Does anyone know why that configuration? It made no sense, and doomed the ship.
In retrospect, we do shake our heads that the top of the bulkheads weren't capped. But back in 1912, the Titanic was the safest design on the ocean by far, despite the uncapped bulkheads.
It was calculated that if the Titanic was broadsided, or hit an iceberg in a collision, the damage would be contained to one or two compartments out of the 16 that comprised the hull's bulkheads. It was known as fact that the Titanic could stay afloat with four or less compartments breached.
So, it would take an
enormous impact to breach 5 compartments... unless the ship had some sort of unusual scraping gash over a long distance that opened up 5 or more compartments to the sea...
The very unusual way that that the berg opened up a relatively small gash along a fairly long length of the hull is just one of the half dozen of odd circumstances that described the metric cluster fuck that was the Titanic.
It's much easier to fix a problem *after* it's known. For 70 years of air travel, the cockpit of an airplane was a door or even curtains. It wasn't until a group of assholes decided that they would meet their god and take a few hundred people with them by cutting the throats of pilots and flying those planes into buildings. Right after that: reinforced and locked cockpit doors..
After Titanic foundered, ship designers realized that a relatively small damage over a large area could doom a ship, something they either hadn't considered or thought that such an odd way of damaging the ship was such a long shot it wasn't worth mitigating with more steel. After the tragic less of Titanic's loss proved this type of damage was possible, ships were retrofitted when possible and new designs capped off the top of bulkheads.
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