Actually, watch this crappy made for TV crapfest that somehow had a pretty well known cast... he's not arguing that a small hole can sink a ship, but rather how it was depicted in this terrible remake was rather implausible. I agree.
There's a terrorist planted explosive keg planted and detonated in a walk-in cooler located towards the port aft (left side, all the way back) section of the ship, under the waterline. The keg goes, and as would be the case some of the hull plating was torn loose and the adjactent kitchen starts to flood.
Some of the more modern ship safety and convenience systems _had_ been turned off on the bridge by one of the terrorists; if it were a real ship one could presume this would include (but not be limited to) the fire control system, the automatic bulkhead door controls, the lifeboat deployment system?, the stabilizer gyros, navigation radar and transponders, etc.
Now of course this assumes that all of these systems even CAN be turned off on the bridge. For safety and security purposes, most CANNOT.
Also this assumes that the entire crew and the passengers wouldn't notice that the ship immediately would start to pitch and roll with the waves, as "old" ships did, but modern ones do not for the most part due to the stabilizer system. The instant they flipped the switch, the system would either stop completely (active liquid ballast transfer system or some other mass transfer system) or its effectiveness would quickly drop off (gyros or combination of the two). Either way, when the stabilizer system was shut down, most of the crew would quickly notice...
Now as far as the water rushing in from the hole created by the exploding keg, it would have had to proceed a fair distance forward, yet to not actually flood the rear of the ship semi-symmetrically is also bad writing and implausible. Basically, the water rushing in from the flooded compartments would not have rushed only along the far port side of the vessel - it would have tried to reach the path of least resistance. Unless the area that was open to the hull breach was a somewhat sealed tube leading all the way fore and aft without any major connections towards the starboard, there's no way that you could cause the ship to roll that strongly to the port; as you'd actually flood those decks evenly towards the aft of the ship, which would cause the ship to draft more in the aft with a slight roll towards the port side, but nothing at all like what was shown in the miniseries.
The miniseries shows the ship rolling over within about 5 minutes of the keg blowing up. Even with the flood control doors wide open, the only type of ship that could capsize that quickly due to hull breach is a car ferry, whose large open decks don't slow down the water migration and CAN quickly become unbalanced.
That by the way is why you hear of so many car carrying ferry boats sinking with great loss of life, but rarely if ever of a cruise ship in this day and age. Terrorists can't undo good engineering, even if they flip a few switches and pop a hole in the hull.
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raymondleggs
19 years ago
maybe the watertight doors were jammed partialy open or the bulkheads could have given way , if you watched thre movie , There was a scene in the longe where the explosion threw people of balance and the ship shook several times afterwords
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