by Sepka » Thu May 18, 2006 5:43 pm
However much malice one attributes to the Jesuits, we're still left with the problem of how the Titanic's collision with the iceberg could possibly have been engineered. Both Boards of Inquiry agreed that had the ship not hit the iceberg at that precise angle, she'd not have sunk. Modern opinion stands firmly behind this idea as well. Had she begun her turn just a few seconds later, she'd have hit bow-on. The bow would have been crushed, and there'd have been deaths and injuries throughout the ship as unbraced passengers and crew were thrown around, much as in the case of the 'Stockholm' some fifty years later, but she'd have remained afloat. Had she turned a bit earlier, she might well have missed the berg altogether. There were literally hundreds of witnesses left alive afterwards to confirm what happened, including IIRC the watch crew who originally spotted the berg. When they sounded the alarm, the helmsman immediately called for full reverse (probably a mistake under the circumstances, but an honest one) and hard left.<br><br>To engineer a hit like that, it would be necessary to know not only the precise (witin feet) absolute position of the iceberg, but also its geometry, including that of the portion that was underwater. <br><br>Let's stipulate for the sake of the argument that that the watch and helm were involved in a conspiracy to sink the ship. Let's stipulate that the Jesuits had scouted out the iceberg in advance, plotted its position as accurately as could be done in 1912, and Titanic had set her course that night to hit it. She'd been on that unchanged heading for several hours before hitting the berg. Even with GPS, setting the helm of a liner to graze the rim of a target a few hundred yards across at a precise angle while still miles away from that target would be precise work. When you're working with a compass, clock and sextant, you can't plot your position to closer than a few hundred yards to begin with.<br><br>It gets worse, though - recall that they swung the wheel hard at the last second. The helm threw the wheel on the watch's sayso - the berg wasn't visible from the bridge at that time. Now we've got a case which is worse than trying to hit an exact spot at an exact angle after sailing four hours in a straight line - we're throwing in a last-second turn, as hard as the ship will go, and reversing the engines as well. All this on a ship that was on her first crossing, one that the crew was still learning how she'd respond to her controls, and what could be expected of her.<br><br>Deliberately sinking the 'Titanic' in that way was pretty much impossible in 1912, and would require GPS and computer control to pull off today. If you want to discuss ocean liners being sunk as the result of a possible conspiracy, the 'Lusitania' is a far more fertile field for speculation.<br><br>-Sepka the Space Weasel <p></p><i></i>
