The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VII

JesseCuster said:
"A gust of wind caused it to list over"? Nobody has claimed that the Estonia listed because of "a gust of wind".
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It looks to me like she's talking about the MS Jan Heweliusz here, not the MS Estonia. Strong wind was indeed a factor in the Jan Heweliusz sinking.

Vixen said:
So the premise is that the accommodation windows should have smashed (it was in hurricane force conditions of >44 m/s and a gust of wind caused it to list over, similarly).
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Why would you conclude that? Wind loading on a window is one of the easiest things to compute, as is hydrostatic pressure on the same window when submerged.

Show us your numbers.

Vixen said:
But the bow visor falling off isn't necessarily due to a couple of strong wave impacts.
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Funny how you admit you're not any sort of engineer, yet you keep drawing conclusions that would normally have to come from an engineering exercise in order to be considered evidence.
 
"Turtling" or "turning turtle" means to roll 180º (or nearly so) and remain there. Capsizing means to roll to at least around 90º but possibly up to 180º and remain there. Turtling is a special case of capsizing. Those are the definitions used in naval architecture. Informal meanings may be interesting, but are insufficiently specific for technical discussions. The key concept is that the ship remains in its attitude due to the loss of the righting moment. This can happen when the ship heels under wave or winds to its critical roll angle, whereupon it rolls to its next stable node and remains there. The intact-hull roll model accounts for this. It can also occur as the result of flooding, including downflooding, and may stabilize at any angle regardless of the intact-hull nodes. The intact-hull model is insufficient to describe the ship stability in that case.

@Vixen wrongly believes that all ships that capsize to 90º or so must continue and eventually turtle, thus there is no reason to distinguish between a 90-degree capsize or a 180-degree capsize. She seems to believe this because it's what Anders Björkman claims about MS Estonia, wrongly applying the intact-hull model to a flooded ship. She claims that ships like Herald of Free Enterprise would have continued to roll—and turtle—had they not hit bottom first. There is no physics reason to believe that, and in fact the formal report accepts the possibility that the ship stabilized in a 90-degree roll and then settled to the bottom.

The term "turtling" comes from the dangerous position a turtle finds itself in when it is fully upside down.
 
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JayUtah said:
She claims that ships like Herald of Free Enterprise would have continued to roll—and turtle—had they not hit bottom first. There is no physics reason to believe that, and in fact the formal report accepts the possibility that the ship stabilized in a 90-degree roll and then settled to the bottom.
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I'm not sure that Vixen ever accepted this; she was remarkably reluctant to say what she understood by the term "on her beam ends".
 
JayUtah said:
The term "turtling" comes from the dangerous position a turtle finds itself in when it is fully upside down.
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I've always assumed it was simply because an upturned ship's hull looks a bit like a turtle's shell, and is in water, like a turtle (remember, outside the US the land animal is referred to as a 'Tortoise').
 
Vixen said:
I quoted the parts salient to my point. Nobody wants to wade through stuff about what passengers were doing when we were specifically talking about the listing. Why would the JAIC assume that Sillaste seeing water entering the sides of the car ramp explains the ingress of water causing ithe vessel to sink. The Jan Heweliusz was in terrible condition yet it did capsize and floated keel up for at least five hours. So the premise is that the accommodation windows should have smashed (it was in hurricane force conditions of >44 m/s and a gust of wind caused it to list over, similarly).

But the bow visor falling off isn't necessarily due to a couple of strong wave impacts.
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Again, I'm no engineer, but it seems like the idea is to keep sea water on the outside of the hull. If water is flooding the inside of the hull there might be trouble.
 
If you learn to sail in a very small sailing dinghy (called an optimist dinghy, very fittingly, since you have to be one to think you will spend your time in the boat, instead of in the water), you will learn all about turtling. The only difference between a turtle and that dinghy is that you can sometimes get the dinghy to go 360 degrees. Sometimes. Mostly its 180.
 
Axxman300 said:
Again, I'm no engineer, but it seems like the idea is to keep sea water on the outside of the hull. If water is flooding the inside of the hull there might be trouble.
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No! Who would have thought it?

And who could imagine that a ship with a bloody great hole in the pointy end, sailing at speed into a storm, might take on water?
 
Mojo said:
No! Who would have thought it?
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Not only that, who would have thought that an investigative body would have assumed that water ingress occurred as the result of water being seen by witnesses to ingress?

"We're flooding!"
"What's your evidence for that?"
"I can see water coming into the boat."
"Now, don't jump to conclusions..."
 
JayUtah said:
Not only that, who would have thought that an investigative body would have assumed that water ingress occurred as the result of water being seen by witnesses to ingress?

"We're flooding!"
"What's your evidence for that?"
"I can see water coming into the boat."
"Now, don't jump to conclusions..."
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"Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" - Chico Marx.
 
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