Nav wrote:
Doug, apparently he did not reverse the order. See:

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org...an_collins.pdf

Encyclopedia Titanica is a great web site. If you poke around, you'll
find a couple of contributions I've made to it.

As for whether Murdoch did or did not order the helm reversed: the above
cited article is taken solely from the Inquiries, which came to several
notably (possibly deliberately?) erroneous conclusions. Hichins would be
in a position to know, so there's no point in arguing with him...
although it should be noted that he made several mistakes in his testimony.

BTW the oft-quoted estimate of 37 seconds is based on Hichins testimony
that the Titanic had turned "about" 2 points before hitting the berg.
The U.S. Inquiry made underway tests with the RMS Olympic to determine
the time & distance this would have taken, and this is the origin of
that figure. Its accuracy is a very open question.



It would seem that reversing the engines to full power would have been
a mistake that would have reduced rudder effectiveness.

Funny they should say that, and it is corrected in another article on
that same web site. More below.


Cheers


otnmbrd wrote:
Coupla points:

1. When he shifted the rudder, from (new world) hard port to hard stbd,
the ship would continue to swing to port for a time before starting to
swing to stbd. It's a matter of timing and conjecture as to whether his
was right or wrong.

Yes, the ship was almost 900' long and 70,000 tons of mass. Not going to
stop on a dime; nor turn on one. It would also take the steering engine
some seconds to put the rudder from hard over one way to hard over the
other.

Certainly if the ship had maintained a turn to port throughout the
collision, the impact area along the hull would have been longer.


2. Putting the engines astern on a ship that is running full speed, is
not the fastest of processes, so he probably still had good steering
power ... i.e., doubt they got the engines stopped and started astern
prior to collision.

Here is where things get tricky- the Titanic and her sister ships had a
rather unusual engine arrangement. She had triple screws, the outboard
ones driven by big reciprocating engines (in fact, the largest ever
built). Her central prop was driven by the exhaust from these engines
into a big turbine which was not reversible. The recips had a valve
train lever to shift into reverse very quickly, which was linked to a
set of valves bypassing the central turbine.

So if the Titanic was ordered astern (another seperate issue... the few
survivors among the engineroom & boiler room crew gave testimony that
she was not reversed), the central engine would have freewheeled and not
affected the rudder.

It is also very likely that if the order was given to go astern, that it
could not have been effectively engaged in reverse in the short time
before impact.

For people interested in the matter, there is a very large amount of
good info available on the web.

Regards
Doug King