Even if they did build a titanic it could not be a very accurate replica. 1) It would of course need more lifeboats and I assume the modern sort would change the appearance of the ship. 2) There would be no steerage accommodation - which would change the ships layout. 3) What would they put in the gym, vintage equipment? I think not! 4) I think the original titanic did not have a Casino - would any company be brave enough to exclude a Casino? After all, the Casino is a ships most profitable public space. 5) Then there is the modern radar and antenna’s to add.
I'm sure a design compromise could be reached, if there was the will. But like you I'm not sure that Business investors will be convinced of its profitability. I think if the price and itineraries were right - it could be successful.

Malcolm

[ 09-16-2006: Message edited by: Malcolm @ cruisepage ]

As to the Queen Mary's replacement, I unfortunately have sparse, if any, details regarding the project. From what I've read, Cunard does not have plans to lay up the QE2 regardless of whether or not a new Queen Mary is built. We shall see.

The Iceberg will be a full scale replica of the one that the Titanic hit on its ill fated maiden voyage. It will be moored of Newfoundland and we anticipate that it will be visited by hundreds of cruise ships, a fitting memorial. Inside the 'berg', will be a state of the art multimedia entertainment centre, including ice rink, spa, restaurant, fitness centre and casino. It will accommodate 2000 people. The berg will be constructed of a rubberised material, just in case history repeats itself and a ship fails to spot it while in transit. Any collision will be harmlessly absorbed. Please send your donations for this exciting project to...;-)

(Maybe the best memorial to the survivors of this tragic disaster would be to let them rest in peace?)

Malcolm

[ 09-16-2006: Message edited by: Malcolm @ cruisepage ]

Hi folks, I've just resurrected the above post from 1998, because it amused me. It is probably one of my first posts to CruiseTalk (although the counter is wrong?). As you can see it is between Joe (BigUfan) and myself. The thing which amused me most was that the topics are the same ones that we have been talking about recently! Nothing changes.

As you can see, I'm talking some garbage as usual. Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-2359782,00.html

quote:

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New evidence suggests that the rescue of 1,500 people would have succeeded but for weak rivets that allowed the hull to 'unzip', Mark Henderson reports


THE most celebrated disaster in maritime history owed as much to substandard rivets as it did to the iceberg, an analysis of the sinking of the Titanic has revealed.
The liner would have survived the collision for long enough for most of, or even all, its passengers to be rescued had it not been put together with weak rivets that caused its hull to “unzip” on impact with the ice, according to the new research.

Although faulty construction has long been suspected as having contributed to the loss of RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, the first experiment to mimic what happened to the rivets that held the hull together has shown that they could not have withstood the collision.

This weakness meant that either five or six of the ship’s watertight compartments flooded, causing the ship to sink in slightly more than two hours. With stronger rivets, fewer compartments would have been compromised, and although Titanic would probably still have sunk it would have remained afloat for several hours longer.

As Carpathia arrived to assist Titanic less than two hours after she went down, most of the 1,523 people who died might have been saved.

The new evidence has emerged from an experiment by two metallurgists. Tim Foecke, of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Maryland, and Jennifer Hooper McCarty, of Oregon Health and Science University, first developed the rivet theory after examining 48 popped rivets from the wreck. This showed that the wrought iron contained 9 per cent slag — a glass-like substance that adds strength at concentrations of 2 to 3 per cent but weakens metal at higher levels.

To test whether this extra slag weakened the rivets, Dr Foecke commissioned Chris Topp, a blacksmith from Carlton Husthwaite, North Yorkshire, to make rivets to the same specifications. These were then used to join 1in steel plates such as those in the hull of the Titanic. When the plates were bent in the laboratory, the rivet heads popped off at loads of about 4,000kg (9,000lb). With the right slag content, they should have lasted until a load of about 9,000kg.

Dr Foecke said: “We don’t know the exact shape of the iceberg so we can’t be sure of the forces involved, but it’s clear that many more rivets would have broken than should have done.”

Even a few failures because of flawed metal would have been sufficient to “unzip” entire seams. As faulty rivets popped, more stress would have been placed on the good ones, causing them to break as well.

“As they failed, a domino effect ensued, distributing the increased loads to other rivets until the damaged seams began to open up,” Dr Foecke said.

Dr Foecke’s analysis of metal recovered from the wreck has also overturned another popular theory about the sinking: that the ship’s hull ruptured as it was made from brittle steel. Mechanical tests “show adequate fracture toughness in the steel at ice-water temeratures, fairly close to steels used to build bulk-carrier ships today”, he said. “The brittle steel theory does not stand up to close scrutiny, and is wrong.”

The iceberg did not cause a gash. A series of bouncing impacts popped open rivets along the bow, creating small openings. Dr Foecke said: “Witnesses recalled water trickling through the ship’s side, not enough to be considered continuous, but a steady pour on to the deck floors. This is consistent with the notion of seams that steadily bulged open as rivets failed, rather than a gaping hole produced by plate fracture, but it doesn’t explain how so much water filled the ship so quickly.”

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The findings are included in a National Geographic Channel investigation to be screened next week.

Seconds From Disaster: Titanic, on Tuesday at 9pm, National Geographic Channel

[ 09-16-2006: Message edited by: desirod7 ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Malcolm:
There is talk of a new Titanic liner being built, there is also talk of a new Cunard Tranatlantic liner called 'Queen Mary'. What do the readers of Cruise Talk think of these ideas?

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Back to the topic. So, they discovered that the rivets are to blame. I'm OK with this, but I wonder if they compared it to nowadays standards or to 1912 standards. I'm not sure if the technology to accurately check slag concentration was already available back in 1912, and if not, it's not Titanic rivets which were in fault, it was simply the scientific knowledge of the era.

quote:

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Originally posted by Linerrich:
It's interesting that these flaws did not manifest themselves in sister-ship OLYMPIC. She sailed successfully for 24 years and survived collisions with both the HMS HAWKE and the Nantucket Lightship.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Pascal:
I noticed that "Joe at PwC" was a very regular poster who eventually disappeared. Nice to learn he's still around as BigUfan.

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Why, thanks Pascal. I appreciate that.

That’s a lot for a menu, but then there is no limit to the fascination with the Titanic. Indeed, I found myself leaning over to read what the first-class passengers on that maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City ate on April 14, 1912, a century ago next month.

There was cockie leekie (a soup of fowl and leeks); egg à l’Argenteuil (scrambled eggs with asparagus tips); veal and ham pie; Norwegian anchovies; corned ox tongue; grilled mutton chops with mashed, fried or baked jacket potatoes; and custard pudding. Recommended libation: iced draught Munich lager.

Somehow all this was captivating, glimpsed on the London Underground one hundred years later. I could see Ruth Dodge of San Francisco, wife of Washington Dodge, a successful banker, mother of Washington Jr., slipping the menu into her purse, a small memento, as she then thought, of a happy interlude.

I say “happy interlude,” but of course I cannot be sure of that, even before disaster struck the great liner and turned those mutton chops into something more.

Whether or not this was in fact your last lunch depended heavily on your sex. Only 33 percent of the men in first class survived, whereas 97 percent of the women in the same class did. “Women and children first” meant something. The overall survival rate for men was 20 percent against 74 percent for women. The lower your class of travel, the lower your chances were.

But of course these numbers are the product of hindsight. The Dodges had no idea what was about to happen to them; none of the more than 2,200 people aboard did. Life, as Kierkegaard noted, is lived forward but understood backward — if you are still around to comprehend it.

Looking back at the Titanic’s doomed load — the high fliers with successful lives, and the humble headed for the New World in search of one — is like looking back at old black-and-white photographs. We are struck above all by how ephemeral the expressions, so full of vitality in the moment, are; and indeed by the brevity of the lives themselves. It was Roland Barthes who observed that, “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

In the case of the Titanic, catastrophe came with an inconceivable swiftness. What, I wondered on that crowded Tube, is it that explains our fascination? In part it is this rapid transition from purring routine to panicked disarray, the same on the Titanic a century ago as in the Twin Towers a decade ago, with similar countdowns from impact to implosion leaving an hour or two for agonized reflection, and the way this reminds us of the maelstrom always lurking behind order. The Titanic was unsinkable. Its fate therefore proves that nothing is.

Perhaps the menu suggests another factor in our fascination. The Titanic sank at the end of an era and on the eve of Europe’s catastrophe.

Today, the very language — cockie leekie or grilled mutton (not lamb) chops — evokes the twilight of the Edwardian era, before the eruption of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and before the clash of classes and ideologies that the various decks on the Titanic contrived to keep at bay. That clash would become the tragic heart of the 20th century. At dinner in first class that evening the seventh course was roast squab and cress: enough said.

Today, early in another century again marked by war, we do not know how far the era-changing event of 2001 will cast its shadow. But again, as in the muddle on the Titanic, we have people second-guessing the second guesses of people who themselves do not know, and the potential for disaster in at least one region of the world is real.

On this anniversary there are new TV series and books about the Titanic. James Cameron’s movie is being released in 3D. You can hardly turn on the radio in London without hearing Celine Dion. There are memorial cruises — some at 50 percent off! — departing from New York and Southampton to the site where 1,517 souls were lost (many, as in the Twin Towers, without any trace ever being found.)

I have no doubt that in 2101 there will be a similar frenzy of commemoration of 9/11, delivered to any device you choose or even direct to your brain via the chip in your left forearm. I am not unhappy that I will not be there to see it.

Theodor Adorno, the German sociologist, remarked that memory is the only help left to the dead. “They pass away into it,” he wrote, “and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.”

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Originally posted by LeBarryboat:
when it visits ports around the world...all to raise money and awareness of children in need. It's very noble to have this dream to help the children of the world with a giant ocean liner, but as I told him face-to-face, it's not reasonable, and that maybe he should start with leasing a large ship, refitting it and pursue his big dream gradually. So what do people here on CT think of this guys idea? And what would you say to him if you met him face-to-face?

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Born in 1867 to Irish immigrants in Hannibal, Mo., Brown struck it rich, with her husband, from a Colorado gold mine years before she boarded the Titanic, and in later years, she fought for women's suffrage and labor rights.

No one called her Molly during her lifetime – her name was Margaret – and biographer Kristen Iversen, author of "Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth," writes that there's no proof she ever referred to herself as "unsinkable." The nickname seems to have originated with a Denver gossip columnist who may have been mad that Brown gave her account of the Titanic disaster to a newspaper in Newport, R.I., where she also spent time. Iversen says two books written in the 1930s created the image of Brown as a gun-packing, wisecracking former saloon girl, accounts that became the basis of the Broadway play and later the 1964 musical starring Reynolds. Molly Brown also appears in James Cameron's "Titanic," portrayed by Kathy Bates.

Brown eventually separated from her husband and, unlike on screen, they never reunited. That gave her the freedom to indulge in travel, and in 1912, she headed to Egypt with John Jacob Astor and his wife. She cut the trip short to visit her ailing grandson back in the U.S., and set sail on the Titanic from France, where the ship made one stop to pick up passengers and provisions.

Brown wrote that she was watching from a deck after the Titanic hit the iceberg and was thrown into lifeboat No. 6. She rowed all night with its mostly female crew until the rescue ship Carpathia arrived.

Before the disaster, Brown was well known in the Mile High City for her charity and social reform work, such as fundraising to build Immaculate Conception Cathedral and mountain camps for poor children and orphans. After the sinking, she gained fame for raising money from rich Titanic survivors to help poorer passengers, making sure they had a place to go when they got to New York.

In 1914, she was called on to help ease tensions after 20 people, including women and children, died when the National Guard opened fire on striking coal miners and set fire to a tent colony in Ludlow, an operation owned by John D. Rockefeller. Brown also helped with relief efforts during World War I and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1914, six years before women could vote nationally.

The museum, a few blocks from the state Capitol, is offering Titanic-themed tours this year and some recent visitors sang songs from the musical on the front porch as they waited to begin. At the end, they were surprised to learn that Brown, despite having just an eighth-grade education, spoke several languages – which came in handy with the Titanic's international collection of passengers – and had planned to take another trip on the Titanic, in part to take advantage of its well-stocked library.

Some of her own books are included in the museum's library, which like the rest of the home is lit by dim 15-watt bulbs like the ones she used. Upstairs, there's a copy of Brown's Titanic insurance claim, recording the loss of items including 14 hats, "street furs" and a $20,000 necklace. There are no Titanic items in the stone Victorian – which was saved from demolition in 1970 – thought there is a binnacle, a nonmagnetic stand that held navigational instruments, from the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

Brown followed her brother to the mining town of Leadville, Colo., when she was 18 and got a job in a dry goods store. After marrying mining engineer J.J. Brown, she moved out of town to be closer to the mines during the winter.

Janet Kalstrom, a retired banking project manager who has been the museum's Brown impersonator for six years, said that the five-mile trip is a rough 45 minutes by four-wheel drive today and may hold some clues to Brown's toughness.

"Adventure ran in her blood so the strength and courage came from just plugging away," she said.

Brown died in 1932 in New York City while pursuing another lifelong passion – acting.

To mark the Titanic anniversary, the museum is hosting a six-course meal, like first-class ship passengers might have had, on April 14 at Denver's historic Oxford Hotel. Brown's great-granddaughter, Muffet Laurie Brown – the daughter of the baby grandchild Brown was rushing home to see – will attend the benefit gala. In August, the museum plans a more affordable Steerage Class Shindig, featuring beer and an Irish band.

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