Posted on 01/05/2017 1:48:18 PM PST by Red Badger
***Ever boil water in a paper cup on a campfire as a scout? ***
When I worked in a steel fabrication plant, I filled a large paper cup with water and put in a steel heating furnace. The lit the gas. The flame was so hot the edges burned away, the paraffin coating melted and the water boiled. Only as the water level slowly dropped, then the edges on top would burn.
with an overheated flat plate, water dripped on it will jump, work it’s way into little balls and bounce and roll off as the steam will not allow the heated steel to cool fast enough. Eventually it does cool then the water will do it’s job of removing heat. In the cold Atlantic water, I have no doubt the water would have kept the steel cool.
In power plants, we found compressing and packing down the coal will prevent coal fires.
***they were substandard and not up to specs,***
Lots of steel back then was substandard. I remember reading that when building the Brooklyn Bridge (or was it Washington bridge) one of the very large cables broke as it was not up to required standards.
“Lots of steel back then was substandard.”
The same brittle steel was used in the Hood and contributed to its extremely rapid sinking. If I recall, it was built at the same shipyard as the Titanic.
Another interesting factoid. General Hatcher (Hatcher’s Notebook) talks about trying to determine why the original 03 Springfield receivers shattered due to being brittle.
They determined that the heat treaters were determining temperature by color and on cloudy rainy days the colors were different than on sunny days. If I recall they solved the problem by covering the skylights among other things.
The Soviet commander of the sub that sank the Gustloff was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.
Kind of an up yours to newly reunified Germany, IMO.
Correlation is not causation. Just because there was a coal fire at the point of impact does not necessarily mean the coal fire caused the breach. Or the collision. The hull also had paint at the point of impact, but I doubt paint was responsible for it either.
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