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

[MarkCorrigan]

Vixen, do you think that someone can be claimed to have a high degree of knowledge in physics (or indeed any degree of knowledge) if they think that nuclear weapons are impossible?

Deleted because you've answered this, sort of. Just...wow though.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

So let me get this straight. Vixen mistook 'a heading of 136 degrees' to refer to the list of the HOFE and invented the whole 45/135 degree thing to fit that narrative?

I doubt if even Vixen knows what she was thinking with the 45°/135° thing. The 136° heading was misunderstood as an angle of list and I *think* the claim that the Herald rolled even further and rolled back was pure invention.

 

[JesseCuster]

Ha ha!

The Police on board Estonia were all civilians on a union conference. The conference was about planning for the upcoming reorganisation of the police force.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/29/...-800-lost-in-sinking-of-baltic-sea-ferry.html

The passengers included 70 civilian police workers from Stockholm attending a union seminar

Ahahahaha!

How about we stick to recorded facts, eh, Vixen? Not your guesswork, assumptions, etc. about elite internal security police forces hellbent on revenge.

You're literally making stuff up to fit your spy thriller narrative.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Helsingin Sanomat 29.9.1994


HS


So, it had the car ramp lights, the car deck cameras and it had the bow visor (= the recommended additional gate).

No. I went in to great detail on why Swedish and Finnish ships were not in compliance with SOLAS recommendations right up to the Estonia sinking.

Did you not read it? All of chapter 18 of the report is dedicated to the non compliance of Swedish and Finnish ships with SOLAS requirements as regards the position and specification of the forward collision bulkhead. They had given themselves their own exemption from compliance and turned a 'blind eye'.

It thus became common amongst the Finnish and Swedish Maritime Administrations to accept the forward-located bow ramp arrangement. Many ferries built for Baltic ferry operations had a forward-located bow ramp that did not meet the SOLAS requirement for passenger vessels regarding the location of the collision bulkhead upper extension.

It has thus not been possible to find any formal steps taken in the affected countries regarding approval of the position of the forward ramp in any ship built during the period. There may have been a lenient attitude from the Administrations at the time as they had very limited staffs and relied heavily on the classification societies. These, in turn, did not in most cases have the authorisation to verify compliance with the SOLAS requirements.

It is the opinion of the Commission that an extended collision bulkhead, built in compliance with either SOLAS 1974 or the 1981 Amendments, would have increased the Estonia's chances of surviving the loss of the visor.

The Finnish Maritime Administration was, according to a national decree, originally issued in 1920, exempted from carrying out a hull survey as part of the basis for issuing the passenger ship safety certificate, if a vessel had a valid class certificate.

According to the Finnish Administration, the problem concerning the deviation of the ramp location from the SOLAS requirement for an upper extension of the collision bulkhead was not known to its inspectors. Anyhow, according to the same information, the Administration would have accepted the deviation in line with previous practice, applied also by the Swedish Maritime Administration.

 

[Andy_Ross]

The true cause of the accident which almost certainly is linked to the smuggling of soviet space and military secrets, which Sweden admitted to ten years later.

So what exactly is classified?

You haven't shown any evidence for this.

 

[Andy_Ross]

In Sweden and Finland the intelligence services come under the police. I should have said, Scotland Yard as a better analogy.

It is a fact there were 70 Stockholm Police on board, only about four of five survived.

If that is not grounds for suspicion of sabotage, I don't know what is.

You think the five surviving police men sabotaged the ship?

I thought it was the captain yesterday?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

So OBVIOUSLY labelled 'Classified' for whatever reason, and the public handed a The Herald of Free Enterprise Mk II soporific.

There's no such thing as being labeled "Classified". Classified documents are labeled according to their actual classification (e.g.: 'Secret', 'Top Secret', etc.)

Labeling something "Classified" doesn't mean anything on its own.

 

[Stamuel]

That is of course not what privacy laws restrict. Please show where the law say you may not put a birthdate on a piece of paper.

Your fantasies are not worth anything. In the press conference in the morning (that you can listen to at https://sok.riksarkivet.se/estonia?infosida=1994-09-28 (in Swedish)) Carl Bildt say that he was notified by an unnamed person, that got the information from a TT News flash. After that he contacted MRCC.

Citation please. In the reports I have been able to find in newspaper archives this is not supported. https://www.dn.se/arkiv/inrikes/carl-bildt-kande-folk-ombord/
https://www.svd.se/arkiv/1994-09-29/7¨
(Subscription required)

In the second article, there is some information about the press conference.


My translation:
"At the press conference, Carl Bildt was also asked if he was aware of the information that a front hatch on the ship was not closed and that it caused large bodies of water to rush into the ship.
Carl Bildt rejected the question and said that it was not the prime ministers' job to handle tasks belonging to the Accident Investigation Board."

So Vixen, show your sources that your oft repeated statement is true.

Do you know if there is a transcript or translation of that press conference? I assumed, since Vixen never provided direct quotes of what Bildt said, that Bildt didn't say what Vixen claimed. However, the only sources I could find when I searched were

1. Various conspiracy theorists saying things like, "At the press conference just hours after the sinking, Carl Bildt confidently declared it was the bow visor," with no direct quotes or sources provided,
2. Video of the press conference on YouTube, with no transcript, subtitles or translation.

Would be good to have his words translated into English.

 

[Parsman]

In Sweden and Finland the intelligence services come under the police. I should have said, Scotland Yard as a better analogy.

It is a fact there were 70 Stockholm Police on board, only about four of five survived.

If that is not grounds for suspicion of sabotage, I don't know what is.

Do boats with police on them never sink unless there is a conspiracy involved? I'm only ever travelling on ships with large police presence in the future then, safe as houses! In other words, you're a bit crazy sounding, you do realise that?

 

[Here_to_learn]

Do you know if there is a transcript or translation of that press conference? I assumed, since Vixen never provided direct quotes of what Bildt said, that Bildt didn't say what Vixen claimed.

I've only found the recorded audio from the press conference held by Carl Bildt in Stockholm. That was before he left for Turku. I don't know of any recording or transcript from the one in Finland later the same day. For that one I only know about the reporting in the press where Bildt was quoted saying the exact opposite of what Vixen claims.

I could probably transcribe/translate the Swedish one if you would like, but there is not much there.

If you happen to run into a recording in Swedish I'd be happy to help translating.

 

[JayUtah]

...had come to rest on a sand bar that was at 136°.

Because you misread the report. What else might you have misread in all this discussion?

The ship had already turtled past the point of negative stability...

No, that's not what turtling means. When you're reading what naval architects say, "capsize" and "turtle" have precisely defined meanings. They are not interchangeable words.

 

[JayUtah]

In other words, centre of gravity can be at an actual 7° angle to begin with as per the boat...

No. Center of gravity is a point. It cannot be "at an angle." Perhaps you mean some line passing through the center of gravity, perhaps GM. It's painful watching you try to stumble your way through this discussion. You've really never done this successfully before, have you? It's hard to believe your claim that your physics teachers once thought you were the brightest light on the Christmas tree.

 

[JayUtah]

Place that dark bit on the diameter of a circle so that it is resting on the 180° line. This represents an imaginary flat horizon. So the left side, port, is circa 45 ° and the right, starboard circa 135°. Imagine the letter U then the top of the far corners represents the boat shape at 45° and 135°.

...to help you visualise.

Obviously it hasn't been very successful.

No, it hasn't, mostly because you seem to lack spatial reasoning skills -- or at best the vocabulary to express spatial relationships. You tried to work your way through a lecture on transverse stability. When you tried restating it in your own words, it came out an incomprehensible mess. You're conflating elementary concepts such as points, lines, and vectors.

When asked to extend the physics principles beyond the point of vanishing stability, you can't do it. You never internalized the concepts that the mathematics are trying to instill. So you flee back to Björkman, who tells you the next point of positive equilibrium is inevitably 180° in all cases because of one ferry that did it in one case. And so you pretend that your lecture told you than, when it didn't.

And all the diagrams you've either posted or seen posted are for intact hulls. But you don't really know what "intact hull" means in this context. What it means is that the GZ framework you've come to ignorantly rely upon is valid mathematically only if you ignore flooding. And you can't do that for any practical ship of the size of the ferries were talking about. The lectures are trying to tell you the limits of model -- when it can and cannot be considered useful. In practice, large ships have a downflood angle. This is the point at which even a ship that has sustained no damage will begin to flood through, say, open portholes or outflow ports. At the very least, it happens when the main deck is awash, whether a critical roll angle has yet been reached or not.

This is why hydrostatics takes more than one lecture to present. As much as you seem to enjoy aspiring to the role, you're not the teacher here. So here's a pop quiz for you, Vixen. When a ship rolls past its downflood angle and begins inevitably taking on water, which parameters in the GZ framework change, and how do they change? What mathematical effect does it have on the righting moment?

 

[Mojo]

I once had an accountancy lecturer who would go absolutely apoplectic with rage and frustration, throwing his chalk about, if a student dared answer any of his exceedingly tough questions with, 'It depends'. Likewise, the examiners: the key to passing the mind-bending exams was to take a view and then justify it.

'It depends,' as an answer, is a big fat, 'No Baby, no'.

Try again.

You seem to have learned a bad lesson from a poor teacher.

I don’t think the problem is with the lecturer, who was probably asking questions that had a clear answer. The problem is the lesson Vixen seems to have taken from this, which is that all questions have a clear answer.

I’ve had a lecturer who would ask incomplete questions, and expected students to demonstrate their understanding by requesting the missing information.

 

[SpitfireIX]

You claimed that Björkman was a Hiroshima/Nagasaki casualities denier . . .

I quoted from his own website where he explicitly denies that there were more than "[a] few" casualties, and I included a link. However, you stated that you decline to follow the link, because you aren't interested.

. . . and therefore he is cancelled as a source on Estonia.

I didn't say that. You suggested that David Irving ought to be canceled because of his Holocaust denial, so I asked you why Björkman shouldn't also be canceled because of his denial that hundreds of thousand of Japanese died from nuclear weapons. And you never gave a satisfactory answer.

The alternative claim was that Björkman was sceptical there was an Atom Bomb on the grounds of technological and logistical issues, which is different from inhumane denial of human suffering.

No. To add to Captain_Swoop's response, neither he nor anyone else has made any such claim. Conversely, several people have noted that Björkman's denial of nuclear weapons is based on his claiming that they are impossible due to his gross ignorance of nuclear physics.

The one grain of truth I will grant to your claim is that I believe I'm the only one who's explicitly called attention to his denial of casualties, but that hardly makes my argument "very different."

I'll have more on the "atomic hoax" later.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

...

I’ve had a lecturer who would ask incomplete questions, and expected students to demonstrate their understanding by requesting the missing information.

<shudder>
You just triggered a memory of a fluid mechanics class where at the end we were posed a question about a fire hose aimed at suspended steel plate and asked what angle the plate would deflect by. I had a lurching sense of horror as I realised we were supposed to be able to answer and I absolutely hadn't grasped enough to do so.

 

[Mojo]

<shudder>
You just triggered a memory of a fluid mechanics class…

<shudder>

 

[The Man]

Tax, like law*, is the one thing you do have to learn off by heart, but other things, such as centre of gravity and centre of buoyancy follow set rules which can be calculated just by knowing the rules.

*This is why law students have to wade through thick volumes as they need to cite case law. Likewise, tax being based on Acts of Parliament follow a similar minefield of rote learning. Thus in valuing a house you need to know (in the UK) whether it was purchased pre-1986 or or post- as that is when the law changed, as an example, etc.etc.

Laws and Tax codes are rules as well, likewise, you can follow them by knowing them or just looking them up.

Engineers have reference libraries as well. Material properties, standards, equations and relations. No one is expected to know everything but they are expected to know where to look it up when needed. Just like taxes and the law.

Some of the more common and consistent stuff are compiled into reference handbooks.

engineering standards handbook

Other stuff gets updated as standards and regulations change.

ANSI INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE (IBR) PORTAL

 

[Mojo]

Laws and Tax codes are rules as well, likewise, you can follow them by knowing them or just looking them up.

Engineers have reference libraries as well. Material properties, standards, equations and relations. No one is expected to know everything but they are expected to know where to look it up when needed. Just like taxes and the law.

Other stuff gets updated as standards and regulations change.

To quote George III, “lawyers do not know much more law than other people, but they know better where to find it.”

 

[Axxman300]

In Sweden and Finland the intelligence services come under the police. I should have said, Scotland Yard as a better analogy.

It is a fact there were 70 Stockholm Police on board, only about four of five survived.

If that is not grounds for suspicion of sabotage, I don't know what is.

Please list the countries who had threatened Sweden with lethal force in the months, weeks, and days before the sinking of MS Estonia.

Cite the public declarations of anti-Swedish hostilities. All of them.