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

[whoanellie]

This is astonishing. 0° must represent upright, vertical, in a position floating nicely balanced in still water. Everybody else in this thread (and elsewhere) would take 90° to mean lying on its side, so that any mast, funnel or whatever standing perpendicular to the deck is now parallel with the water's surface.

Beyond that - even if you arbitrarily chose 0° to mean lying on its side, then 45° would be only half way up/down to the vertical. A right angle has 90°, in case you missed that at school.

I'm starting to wonder if Vixen realizes there are 360 degrees on a circle.

 

[GlennB]

I mean, I would laugh until my abdomen could take no more.... but I have work to do. So I'll just make do with noting the patent idiocy and absence of logic/reason behind this.

I suspect Vixen struggled not to write 'The Informed' back there, at which point we'd be a short step away from The Informadati, of which she is a member.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

He thinks the nuclear bombs were fakes.
They were not in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. At least learn something about it.

It's worse than that, he thinks that they are impossible because he fails to understand or accept basic physics. This is the person you are using as an expert Vixen. A disgraced former naval architect who thinks that nuclear bombs are impossible to build. He's a loon and a moron.

Incidentally stop running away from your claim to be a scientist. It is poor form to avoid questions. Are you a scientist, yes or no?

Finally yes, a ship could well float at an orientation of say, 120^o if the conditions were right for it to maintain buoyancy and it was not filling with water. If the conditions were right to maintain buoyancy a ship could float at literally any orientation.

 

[Andy_Ross]

It's worse than that, he thinks that they are impossible because he fails to understand or accept basic physics. This is the person you are using as an expert Vixen. A disgraced former naval architect who thinks that nuclear bombs are impossible to build. He's a loon and a moron.

Incidentally stop running away from your claim to be a scientist. It is poor form to avoid questions. Are you a scientist, yes or no?

Finally yes, a ship could well float at an orientation of say, 120^o if the conditions were right for it to maintain buoyancy and it was not filling with water. If the conditions were right to maintain buoyancy a ship could float at literally any orientation.

It could also maintain any orientation as it sank

 

[Stamuel]

Since Vixen does not really provide any details and never does calculations, I am not sure what the overall argument is regarding "more than 90°," but we have evidence that the Estonia was listing beyond 90° before it sank. At 26:55 in this video, Paul Barney says, "Ship disappeared like a giant surfboard, effectively, and turning turtle, begin to turn… So it was like 95 degrees, it was slightly turning turtle."

So far, Vixen has treated Paul Barney as one of the survivors that it is unacceptable to question, so at least Vixen should accept this as accurate.

If the claim is that the JAIC conclusions would require the Estonia to rotate more than 90° (which may or may not count as "turning turtle"), then there is no problem. It did that.

 

[JayUtah]

My understanding is that Vixen's claim is that MS Jan Heweliusz should be considered the stereotype for the sinking of a ro-ro ferry, specifically that any such ship should turtle (completely and inevitably) and float for a considerable time. There is a roll component to the claim, and a buoyancy component to the claim. That MS Estonia didn't both turtle and remain afloat is, in her opinion, anomalous.

 

[Mojo]

The passage Vixen quoted to support her claim also says that there “is some reason for thinking that the ship floated more or less on her beam ends for about a minute before finally resting on the sea bed.”

Vixen, what do you understand by the expression “on her beam ends”?

I do.

What do you think it means?

I know what it means.

What do you think it means? Your first attempt at a definition, “I do”, is meaningless enough to be not even wrong.

I am guessing you are struggling and are looking for enlightenment, no?

No.

What do you think it means?

 

[junkshop]

Sorry, are you claiming a boat can float at a list of 90°?, 100°? 120°? or even 180°? (starboard side, assuming 0° represents port and 45° perfect equilibrium, or vice versa)?
So you believe a ship can float on its superstructure and that this only stops when water weighs it down?

Oh.

Oh dear.

I can't even...

I mean, how?

This must be the most spectacular self-owning I have ever witnessed.

 

[JesseCuster]

Sorry, are you claiming a boat can float at a list of 90°?, 100°? 120°? or even 180°? (starboard side, assuming 0° represents port and 45° perfect equilibrium, or vice versa)?

What?

0 degrees = upright

90 degrees = on its side

180 degrees = upside down

What on earth does “45 degrees represents perfect equilibrium” in this context? I’m pretty sure that a list of 45 degrees is not perfect equilibrium for ships, but I’m not a naval architect.

 

[Mojo]

Sorry, are you claiming a boat can float at a list of 90°?, 100°? 120°? or even 180°?

Someone has been persistently claiming, in this very thread, that ships inevitably float with a list of 180°.

Do you remember who it was?

 

[Mojo]

I’m pretty sure that a list of 45 degrees is not perfect equilibrium for ships, but I’m not a naval architect.

It would at the very least be bloody inconvenient for anyone on board.

 

[JayUtah]

It would at the very least be bloody inconvenient for anyone on board.

Not if you handle it the way MI6 handled it in The Man With the Golden Gun.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Not if you handle it the way MI6 handled it in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Which i sset on a ship that has sunk but not turned turtle!

 

[Mojo]

Sorry, are you claiming a boat can float at a list of 90°?, 100°? 120°? or even 180°? (starboard side, assuming 0° represents port and 45° perfect equilibrium, or vice versa)?

So you believe a ship can float on its superstructure and that this only stops when water weighs it down?

A ship can float for as long as it remains buoyant. What do you think is likely to compromise the buoyancy of an air-containing object floating in water?

 

[LondonJohn]

Sorry, are you claiming a boat can float at a list of 90°?, 100°? 120°? or even 180°? (starboard side, assuming 0° represents port and 45° perfect equilibrium, or vice versa)?

WHAT????????????????????????????????????? *peers at screen through fingers*

But other than that (whatever "that" is...), yes of course a boat (or ship) can float at a list of all of the angles you mentioned (even though it's abundantly clear now that you don't even understand what those angles represent).

And before you get the wrong idea... I am in no way suggesting that a ship must necessarily float at those heel angles. What I am telling you is that a) some ships most definitely do float (and have floated) at those heel angles, and b) your contention that ships both cannot and do not ever float at those heel angles.... is bogus and born of ignorance.

So you believe a ship can float on its superstructure

This strange and dogged insistence on talking about "floating on its superstructure" is yet another illustration that you don't know what you're talking about.

Look: ships float because/when - and only because/when - they have excess buoyancy.

Ships can, and do, float while heeled at 90 degrees. But for this to be anything more than a transient period of floating, it should almost always be the case that the whole side of the ship (including, of course, the side of the part of the ship that would normally be above the waterline) remains more-or-less watertight.

and that this only stops when water weighs it down?

Now, what the heck do you mean by "....only stops when water weighs it down"?

As plenty of people (including me) have repeatedly told you by now, the only reason why/when ships cease to float is if/when they cease to become buoyant. And - in extremely simplistic terms - this happens when the weight of water displaced by the ship (in whichever attitude it happens to be at the time) is less than the total weight of the ship. In many sinkings, the "weight of water" within the confines of the hull may be the salient factor, for sure.

But it needn't necessarily be the case. It might be an excess of heavy cargo, for example. Or it might be because a ship was carrying many more passengers than the maximum it was designed for. In both of those kinds of causes, the ship would become non-buoyant (and would therefore start to sink) without it ever being necessary for a single drop of water to enter into the hull.

Indeed, a sinking might occur even when the entire ship remained completely watertight: it might hit the sea bed in that fully-watertight state (provided that it didn't sink so deep that parts of the hull imploded). No water ingress required - provided that the ship now had a greater weight than the weight of water it was displacing.

I've tried explaining this concept to you, but it's pretty clear I've had no success in getting through.

 

[LondonJohn]

He said it had turned over by more than 90° to port.

You claim, 'It would not have turtled.' Seriously?

You do not know what you're talking about. Not only are you misinterpreting those remarks from the HOFE accident report.... you're also remaining fundamentally ignorant (and way out of your depth*) on this whole "turtled" malarkey. Simply put: 1) there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that the HOFE would necessarily have turned turtle had it sunk in deeper waters, and 2) in fact, there's reasonable grounds (with reference to the accident report) to suggest that the HOFE would have sunk on its side.


* Pun partially intended

 

[LondonJohn]

Thank you for the incredibly amusing schoolboy howler!

Oh dear.

Bwahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Whoops, busting a gut.

It's really tiresome when you ape others' posts in style and content, you know?

But that aside.... I'll certainly be very interested to hear you educate me more fully as to how I made such a "schoolboy* howler".




* And would this apply even to a schoolboy who'd done 5 years of physics, and who was keen to claim to everybody that he was the outstanding student of his cohort and a proper teacher's pet?

 

[LondonJohn]

Not if you handle it the way MI6 handled it in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Ahahaha the preposterous concept of having MI6 set up their HK operation inside the rusting wreck of the Queen Elizabeth

I was going to say that those amazing jaunty-angled sets were another triumph of the late great Ken Adam (who was production designer on practically every Bond movie up to the 80s). But I just checked on that and for some reason he didn't production-design The Man with the Golden Gun - maybe there was a scheduling conflict. I note though that one of the two Art Dept bods (effectively PD deputies) - a man who went on to take over as PD for Eon in his own right (and PD'd Bond films up to the Daniel Craig era) was Peter Lamont; his daughter was a friend of mine at uni.

 

[SpitfireIX]

WAIT! Are you claiming Björkman is a Holocaust denier? Or is that an attempt to discredit someone who appears to have upset you in argument?

I'm going to be charitable and assume you're not being deliberately obtuse. Rather, I'll assume that in your zeal to attempt to score a few rhetorical points, you simply misread or otherwise failed to comprehend what I'd written. I didn't say Björkman's Hiroshima and Nagasaki denial is the same as Holocaust denial. I said it's as offensive as Holocaust denial.

From his page on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

There are no public records of persons in Japan having been killed by nuclear weapons and radiation. . . . The two Japanese towns were simply destroyed/burnt down by napalm carpet fire bombings. Only [a] few Japanese died. Military censorship did the rest. And the Japan elite - the secret Black Dragon Society - became a winner. They blamed the war on some military people that were executed.
​

So, Björkman claims that more than 300,000 Japanese didn't die as a result of the use of nuclear weapons, and that it was all simply faked. How is this any less vile than Holocaust denial?

As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is hardly an analogy, as the US bombing of Japan was an act of war, in retaliation for Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbour.

As our good captain observed, you have no idea what you're talking about here, and you really should educate yourself. And as an aside, Björkman disagrees with you that the two cities were legitimate bombing targets.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Yes a ship can roll to "more than 90°" and just stay there.



You're the one claiming it must necessarily have turtled once the roll exceeded 90°. That's not how it works.

Ah, but actually she claimed that it must necessarily have turtled ceteris paribus. It's important to add the proper context.