5 Ship Design Fails

ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs ships are complex beasts they involve hundreds of thousands of working hours to design and construct but sometimes small design floors can slip through the cracks these can have huge ramifications down the track and occasionally even turn deadly without further Ado here are five of my favorite ship design failures from history that prove that shipbuilding and design is no easy task [Music] number five Queen Mary's rolling when Queen Mary was introduced in 1936 for a maiden voyage the British public was awed by the Monstrous size of the new ship in just 36 years the largest ship in the world had jumped from 20 900 gross registered tons in 1900 to Queen Mary's 80 774 gross registered tons in 1936. simply put the liner was monstrous in scale in drydock its Hull stood 181 feet tall the height of an 18-story building with a beam of 118 feet you could stand 15 London buses side by side and just cover the ship's width the ship was so big for economic reasons the real objective was speed to maximize profits the larger the ship the more space there was for paying passengers whose fares would make up for the incredible power bill newsreels and magazines praised the new ship as a new era for Britain's shipbuilding and an exciting new chapter in Maritime design the hull had been tested in water tanks about 8 000 times to figure out how it would actually perform at Sea and all seemed well the ship's bow was heavily flared to reduce sudden pitching up or down and ensure that passengers got a smooth ride in the early days a passenger travel over the Atlantic ships had pitched and rolled in huge waves to an alarming degree the SS Great Eastern was in 1861 by far the largest ship in the world at 18 000 gross registered tons and it proved stable and comfortable for passengers but in 1861 the power of the ocean was emphasized that year when the ship was caught in an enormous hurricane just two days out of Liverpool accounts of the events a harrowing and a newspaper reported that during the whole of the remainder of the day the Gale blew fearfully the Seas running mountains high on the ship not being able to bring up rolling frightfully things thus continued until the following morning when it was found that the paddles had been broken clean away it was at the same time discovered that the top of the rudder post the piece of iron 10 inches in diameter had been smashed the ship now lay quite helpless lying like a log on the water and tossing and rolling in the most alarming manner on many occasions her decks were at an angle of 45 degrees Crockery and culinary utensils went crashing about in all directions chairs and tables were broken to Pieces chandeliers and mirrors were smashed to fragments and the whole interior of the vessel presented one scene of utter Confusion by 1936 though things seemed different Queen Mary was over four times larger than the Great Eastern and being so big and wide General consensus was that the ship would be an immensely stable platform even in Heavy Seas and that British shipbuilding had at last conquered the ocean to that end many of the passenger corridors were at first devoid of handrails because it was thought that she would be so stable and wouldn't need them so it was on her maiden voyage in May 1936 the passengers noticed something unusual about Britain's new super liner she rolled very slowly but noticeably in fact the size of the ship seemed to do very little to quell the rolling which had been endured by ships for Generations the lack of handrails meant passengers had to awkwardly shuffle through corridors with their backs to the wall as the ship rolled and there were even Falls and injuries when it got bad Crockery was smashed and the Mary began to gain a reputation for being a slow roller this is all to do with the Queen Mary's metacentric height this is a measure of stability and calculated by comparing the ship's center of gravity with its Center of buoyancy a larger metacentric height will result in Greater overall stability but short sharp and sudden moments of rolling which could be uncomfortable for passengers Queen Mary's designers instead gave the ship a slightly lower metacentric height so that she would roll slowly but this resulted in a ship that in big Seas would slowly lean over to one side and seem like it would never be coming back upright at times it even felt like the ship might capsize in one storm during the war the Mary's escorting Destroyer crew were alarmed they could see just about straight down the ship's funnels because it was leaning so heavily over in the water passengers said that she could roll the milk out of a cup of tea and down in the engine rooms Engineers recall the ship's inclinometer which shows how far over the ship is leaning in either direction reading off the charts measurements of 46 or 47 degrees over at times it was easiest to walk down corridors with one foot on the wall in the end the Queen Mary still captured the Public's imagination and affection but the rolling was a meddlesome issue that was never totally solved handrails were hardly put into all passenger spaces and in big Seas ropes could be strung out on passenger decks so that passengers could hold on and Traverse the ship's huge 118 foot width without falling over in 1957 Cunard invested over a million pounds to install stabilizers on the ship this largely culled the rolling in normal Seas but still the might of the North Atlantic Ocean in a storm was unquestionable in 1964 the Mary was caught in a violent hurricane and tossed around like a cork the line is 80 000 ton bulk accounted for little in the face of 80 mile per hour winds and waves the height of a five-story apartment block the ship roll over 20 degrees to one side and the port stabilizer came clear out of the water and in the end 14 passengers were injured with one needing hospitalization Crockery throughout the ship was smashed to pieces and the furniture was damaged or destroyed I've said it before and I'll say it again ships are big but the ocean will always be mightier number four the lusitania's vibrating Stern at the turn of the 20th century passenger ships were just getting faster and faster not unlike today's jet airliner travel passengers needed to get across the Atlantic quickly and reliably be it for business or vacation getting there and back on time was important and the great shipping companies tried to outdo each other to create the fastest possible ship this was the era of the great Express steamer and huge investment was made in shipping technology to squeeze out additional miles per hour on the ship's top speeds in 1907 the British Cunard line had a major victory in the battle for transatlantic Supremacy when they introduced The Enormous RMS Lusitania aside from being the largest and most luxurious ship in the world at the time Lusitania boasted a long Sleek Hull and four propellers housed in Sleek bossings which gave her an extremely streamlined profile four powerful pass and steam turbines drove the ship's propellers at great speed and she was designed to be the fastest in the world in June 1907 the ship's Builders the Scottish John Brown and Company were excited to demonstrate the newly completed ship to its future owners Kennard Line This was the ship's speed trials where her engines would be pushed to full power for the first time John Brown had accepted the contract to build Lusitania on the understanding that the ship had to hit 24 and a half knots around 28 miles per hour in order to be the fastest in the world if the ship couldn't hit that speed the company would be fined 930 000 pounds in today's money for every one tenth of a knot under that contract speed on August 1st everybody held their breath as the lusitania's engines were worked up to full power the bow sliced through the waves like a knife and its speed climbed 23 knots then 24 and then 25 and 26. Lusitania absolutely surpassed her contract speed and was destined to be a record breaker and the mood on board must have been triumphant but then there was a problem reports filtered in from the back of the ship towards the stern here there was a huge tower for second-class passengers containing important public spaces like the lounge the smoking room the ladies room and then further down in the hull the Dining Saloon and dozens and dozens of staterooms for passengers but as Lusitania was worked up to full power the hull began to vibrate violently it was so bad that all the second class spacers at the stern of the ship would be completely uninhabitable for passengers and something had to be done and quickly John Brown got to work diagnosing the problem and realized to their horror that the lusitania's four bronze propellers were interfering with one another the wake of disturbed water created by the forward set was colliding with the after pair of propellers creating violent shaking and even worse as Lusitania was worked up to higher speeds the shaking resonated with the hull sending surging vibration up the hull members and throughout all the passenger spaces mechanical resonance is no joke simply put it's the sensitivity of a structure to the frequency of a vibration all big structures like ships Bridges or buildings have a natural frequency of vibration within them Force that's applied to an object at the same frequency as that object's natural frequency will amplify the vibration of the object and begin to shake it apart in 1831 a brigade of marching soldiers happened to step at the exact frequency of the bridge they were crossing the Broughton suspension bridge beneath their feet the bridge began to vibrate then shake until it came apart completely and collapsed lusitania's Stone wasn't at risk of being shaken apart by the resonant vibration but every bulkhead and wall shook every table every light fixture and floor vibrated so badly in the stern that passengers couldn't hope to be comfortable there tragically for the shipyard workers the only solution was to gut all of their careful work in the second class spaces aft and reinforce the entire Stern the completed wood panel Interiors were stripped and dozens and dozens of stanchions steel poles and columns were riveted into place to brace the ship's Stern and reduce the vibration the work took about two months and with the bracing installed the Interiors were replaced and those stanchions were disguised in the ship's Decor covered in wood paneling and made to look like Roman columns the fix worked to an extent the ship still vibrated though but at least now it wasn't so bad that the second class areas were uninhabitable and passengers could actually stay there in August 1907 John Brown delivered Lusitania to Kenard lion and she entered service the next month the vibration problem was never fully resolved though when the ship was sunk very famously in 1915. number three the SS America's funnels in the 1920s and the early 1930s America's passenger ship Fleet largely lagged behind that of its European and British counterparts the nation had built and introduced a fleet of gorgeous passenger ships but it was the British French Germans and Italians who vied for transatlantic Supremacy and one up to each other by building ever larger and faster ships in the late 1930s the company United States lines sought the engineering Genius of renowned Maritime architect William Francis Gibbs in designing and building what would be one of the newest sleekest and most modern ships afloat the ship would go on to become the SS America not the largest or fastest ship in the world but hyper modern safe and beautifully proportioned in those days streamlining was everything and perhaps inspired by the designs of trains motor cars and buildings of the time the America was slickly streamlined on the outside with a round curving superstructure fine Hull lines and two very short funnels a surprising amount of planning has to go into the design of a ship's funnels or smoke stacks if they're too short then smoke soot and Ash can fall freely or drift into passenger spaces at the back of the ship making the experience extremely uncomfortable in the early days of the 20th century steamships had huge tall funnels about the height of five or six story buildings angled backwards they acted like chimneys to draw out tons of coal smoke and soot from the boilers and spew it out well clear of the ship by the 1930s those ship's fumes were not as accurate as the old coal smoke because ships burned fuel oil instead which created a whispier slighter smoke still though the problem remained how do you vent this Smoke Clear of the ship in America's case tall funnels couldn't cut it the ship was meant to be streamlined and modern so Gibbs and the design team instead invested in an Innovative form of funnel design to use aerodynamics to clear the smoke over the back of the ship the funnels featured fins designed to create an updraft of wind while moving blasting smoke as it exited the funnel aft and harmlessly passed the ship America was completed for a trials in early June 1940 the ship was put through its Paces it all seemed well except for one thing the funnels just weren't High Enough the oily smoke dropped soot and Grime on the ship's aft passenger decks because the airflow just wasn't enough to clear it over the ship's Stern it was an embarrassing oversight and before it could be delivered America had to be moored again at her Builders and the funnels rebuilt they only needed to be raised by 5 meters or 15 feet and they worked just fine after that the fins were working as intended and smoke cleared the ship Ten Years Later in 1950 Gibbs and his design team were working on the running mate for America the SS United States they ensured the same problem would not be met following in the same footsteps as America Gibbs employed fins on the funnel but made extensive use of wind tunnel tests to make sure that smoke would clear the ship not only that but United States as funnels were the largest funnels to ever be put on a ship so tall that the smoke passed harmlessly over passenger's heads in my humble opinion the America looked better with the taller funnels anyway so maybe it was a blessing in disguise number two the Titanic's watertight bulkheads sometimes design oversight can turn deadly and in the case of the Titanic this ring is particularly true the story is very well known the ship was designed and built in a time of extreme confidence in Maritime engineering and to be fair this confidence or arrogance seemed well-founded and Justified for centuries people had been taking to the ocean in ships only to go missing or be wrecked in storms or on rocks ships for the longest time weren't particularly big and were totally at the mercy of the ocean the ships like the Titanic seem to totally resolve this like Queen Mary they could still roll sure but they were immense in scale and offered reliable and safe passage and seas that might have sunk smaller ships in previous decades Titanic was absolutely Cutting Edge in its safety apparatus because all of those systems automatic closing watertight doors shipboard telephones quadrant Lifeboat debits and the Marconi wireless radio system were absolutely brand new and most other comparative ships simply just didn't have them that's a sad irony that Titanic which was then easily the safest ship afloat should suffer some damage that the ship just wasn't designed to survive since people invented ships there had always been things for ships to run into and they did it often with many dramatic bow on impacts throughout the years Titanic was designed to survive a bow on impact like this or to survive collision with another ship from the side and the ship employed a system of watertight bulkheads tall steel walls running across the ship's width with minimal openings for crew to pass through all of which could be sealed to create a wall which would not leak water into the next compartment along the design team only made the compartment so high because once these began to reach up into passenger areas it became difficult to fit the many passenger accessible doorways and was a bit of an eyesore to Second the first class passengers most of the bulkheads terminated at edec which was fairly high up on the ship's Hull and well above the waterline about two or three stories up the top of the compartments was not watertight staircases ventilation shafts and ducts all could leak water if it ever got that high but according to Titanic's designers it wouldn't because no situation could be thought of where the ship's compartments would be overwhelmed like that what Titanic's designers did not consider though was a side-on glancing blow the kind of collision that Titanic suffered when it hit the iceberg this created a long series of small incisions in the hull for about 300 feet of Titanic's length opening the hull up slightly to allow water into five of the forward compartments because the bulkheads only went as high as edec water reached the top and simply spilled over into the next climbing stairs empty vent trunking and through non-watertight doorways and passageways some crew members even noticed water coming from above them indicating that water was spilling over the top of the compartment next to them it seems a remarkable oversight the Titanic could be built as Unsinkable when something is seemingly obvious as a side on collision wasn't even considered a possibility Titanic sister ship Olympic was heavily modified with watertight bulkheads that ran all the way up to b-deck amongst other changes but the Titanic's loss as well as subsequent disasters like the sinking of its sister ship Britannic largely killed the idea of the unsinkable ship number one the principessa Yolanda's launch shipbuilding is a difficult laborious task that takes thousands of workers thousands and thousands of hours to do so when a ship is finally ready for launching the moment is a real moment of Pride for the designers and creators in 1907 the shipyard country navale de Riva trigorsa had built the 463 foot 9 200 gross registered ton ocean liner principessa Yolanda and set the stage for a spectacular launch the ship was at the time the largest italian-built passenger ship ever and intended for the Italy to South America service she would have offered comfortable luxurious quarters for passengers and demand for services to South America was such that the owners navagatsuone General Italiana commissioned a pair of sister ships from Prince PESA Yolanda would be the first to be launched in the weeks leading up to the launch an enormous marketing campaign was led so that on the day thousands of onlookers as well as dozens of officials and dignitaries showed up to watch the event the ship looked stunning sitting high and dry up on its slipway and as the clock counted down the crowd held its breath then the ship thundered down the slipway and floated for the first time but then crowds noticed it began to heal over to one side the list got worse and worse just 100 meters from the shoreline and only minutes after launch the brand new ship was now leaning far over onto its port side and appeared to be sinking to the dismayed Amusement of the crowd the principess of Orlando pride of Italy had rolled over and sunk onto its port side in just 20 minutes resting on the seabed so that only part of its Hull could be seen above the waterline see Orlando's Builders had worked to a really tight schedule and had actually almost totally completed the ship prior to launch installing all the fittings interiors and Furniture the funnels and the superstructure all before launching the ship the usual process and shipbuilding is to do all this after the launch the ship's Hull is completed and ready for floating then launched then the whole thing is docked so that can be completed while afloat Prince Passa Yolanda had been completed and filled with equipment but her ballast the weight at the bottom of the ship taken on to ensure stability had not been fitted and the ship was carrying no coal or cargo deep down to add more weight because of this the ship's center of gravity was simply too high out of the water making it dangerously unstable and as it hit the water for the first time and began to lean over all of those loose internal fittings like the furniture slid over to one side and only added to the problem water began to pour through open and incomplete portholes and windows and it was all over the ship was a total loss and although some of its parts could be salvaged it was broken up on site the Yolanda's sister ship the principessa mafalda was completed under great scrutiny and successfully launched in 1908 but she too was doomed in 1927 one of the ship's propeller shafts detached from the hull opening a massive gash in the side flooding the engine rooms and generators first ships watertight doors were rendered inoperable and it sank with a loss of 314 lives some ships really seem to get all the luck don't they ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs thank you so much for watching this video please think about liking and subscribing to the channel could support my channel on patreon you'll find the link down in the description until then stay safe stay happy and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 873,603

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships

Id: QsKNWEsm4r8

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022