When Engineering Goes Wrong: Three Badly Designed Ships

designing a ship is a massively complex operation these things can be the size of city blocks and they have to function safely in a constantly changing unstable environment it takes brilliant engineering and mathematical Precision to make sure they will work because one small oversight can have disastrous consequences in the past we looked at five Maritime engineering failures including the Lucitania serious vibration issues and the failed launch of the principesa Yolanda but today we'll look at three more engineering failures that range from the harmless and comical to the downright deadly ladies and gentlemen I'm your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs and here are three more ship design failures from [Music] history ships like ocean liners and warships are obviously designed to fulfill a specific purpose and their intended role actually impacts the design of the ship it's actual structure way more than you do expect take for example rolling a passenger ship needs to be designed to maximize passenger comfort so ship Builders actually need to decide just how they want their ship to roll and then they can adjust this by designing the ship's metacentric height too large and the ship will snap back and forth in the waves flinging Crockery from tables and resulting in a miserable experience they're too small and the ship Will Roll slowly and seem to not want to come back it's a sh fire way to trigger seasickness in most complex math has to be done and Engineers try to strike a happy balance between the two down below the ship's power plant is also crucial different ships need to go at different speeds and some of the fastest of their time were ocean liners but ship Builders didn't always get it right the Estus and the Alcantara were two new proposed sister ships for the vaunted Royal Mail line that was supposed to carry the company into a new age but a misstep in their engine design would see them become an embarass embarrassment and relegated to the history books ocean liners needed to go fast it's what they existed for in the first place to get people across the world's oceans as quickly as possible it wasn't just for passengers Comfort either it all had to do with profitability and good business a company in the 1910s would have needed three or four medium-sized ocean liners to maintain a regular weekly Crossing schedule across the Atlantic but that many ships incur a lot of running and maintenance costs by the 1920s and 30s you could replace the four with just two larger faster ships if the ships were bigger they could fit more people and it would create more profit so speed for ocean liners was absolutely Paramount and that guided the way that they were designed and built shipping companies would commission the ship to be built by a shipyard but crucially only a small amount of money changed hands at the start it was up to the shipyard to finance building the ship and then to demonstrate that the ship could achieve the speeds and performance that the owner owners needed it to and only then would it change hands and be paid for by the new owners so it was in 1925 that the rmss stus was on her sea trials to demonstrate her speed when all on board were bitterly disappointed that the ship's top speed was way slower than ships that were 10 years older it all had to do with attempted Innovation and more than a little bravado see back in 1924 the head of the royal M line was Lord kiland and he was also the chairman of Harland and Wolf the ship builders in fast I've actually covered Lord ksand on this channel before he's The Cheeky devil who ran the white Starline into the ground and racked up over a billion dollars into today's money worth of debt his baby was the royal male lion a companied with a vast Fleet of ships but in the first world war the company lost many of its vessels which was of course a devastating blow they had got back on their feet by rebuilding cargo ships first but then in the mid 1920s they were ready to replace their prestigious passenger ships that had been lost in the war one of the more lucrative roots for the Royal Mail line was in South America where the ships would call at Brazil Uruguay and Argentina before heading back to Southampton England now as always speed was the critical factor a pair of fast large modern sister ships would increase profitability for the company and here is where kill sand was presented with a choice what kinds of engines should the shipyard install Steam Engines had been used for decades it was the propulsion system that actually birthed the ocean liner in the first place but by the time of the first World War an Innovative new kind of engine had arrived that today we're all familiar with but which back then was a radical departure in the late 1800s a German engineer was making an engine that ran by compressing air and mixing in liquid fuel to create combustion and his name was Rudolph diesel now the diesel engine you may have heard of it before back in the day it was a huge deal for a number of reasons in landbased vehicles it got rid of the need for spark plugs diesel engines on ships were an even bigger deal because they could do away with bulky coal Coal was a nightmare to work with refueling took literal days and it required the installation of massive boilers fed by hundreds of men to burn the coal and create Steam for the engines diesel engines installed on ships could draw fuel oil from tanks and ignite it in the engine itself it would mean there would be no need for boilers no hundreds of stokers and no days long refueling process nowadays the technology has been perfected and diesel engines of the standard at sea but back in 1924 when Lord ksand was plotting out the two new Royal Male ships it was like Uncharted Territory he needed aerus and Alcantara to do 20 knots exactly the speed would keep them on time and profitable now he could choose to fit steam turbine engines but these were expensive and they took up a lot of space they were standard for the era and they would be for many more years to come but the ship's bottom levels would be totally occupied by the massive amount of necessary boilers to run in Reverse as well the turbines needed complicated and delicate gear boxes if Kil Sant chose to use a diesel motor setup the massive cavernous space that would otherwise be used for boilers could instead house cargo and the diesel engines could run in Reverse at the drop of a hat as head of both Royal M line and the ship's Builders Highland and wolf he had the final say and he decided to go for it it would give him his company bragging riots to suggest that they were leading the technological charge the diesel motors would be built under license at the shipyard and would be at the time the largest yet built now crucially this wasn't Harland and Wolf's first diance with diesel engines and ships in 1920 the company had built the cargo vessel Glen app and fitted her with two diesel engines now these motors were enormous standing the height of a twostory building but despite their size they were surprisingly underpowered they could only generate 4500 brake horsepower that meant that Glen app could only amble along at 12 and and a half knots Now by 1924 maybe Kil sand thought the technology had been refined and asus's engines would be far more powerful the diesel engines were installed with eight massive cylinders each and both capable of about 10,000 indicated horsepower making aurus the most powerful motor ship in the world with 20,000 horses pushing them through the water kiland must have thought that aurus and her subsequent sister ship would easily hit their 20 knot speed Target that's 23 m per hour about 37 km/ hour by the way in 1926 the ship was completed and ready for her sea trials the motors were worked up and the ship roared through the water at cruising speed 16 and 1/2 knots she could go faster but it would mean that the engines would be at Full Throttle the entire time burning fuel and money even then she couldn't hit 20 knots now if all mailine was a normal customer they would have flat out rejected the ship then and there and Harland and wolf would need to either cover the cost of re-engining or come up with some kind of clever solution but as it was there was only one person to blame Lord kiland he had chaired both companies and he had decided on the engines the pair of sisters Royal mine desperately needed to service one of their most competitive and lucrative routes were a pair of white elephants in fact the French competitors company D sud had a pair of ships on the route that could easily hit 20 knots and beat aerus and Alcantara to Buenos Ares by days but the most embarrassing thing about this was that one of the French ships the lessia was over a decade older than aerus which was then Britain's newest liner and one which had been heavily marketed and proudly proclaimed to be the most powerful motor ship in the world it would take a few more years yet for diesel engines to be perfected but it seems that in 1925 kiland had jumped the gun by 1931 Lord kiland was in jail now I've covered why in my video about the cancelled super ocean liner the white styline was was planning called the oceanic it's well worth a look because it's a wild story but the gist of it is that he was jailed for fraudulent activity and stus and Alcantara were having their butts kicked on the South Atlantic route by German and French competitors Royal Mail line now under new leadership began to float the idea of replacing the ship's engines to get them up to speed they gave the task to Harland and wolf on the condition that the yard could put in new machines that would get the ships up to at least over 18 knots now the yard agreed and got to work but they knew that for every KN slower than that speed they would need to have to pay out a penalty they ripped out the underperforming Diesels and put in six powerful turbines instead as well as boilers generating superheated steam the result was a 25% increase in power and the two ships could at least hit just under 20 knots they remained in service up until the 1950s but the failure of their original designs was just another blight on kill sant's career as a curious footnote in 1957 Estus was awaiting scrapping at fast lane in Scotland when a Film Production crew asked for permission to use her for a movie they repainted part of the hull and aurus played the role of Titanic in scenes where the ship's boats are being lowered for the movie a night to remember which is all the more fitting because both ships were even built at the same Shipyard now aerus and Alcantara are an interesting case study because although their engines were underpowered the designs of the ship's har and Interiors were sound so all they needed was to be re-engined but some design sign eras are actually way more serious because they're built into the ship's very structure it's it's skeleton it's steel this can result in some quirky Behavior at best but at worst it can lead to the deaths of many many people take for example the German ocean liner imperator she was intended to be a response to British super lers like morania and Olympic The Mastermind behind the ship Hamburg America Li's brilliant Albert bin intended for the ship to be the first in a trio designed to absolutely outdo the British in every way in itself it's a fascinating story and we've also done a video on that too I'll put a link in the description but in 1906 the biggest ship that Germany had ever built was the SS Kaiser and austa Victoria at about 24,000 gross registered tons but imperator would be twice that size now building a ship that big is a huge learning curve that the German Shipyard Vulcan vka was happy to take on the design called for an immense ship with three towering smoke stacks and orate interiors that were modeled on some of the most famous hotels in the world specifically the Ritz in 1913 imperator set out on her sea trials and her Builders and owners must have been extremely proud because they had achieved their goal imperator's Interiors certainly put the newest British liners to shame but there was a huge problem the designers had messed up somewhere along the way because imperator didn't seem to want to stay on an even Keel the ship's desire to list over to one side has become legendary passengers on some of the earlier voyages were so dismayed they gave her the nickname Lim perator now the ship's Hull was huge and towering and the smoke stacks on top stood the height of a five-story building it meant that the ship center of gravity was just way too high urgent calculations must have been done by the builders because they figured that she was safe enough to operate but she would exhibit some quirky habits namely responding to any rubber inputs by lazing over to about 5° and staying there she wasn't at risk of capsizing but the ship was clearly unstable it would need to be rectified but it was too late the much publicized maiden voyage was coming up imperator set to see it's actually hard to find a bit of footage or a photograph that shows the ship on an even kill this coupled with electrical failures and fires resulted in Hamburg America line pulling imperator from service just one season into her career for a full refit now they did everything they could to fix the issues first the funnels were cut down in height by as much as 3 m or almost 10 ft and then 2,000 tons of cement was poured into the ship's double bottom to act as ballast passenger cabins were attacked as well marble bathtubs were ripped out they were replaced with cast iron ones which were actually lighter decorative panels made out of marmor a kind of marble were replaced with plaster and then heavy wooden furniture was ripped out and replaced with cane in 1914 Hamburg America line held their breath as the new and improved imperator entered the service but then they were dismayed to find that the changes had done relatively little to help the 1920s the ship's new owners kunard line had a go at solving the problems too but even they couldn't do it the simple issue of a center of gravity was so ingrained in the vessel's bones that it couldn't be overcome with simple fixes honestly in my opinion to solve it probably an entire upper deck at least would have needed to have been taken off in the end the ship had a successful career but her quirky lean to one side has become the stuff of Legends imperator's design fault led to behavior that was just that quirky if it was that dangerous I can't imagine the Hamburg America line or even their Builders would have allowed the imperator to go to Sea in the first place but sometimes design faults can slip through the cracks that are much more serious even though they might seem at first glance glaringly obvious in 1906 a pair of sister ships were introduced that was celebrated for their modernity and their luxury but which actually harbored A Deadly Secret that would result in the deaths of over a thousand people in the early 1900s the Canadian Pacific Railway company wanted to up the standards of its transatlantic Fleet the company ran a fleet of running mate steam ships between Liverpool and Quebec but they were simple utilitarian passenger cargo vessels that put just as much emphasis on the cargo as they did the passenger Canadian Pacific's dream was to build a celebrated pair of liners to bring standard of luxury to that route that had previously only been seen on board the most celebrated liners of the day which sailed on the prestigious service to New York the result was a pair of ships built at the famous Fairfield Shipyard in Goin Scotland Empress of Britain and Empress of Ireland the two ships were of medium size about 14,000 odd gross registered tons but what they lacked in size they made up for in modernity the ships featured electric lights throughout and modern fixtures like flushing toilets and call buttons passenger space were Lush and comfortable they brought a whole new standard of luxury to the route and in that regard Canadian Pacific Line absolutely nailed their brief the lounges cafes ornate stairwells and smoking rooms were a huge hit when the ships were first introduced but what Canadian Pacific Line was most proud of was the modernity and safety of the two ships because they had done everything in their power to up the standards of safety at Sea as well in the decades leading up to the introduction of the empress sisters a series of Maritime disasters had guided ship builders in how to protect their ships the most obvious takeaway was the need for a double bottom and then compartmentalization now a double bottom was like an inner skin on the ship's lowest point that would protect it from damage from below the Second Skin would trap water and prevent it from flooding into the ship but the hull could still be damaged from the side so to stop water from flooding freely throughout the ship the hle was split into sections called compartments which were separated by watertight bulkheads tall steel walls rising up from the bottom of the ship that could be sealed off by watertight doors now if the hull was damaged in one spot the flooding would be contained to that one compartment in later years the watertight doors could be closed electronically from the bridge but in the empress violin's day it was still largely a manual process so the crew were trained and drilled in the event of an emergency to take heavy brass keys and then manually hand crank the two dozen watertight doors shut in practice tests this could be be done in less than 3 minutes which is fairly impressive now the Empress of Ireland and her sister ship featured 10 bulkheads that Rose through the hole as high as the shelter deck creating 11 compartments a Board of Trade regulations is stipulated since 1890 the ship's longer than 425 ft in length be designed to remain afloat with any two adjacent compartments flooded now we'll call this Factor flood ability it's the amount of compartments that could be flooded without the ship being lost flood ability relied on a few things mainly that the flooded compartments remain watertight this posed a problem for designers and Builders people passengers and crew alike needed to walk through the ship along its length to be able to get around so bulkheads rising up from the bottom of the ship can then intrude on passenger spaces making navigating very difficult it also adds more doors for the crew to close in an emergency so for reasons like this back in the day water type bulkheads did not rise to the top of the hull but only as high as some of the lower passenger decks now this would prove suitable for most situations because it would mean that the water just couldn't spill over the top and keep flooding the ship so long as the doors were shut now this is all common knowledge now thanks to the Titanic disaster that ship was designed to stay afloat with three or four compartments breached but in the event more were flooded creating a cascading domino effect that sank the ship on the empress sisters the compartments had to be designed to make sure that if any two adjacent compartments were flooded the margin of buoyancy would not be exceeded and the ship wouldn't sink if two compartments were made too big for example then in an emergency the combined volume would pull the ship down and sink it because the ship would be made far less buoyant and here is where the empress's designers made their first misstep because two of their compartments were far far too big it was the engine and Boiler Room compartments that were the largest of their kind because of the size of the Machinery they had to house in the dead center of the ship was a pair of cavernous boiler compartments separated by a single tall watertight bulkhead and a series of large coal bunkers now the compartments were huge they were 87 ft or 26 1/2 M long compared to the forward compartments which were about half that length if open to the ocean and flooded the Empress of Ireland should still have been able to stay afloat providing the watertight doors were closed but then only barely because the compartments were so vol linous if they were flooded it would come dangerously close to exceeding the margin of buoyancy and the ship would sink there was absolutely no margin for error with those two compartments flooded the empress could take on absolutely no more water whatsoever or she'd sink like a rock now her designers knew this unfortunately it was a necessary evil to make those compartments so big purely because of the size of her boilers now to compensate for this they came up with what they thought was an ingenious solution they could take the compartments and then subdivide them even more into something like mini compartments that would slow or maybe even stop the spread of flooding water they couldn't do it across the width of the ship because the crew would still need to be able to get around through the boiler room as easily as they worked so instead they could do it down the ship's length adding things called longitudinal bulkheads that split one half of both boiler rooms essentially into two in the empty space they added storage for coal it meant that if a boiler room was breached only half of it would flood simple and besides the odds of a ship being hit dead center like that must have seemed extremely low with the job well done the ships were built and introduced and they served well for the better part of a decade but then in 1914 the worst case scenario played out and the empress's Achilles heel was revealed in a dense fog the Empress of Ireland was rammed dead center by the coal carrying ship storad and honestly it's almost as if the disaster had been designed as a kind of engineering experiment because the empress was hit in exactly the worst possible spot at least 15 to 20 ft of stud's bow which by the way was designed and heavily reinforced specifically for ice breaking plunged deep into the empress creating a gash which stood stories tall suddenly the celebrated safety measures which been put in by her Builders were put to the test but there was an immediate series of problems see when Titanic had hit its Iceberg 2 years earlier something like 12 square ft of the hull was opened up allowing water to slowly come in and fill the ship over about 2 hours but the Empress of Ireland was opened up to the river right between her two boiler rooms with a hole allowing 60,000 gallons of river water that's a quarter of a million liters to enter the ship every second now the stewards rushed to their posts to shut the doors and make the compartments watertight but they were immediately overwhelmed stewards in third class were met with a tidal wave of river water that drowned them all on the starboard side of the ship and the doors remained open open in the boilers the stokers didn't even have a chance at closing the doors they did their best just to run out of the way so now the two largest compartments were open to the St Lawrence River and flooding incredibly quickly the empress's margin of buoyancy would be exceeded and she would sink but the designers had foreseen this remember the empress's boiler rooms had those longitudinal bulkheads designed to split the massive compartments into two and keep flooding restricted only to one side this choice would have devastating consequences for passengers and crew because as soon as she began to flood the water's flow was hampered by the longitudinal bulkheads meaning the starbard side of the ship had taken on tons and tons of water that the port side didn't the ship Lent over in the water so severely that the lifeboats on the port side of the ship were useless as they soared higher and higher in the air and they swung inwards were still on the inside passengers struggled against the lean as they tried to escape desperately through stairways and spaces that were now almost impossible to climb out of with only one side of the boiler compartments fully flooded and the water flooding unimpeded into other compartments the empress wallowed in the water until finally the inevitable happened with the starboard side of the ship settling lower and lower into the water now Port holes which were open on that side began to allow water in two the ship center of gravity was met then exceeded and then she rolled over dramatically not fully capsizing but coming to rest on her side in the end someone 12 people died as a result of the Empress of Ireland sinking the ship was always going to sink that blow from the store was an absolute killer there was nothing the poor stewards and crew could do to shut the watertight doors but in the event the ship had been built without the longitudinal bulkheads the boiler rooms would probably have flooded evenly and brought the ship a little bit more time she would have begun to sink on a fairly even kill enabling people to escape lifeboats on both sides of the ship to be swung out and lowered it would have saved dozens more lives at least if the ship had been sailing through the fog with her watertight doors shut as a preventative measure in the first place she wouldn't have sunk at all nowadays ships at Sea have their most critical watertight doors Shut by default it makes it more difficult to get around but it means that in the event of an emergency the most important compartments will already be made watertight and the flooding will be contained now this was actually put to the test in the 1990s when a cruise ship almost sank in 1998 the monarch of the Seas grazed a Reef of St Martin's which opened up a Monumental gash in the ship's hole about 130 ft or 40 m long and 6' 7 or 2 m wide now the ship began to immediately take on water and sink down by the head so the captain grounded her on a Sandy shallows and evacuated the passengers now subsequent report found that an incredible amount of the ship had been open to the ocean with three whole water tip compartments breached and flooded and 16 tanks and spaces in the double bottom flooded as well but so last the body responsible for maritime safety found that the ship would have been able to stay afloat if she hadn't been beached anyway because the ship still had plenty of Reserve buoyancy and the flooding had been contained because the watertight doors were shut now unfortunately safety lessons usually come at the cost of human lives and in the case of longitudinal bulkheads that run along the ship's Center Line it was found after the Empress of Ireland's loss that they had actually contributed to the loss of life a Centerline subdivision was dangerous it split massive compartments into two meant the ship would lean dangerously over in the water if flooded instead Machinery spaces could be split safely into three or four with longitudinal bulkheads because it meant that if one was flooded it wouldn't be a big enough space to make the ship list as tragic as stories like this are their continuing Legacy today is the Improvement of safety standards and lessons learned the hard way in the past are continuing to help save lives today ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs thank you so much for watching this video If you enjoyed it please leave a comment below don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we get new videos out weekly if you want to support my work and get really cool perks like behind the scenes and Early Access please visit my patreon in the link in the description below or sign up as a YouTube member come and join the crew as always stay safe stay happy and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 858,283

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships, engineering, history, ships, documentary, origins explained, world history project, animated history, open educational resources, titanic, shipwreck, sinking, boats, ocean, disaster, tragedy

Id: AInu0djY2zA

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023