming in at the top. Videos and photos clearly show a red mattress and various bedding near the car ramp, which were obviously used by the crew to stem water leaking in and which the JAIC weirdly describes as some kind of random clothing storage kept in the car deck (What...?).

Okay, so undeniably, water came in gushing from the sides of the ramp at some point of time. Now, "gushing in" isn't the sort of problem that the mattresses would be there to prevent. They may have slowed a leaking visor, but not one in which water gushed around the ramp.

Hence, whether the ramp was up the entire time or not, an unusually large amount of water was coming in from the bow. Agreed?

 

[phiwum]

Section 12.6.1 of the Final Report:
“Even though the list developed rapidly, the water on the car deck would not alone be sufficient to make the ship capsize and lose its survivability. As long as the hull was intact
and watertight below and above the car deck, the residual stability with water on the car deck
would not have been significantly changed at large heel angles (figure 12.12). Capsize could
only have been completed through water entering other areas of the vessel.”

Thank you.

[Deleted incorrect discussion -- I looked at the source]

 

[JayUtah]

Imagine you are walking along. Your body's centre of gravity keeps you perfectly balanced. Then imagine an unseen hole in the ground introduces an element of instability in that it causes your right foot to miss its stride. Your centre of gravity is no longer balanced, pitching you to one side, causing you to either stumble...

None of this is actual physics. Nothing's center of gravity "keeps it perfectly balanced." An object may be angularly stationary if, for example, the reactive force to gravity acts through the center of gravity (a zero-length moment arm), and there are no other moments to accommodate. The location of the center of gravity is one parameter to an angular stability problem, but it is not something that, by itself, guarantees or generates angular stability or instability.

Bipedal locomotion is a metastable state of constantly moving the center of gravity forward from the locus of the reactive force and generating a forward pitch moment. Then it changes the locus of the reactive force (i.e., which foot is bearing the weight) to convert the pitch moment into forward motion. If you lose your footing, then the state stops being metastable and becomes unstable; there is an uncorrected pitch moment and you might fall.

Please stop trying to teach people physics. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. You're just throwing words around that you may have vaguely remembered from your "five years of physics" as a child. But you aren't fooling anyone into thinking you actually have something to teach others.

 

[LondonJohn]

Thank you.

[Deleted incorrect discussion -- I looked at the source]

But as has been explained (to Vixen) several times already in these threads - and as the official investigation understood properly* - ships such as these simply aren't designed to have hulls that are internally watertight. In fact, it would be a pretty severe hindrance to a passenger- and vehicle-carrying ship if it had to partition and seal off every internal area of the hull.

And that's precisely why, once the water had started flooding onto the vehicle deck via the now-compromised bow opening, it immediately began to find its way down through the internal structure of the ship - via stairwells, ventilation shafts and other openings.

In the end, the combined mass of seawater on the vehicle deck plus seawater that had pooled lower down in the hull was sufficient to pull the ship so far down in the water that sinking became the inevitable outcome. At the same time, the un-baffled water on the vehicle deck severely destabilised the ship (which had set off with imperfect trim in any event), precipitating the capsize which greatly sped up the loss of the vessel.


* It goes without saying that the official investigation understood this properly, since they knew 1) that the ship sank, and 2) that the cause of its sinking was the broken bow opening mechanism.

 

[LondonJohn]

None of this is actual physics. Nothing's center of gravity "keeps it perfectly balanced." An object may be angularly stationary if, for example, the reactive force to gravity acts through the center of gravity (a zero-length moment arm), and there are no other moments to accommodate. The location of the center of gravity is one parameter to an angular stability problem, but it is not something that, by itself, guarantees or generates angular stability or instability.

Bipedal locomotion is a metastable state of constantly moving the center of gravity forward from the locus of the reactive force and generating a forward pitch moment. Then it changes the locus of the reactive force (i.e., which foot is bearing the weight) to convert the pitch moment into forward motion. If you lose your footing, then the state stops being metastable and becomes unstable; there is an uncorrected pitch moment and you might fall.

Please stop trying to teach people physics. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. You're just throwing words around that you may have vaguely remembered from your "five years of physics" as a child. But you aren't fooling anyone into thinking you actually have something to teach others.

I'm here to instruct you that if your centre of inertial volume becomes either greater or less than your electric field velocity (in pounds per square inch), you'll fall down an open manhole.