Unknown Details of RMS Lusitania | Detailed Analysis of a British Ocean Liner | Oceanliner Designs

hi my name's mike brady i'm the founder and illustrator from liner designs and illustration this is my first youtube video and it's really good to uh to meet you all today i wanted to talk to you about the lusitania i recently finished illustrating it and today i wanted to give you a guided tour around some of the interesting points of the ship and some things that i learned while i was drawing it so let's have a look around the poop deck here is a little different to what some of us have come to expect from certain white star line ships that shan't be named in the way that there's not really a well deck this was one continuous deck it was a promenade um that ran all the way forward so it was flush with the hull as opposed to where you would typically have a sort of cargo handling area or a well deck with cargo hatches and things a white star line was really guilty of this but you've got whole towers devoted to classes so of course first class has this fantastic great whopping section of superstructure that's like three quarters length of the ship and second class has its own tower further off we'll come back to that in a minute looking at the poop deck here you've got all the machinery that falls under probably the warping or mooring category of deck equipment you've got um steam capstans you've got fairlead rollers and what have you you've got a fairly large steam winch here one point of interest is this little skylight here that leads right down into the uh the depths of the ship from where the steering gear compartment was that would operate the rudder that provides ventilation and air is really important because the way that the rudder was operated was through a miniature steam engine really reciprocating steam engines similar to those that might be found uh powering not this because she was turbine driven but other steamships like i hate say it titanic another thing that's fairly lucitaney and i wanted to capture it in my drawings is camber camber is the degree to which a ship um sags for want of a better term in a sectional direction so if you take a ship and you cut it out like a loaf of bread you're going to see that a lot of these decks that are exposed to the elements aren't actually dead flat they slant downwards by a fraction of a degree and this is to help water um from accumulating and drain it down into the scuppers and out of the side of the ship and you see this a lot in things like the docking bridge here where you can actually just see it sloping downwards there's one photograph of the baltic this old white star lighter that looks like it was left in the sun a little bit too long and melted camber became slowly less and less severe if you will as shipping technology progressed but in those early days it was really evident you're going to see that a little further forward as well this is a really interesting little thing this was called a nightlife boy this was fairly popular as a device on late 19th century pre-dreadnought warships especially in the french navy but also in the british navy essentially how it worked you've got a hollow structure made out of steel tubing so fairly lightweight part of it i'm not entirely sure which part but part of it was coated in a magnesium mixture so that when it landed on contact with water would light up so in theory if someone goes overboard at night time when previously they'd be in trouble um this device could be deployed it'd light up on contact with the water and someone could swim out to it and cling on maybe be uh rescued by the ship i don't think it really took i don't think it really took i don't know that it was ever used um in fact it's kind of sad but nowadays a few people every year actually disappear at sea on cruise ships it's a problem that's never really been solved but people do still disappear so uh don't go overboard it's not fun there's another skylight and ventilator here um this one was recently identified on the wreck which is significant because there's really not a lot on the wreck of the lusitania that's identified in fact lusitania's structure was covered in ventilators and skylights and from the inside it's beautiful you have these spectacular tall rooms that are capped with a with a glass skylight it's another interesting thing the lusitania existed in an era where promenading was one of the few things that you could do at sea they of course they didn't have any floating casinos or uh or theaters or have you so um walking around at sea on deck was a really important thing and when you're in uh when you're in rough weather you still want to be able to do it so cunard and a lot of other passenger lines at the time went to a lot of effort to make sure that in rough weather whole sections of the deck that would otherwise be exposed to the elements could be screened off with canvas so you get these really complex awning structures this one at the stern is probably the most interesting it looks really really complicated i haven't seen any photographs of it in use yet you see a lot of this in ships like pianos multan similar ocean liners of the 1910s 15s and 20s that were sent to tropical climates where maybe the passengers from uh england and europe weren't so used to being exposed to sun my dad tells me the story he came out to australia in 1959 on the strathnaver which was this old 1930s piano ship and a couple of passengers were sunbathing young men in their 30s and died at sea because they weren't so used to uh to the heat and they died of sunshine and they had to be buried at sea even in the 1950s late 1950s go figure i like uh the way that cunard uh or i guess john brown went about um warning people about the propellers they didn't just go for a you know slapping a board on the side you've actually got almost this three-dimensional effect because one's slightly raised forward and once slightly raised aft which i think is a nice touch curiously though they only align with the forward-most set of propellers not the afmos set so you might be excused for thinking this was a twin screw ship and you wouldn't want to end up here as a tugboat captain my father was looking for the holy grail did you kill him too that's a good one down here we've got um two sets of uh inlets if you will an outlet so in this case you've got two massive openings that lead straight into the pump room so this was for drawing in huge amounts of sea water and then you've also got the condenser discharge outlets from here so the turbines are obviously taking a lot of steam um condensing that taking the energy out of it and what you're left with is of course a lot of a lot of fresh water there's only one way to get rid of it some of it gets recirculated into the ship the rest of it goes outside the cargo cranes early in her career lusitania only had two uh cranes for cargo handling aft here but at some point um before 1910 at the very least um even probably earlier than that they were they were supplemented by a second pair so these two little structures where the cranes would eventually sit were originally deck stores um they probably held deck games i'm gonna say you do actually see photographs of uh shuffleboard being played in this area i'm gonna say it was probably stored in there moving along this is uh this is kind of a funny thing but of course we were talking earlier about how you had whole towers if you will superstructure towers dedicated to individual classes which is kind of a cool idea but also results in these awkward situations as supposed to crew say you have to get down here to the docking bridge from the bridge at the forward part of the ship you're a crew member there's no real comfortable way of getting there apart from descending a bunch of stairs and then climbing a whole lot more so the solution that's come up with is to install two gangways on either side of the mast so that crew can access either side of the ship i don't know it's kind of inelegant and a bit silly looking but it's not as bad as normandy normandy had this almost last minute screen it looks like it's a wooden partition installed on the the deck it's not really in the plans i couldn't find it but the way that they decided to discern that this was first class in this second class was by installing a giant tall wooden bulkhead partition with a door for crew to go between really an elegant also extremely impractical i can imagine these things being ripped off during storms i would be surprised if they weren't at some point during her career i love i love all this clutter there's so much so much detail going on here this is a cool little detail here that almost escaped me the first time i uh i drew this but this seems to be a device for securing the funnel shrouds to the deck providing tension and flexibility you've got these funnels that are say 50 60 70 feet tall they're riveted to the deck plates but of course they need support almost like a the cables on a bridge you know in rough weather it's important to ensure that there is actually a degree of flexibility because the funnel is swaying from one side to another you hate to uh have a situation where the shrouds might snap and come crashing back down on the deck nobody wants that so these devices here provide the tension to make sure that the funnel is uh always supported and under tension on all sides evenly it's a great idea these ventilators here are probably the most important this whole uh section these go straight down into the turbine rooms they uh they provided access to the turbine rooms from the deck and they also provided light and ventilation for the engineers down there really important you can only imagine what that would have been like standing right at the top and looking down 10 stories right out into the depths of the ship really cool this is a really nice detail it's not evident from the exterior but sitting right in here is the first class smoking room and on top of it you've got a massive glass skylight just to the right of these little forward further of the ship you've got two big drum barrel type ventilators that go down into the galley before this you've got a pipe leading straight into the forefront now people like to say the fourth funnel on a lot of these liners was uh dummy this is a popular misconception in the way that's true they didn't vent gases and smoke and fumes from the boilers but they serve really important purposes as far as providing ventilation and in this case providing an escape for smoke from a pair of fireplaces in the first class smoking actually this is a again really lusitania-ish but i just love these exposed switchboxes you just have these sitting out there exposed to the elements this is an important one there's not a lot on the lusitania today that is recognizable as once being part of the ship there's a lot of small pieces here and there like capstones and what have you but there's not a lot of areas where you can definitively say oh yeah that's lucitonia this is one rare exception this is the base of the first funnel today still relatively intact you can pick out a lot there one of the things that for a long time served as a marker for divers going down on the ship and using this as a orientation point was these three water tanks fresh water for drinking salt water and condensed water these tanks i think have since rusted away these pipes are really similar to those seen on the funnels of the olympic class liners but essentially gravity is providing water pressure so that um when you turn the tap on water will actually come out provides pressure for the entire system pretty cool this is one of those details that remind me that lusitania was was really an early four stacker but um the way that the bridge is connected to the whistles on the forward funnel it's just a pulley system that's all it is from what i can see you had two rollers installed on the funnel sides on either side the way that you would engage the fog horns and the whistles is by pulling on that cable it's rudimentary but it works we talked earlier about the camera of the ship this is another place where it's really evident you can see the uh the bridge wing cab sloping down there it might have been a little bit uh sado masochistic of cunard but they installed the bridgewing cabs there as open it wasn't too long ago that the entire bridge of an ocean liner especially cunadas was completely open they had no no enclosure whatsoever that was that must have been a pretty tough time you've got two skylights here these are really important one of them looks down into the wheelhouse and provides natural light but the other one looks down into the office's smoking room you can see it in photographs it would have provided some really nice light lastly her name picked out in uh polished metal i think it was bronze and these were riveted or bolted straight onto the side of the ship and she was a beautiful ship you know the cunadas uh especially the lusitania and the mauritania look like they were built for speed you have to love them you can see why they were called greyhounds of the atlantic well that's it from me i hope you enjoyed my first youtube video please like subscribe and comment i'd love to hear your feedback i'll probably do another one of these videos for another ship maybe the olympic or something i don't know what would you like to see next you can see my entire catalogue at linerdesigns.com i'll provide the link until the next video stay safe stay happy and thank you for joining me you

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 85,733

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Id: 8y7xFUuc_Z4

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021