Cont: The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VI

[Mojo]

Ok, so I decided to use the free openseamap service and lay out some routes. Note - I did not bother to get it down to the smaller details when it comes to navigating either the Stockholm Archipelago or the exact route out of the Tallin harbor. The positions are not exact either, since I positioned the waypoint just using drag and drop.

I just couldn't be bothered to go down to the boat and plotting it for real in the commercial chart plotter solution (Transas NaviSailor) that we use onboard.

So first of all, here is a rough picture showing the full route as it's described in JAIC. That includes entering the Stockholm area using the northern (Söderarm) entrance, since that one is not as hard to navigate in bad weather.

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/h45f8KDM/Estonia-1.jpg[/imgw]

The total distance of the trip is about 222 NM.

Then we have the part of the route up to the wreck site.

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/vBpDsvSk/image.png[/imgw]

The distance traveled to reach this point is around 96NM.

96/222 is around 41%.


But let's check the "as crows fly" distance also. I don't know why, but...

A straight line between the two cities:

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/15d7ZV96/image.png[/imgw]

So that's about 204NM.

And a straight line to the wreck site:
[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/C5Gk5KXF/image.png[/imgw]

That's about 93NM.

93/204 is around 45%.

I can't see that this can be called any form of exact "midpoint".

Perhaps "military precision" is a bit like "military intelligence".

 

[Here_to_learn]

Perhaps "military precision" is a bit like "military intelligence".

Could be! Or I just need to convert from NM to some other unit - after a couple of conversions maybe the % is closer to 50%!

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Well, it would appear that (unless Vixen wants to have another try and has been hiding a really convincing argument about sailing distances up her sleeve) we can say the 'exactly halfway' point on her list of sinister coincidences is simply untrue and can be struck from the list.

Do you have any objection to that Vixen? Do you want another go at demonstrating how it could send a message?

 

[GlennB]

Well, it would appear that (unless Vixen wants to have another try and has been hiding a really convincing argument about sailing distances up her sleeve) we can say the 'exactly halfway' point on her list of sinister coincidences is simply untrue and can be struck from the list.
Do you have any objection to that Vixen? Do you want another go at demonstrating how it could send a message?

For now, but it will sneak round the back and reattach itself at the bottom. Slowly it will rise back towards the top ... oh, so slowly ...

 

[Vixen]

He inferred there had been a collision. He didn't actually witness a collision.



Then you can't be considered an eye witness.



No, I think I'll be correct instead. Witness observations are evidence. Witness inferences are not.

Absolute nonsense. You can tell you are in a collision without necessarily seeing it. As I pointed out before, some witness are visually descriptive, others audio, yet others, more visceral. I am an auditory type, give me a teacher standing right in front of me spelling out a complex equation on the board and I will understand it immediately and perfectly. Give me distance learning and a textbook and soon I'll be crying tears of frustration and ringing a friend for help. Likewise, what I mostly remember about my recent car crash is the smashing noises, tinkling glass, bangs and what have you. (Plus the embarrassing vision of cars driving around me.)

So what a witness sees, or hears, or has a visceral sensation of, such as being thrown forward or slammed into a wall, is perfectly valid as an observation as seeing a submarine sliding away in the water.

 

[Vixen]

So uhh what does a collision smell or taste like?

He felt a deceleration, you cannot feel a collision from within your cabin.

The way this could have occurred from the bow visor has been explained by JayUtah. He heard loud crashes/banging noises... a collision. Well yes with a large, heavy, metallic, part of the ship.

And all of this is a pointless exercise. We know the ship collided with the visor. There WAS a collision.

The guy was on a promenade deck. He was a PhD student. He was not a moron. He knows what he felt.

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC, whilst the vessel itself is a 15,000 tonner.

 

[lobosrul5]

Absolute nonsense. You can tell you are in a collision without necessarily seeing it. As I pointed out before, some witness are visually descriptive, others audio, yet others, more visceral. I am an auditory type, give me a teacher standing right in front of me spelling out a complex equation on the board and I will understand it immediately and perfectly. Give me distance learning and a textbook and soon I'll be crying tears of frustration and ringing a friend for help. Likewise, what I mostly remember about my recent car crash is the smashing noises, tinkling glass, bangs and what have you. (Plus the embarrassing vision of cars driving around me.)

So what a witness sees, or hears, or has a visceral sensation of, such as being thrown forward or slammed into a wall, is perfectly valid as an observation as seeing a submarine sliding away in the water.

The guy was on a promenade deck. He was a PhD student. He was not a moron. He knows what he felt.

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC, whilst the vessel itself is a 15,000 tonner.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

You can tell you are in a collision without necessarily seeing it.

You can infer you are in a collision without necessarily being in one. Which is the point.

 

[JayUtah]

You can tell you are in a collision without necessarily seeing it.

No, you literally can't. You can tell there was a jolt, a sudden stimulation of your vestibular sense. But if you cannot see that you collided with something, you cannot say that you witnessed a collision.

So what a witness sees, or hears, or has a visceral sensation of, such as being thrown forward or slammed into a wall, is perfectly valid as an observation...

Correct. But inferentially attributing that to some cause you didn't see is not evidence.

 

[Vixen]

Correct. But the conspiracy theory wants to equivocate this to mean collision with another vessel. Specifically the conspiracy theorists point to the hole on the starboard side and say this occurred on the surface as the result of a collision with another vessel, and these various witnesses reported it but were ignored.

The witness testimony in this matter has been properly incorporated into the final findings.

No, the conspiracy theorists were the people who conspired to cover up the full events of the disaster. How can Bildt have possibly known it was 'the design of the bow visor' wot caused the accident the same morning, when the thing hadn't even been located yet. It is claimed that whilst he was on the plane to Turku - where he was to meet with the Finnish and the Estonian Ps and interview Piht (as stated by Stenmark IIRC) someone told him about Sillaste seeing water on the car deck coming through the sides. As if that is reason enough to have a press conference the same day to announce it.

No mention of the hull breach. No mention of the cargo. No mention of the problems in communication.

 

[Vixen]

You're the one who claimed that there were eye witness reports of a collision, and that the JAIC had "never dealt with" them.

Are you now withdrawing that claim?

Read the reports for yourself.

 

[JayUtah]

The guy was on a promenade deck.

Irrelevant. If he didn't see a collision then he is not a witness to a collision.

He was a PhD student.

Irrelevant. If he didn't see a collision then he is not a witness to a collision.

He was not a moron.

Straw man. No one is claiming he is. The claim is that his inference for what caused his sensation is not witness evidence.

He knows what he felt.

We stipulate that he knows what he felt. But unless he saw an actual collision then his inference regarding the cause of what he felt is not evidence.

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC, whilst the vessel itself is a 15,000 tonner.

Asked and answered many times.

ETA: You may want to verify your units.

 

[JayUtah]

No, the conspiracy theorists were the people who conspired to cover up the full events of the disaster.

No.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC

Do you want to try again with that recollection?

In the meantime, may we strike your claim Estonia was "mid-point of journey distance-wise" from your list of suspicious facts, or do you want to have another go at showing this to be the case?

 

[JayUtah]

Read the reports for yourself.

We have.

You claim the witness statements include those who witnessed a collision. But you cannot point us to any of them beyond those that inferred there had been a collision by having felt a sudden movement in the ship.

The JAIC report addresses these claims and reconciles them defensibly with the physical evidence. Your claim that the JAIC ignored witness evidence of a collision is rejected as lacking foundation.

 

[Vixen]

<snip>
I would still like to know where you got your starting figure of 193 km from.

I'll have to come back to you on that.

 

[lobosrul5]

No, the conspiracy theorists were the people who conspired to cover up the full events of the disaster. How can Bildt have possibly known it was 'the design of the bow visor' wot caused the accident the same morning, when the thing hadn't even been located yet. It is claimed that whilst he was on the plane to Turku - where he was to meet with the Finnish and the Estonian Ps and interview Piht (as stated by Stenmark IIRC) someone told him about Sillaste seeing water on the car deck coming through the sides. As if that is reason enough to have a press conference the same day to announce it.

Lol wut... the CT'ers were the conspirators??OK.

Its claimed... by whom exactly?

I thought you had gone back to the Russian's did it... so why now are we back to Bildt has foreknowledge? If he did are you claiming he's such a big moron that he let slip information there was no way he could've known? Come on!

No mention of the hull breach. No mention of the cargo. No mention of the problems in communication.

Because it wasn't breached until the ship hit the bottom of the sea floor. Because there was no "special" cargo on board. Because it wasn't yet known.

 

[Andy_Ross]

The guy was on a promenade deck. He was a PhD student. He was not a moron. He knows what he felt.

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC, whilst the vessel itself is a 15,000 tonner.

Apart from your mistake of claiming the visor was only 15kg, it formed the bows of the ship.
You know, the pointy but that cuts through the water?
It also keeps water out of the ship.
What do you think will happen if you take the bows off a ship and let water flood in.

What is there about being a student that gives him experience with ships behaviour in storms?

 

[P.J. Denyer]

The guy was on a promenade deck. He was a PhD student. He was not a moron. He knows what he felt.

The bow visor in the scheme of things is tiny, just 15 kg IIRC, whilst the vessel itself is a 15,000 tonner.

That seems rather unlikely even as a back-of-an-envelope figure, unless it was made of expanded polystyrene.

The weight, CoG and volume of the bow visor of M/S Estonia has been calculated based on the original drawing from Meyer Shipyard. The weight was calculated to 64.0 tonnes with a LCG of 5.25 m from frame #156 and VCG of 6,99 m above DWL.

https://www.estonia1994.ee/en/technical-report-ms-estonia-bow-visor-calculation-weight-and-volume#:~:text=The%20weight%2C%20CoG%20and%20volume,6%2C99%20m%20above%20DWL.

I'm not qualified to judge how accurate that figure is, but I'm sure Jay can tell us if it's in the right order of magnitude. I'm sure it's closer to the correct value than 15kg though.

 

[Vixen]

Ok, so I decided to use the free openseamap service and lay out some routes. Note - I did not bother to get it down to the smaller details when it comes to navigating either the Stockholm Archipelago or the exact route out of the Tallin harbor. The positions are not exact either, since I positioned the waypoint just using drag and drop.

I just couldn't be bothered to go down to the boat and plotting it for real in the commercial chart plotter solution (Transas NaviSailor) that we use onboard.

So first of all, here is a rough picture showing the full route as it's described in JAIC. That includes entering the Stockholm area using the northern (Söderarm) entrance, since that one is not as hard to navigate in bad weather.

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/h45f8KDM/Estonia-1.jpg[/imgw]

The total distance of the trip is about 222 NM.

Then we have the part of the route up to the wreck site.

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/vBpDsvSk/image.png[/imgw]

The distance traveled to reach this point is around 96NM.

96/222 is around 41%.


But let's check the "as crows fly" distance also. I don't know why, but...

A straight line between the two cities:

[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/15d7ZV96/image.png[/imgw]

So that's about 204NM.

And a straight line to the wreck site:
[imgw=800]https://i.postimg.cc/C5Gk5KXF/image.png[/imgw]

That's about 93NM.

93/204 is around 45%.

I can't see that this can be called any form of exact "midpoint".

So far, so good. But you appear to have planned it as a passenger might. Google distance is fine as a heuristic measure if you want to know expected time of arrival.

Consider this. If the disaster had been the result of a military operation, then it woudn't be a case of looking at Google distances or passenger timetables.

For example, say you have planned a paintballing experience at, let's say, the V&A and it is a military exercise. You wouldn't send your guys a map of the London Underground, together with bus routes, for them to work out how long it might take to get to the station or from a bus stop or car park. You would give precise time and precise coordinates. For example: Paintball Event at 13:00 at 51.4966° N, 0.1722° W.

Likewise, with the MV Estonia, any saboteur is not going to worry about the minor details, but would be ready with a precise time and position.