Lost in sea

I would like to introduce you to my very first English blog article. This is due to the fact that I am not intending to translate a quote I found on the internet and add my own commentary in German. It is easier to write the whole thing in English.
So, I am a fan of cracked.com. This is a website offering a lot of humorous and also serious, but always quite interesting lists of different things. One of these is called “6 small math errors that caused huge disasters”. The number one of this list: RMS Titanic. Read for yourself:

#1. The Titanic Sank Because the Center Propeller Wouldn't Reverse

There are dozens of theories about how the Titanic sinking could have been prevented, from those who say they should have just rammed the iceberg head-on instead of trying to steer around it, to not taunting God prior to its first voyage.

Human stupidity notwithstanding, most of the criticism focuses on the atrocious lack of safety features, but there is one obscure flaw that was intentionally designed.

The Laughably Simple Flaw: The center propeller didn't work in reverse

The Titanic had three steam-driven propellers, with the outer two driven by piston engines and the center screw driven by a steam turbine. Steam turbines have the advantage of generally being smaller and more efficient than their piston counterparts, but have the drawback of being one-way; that is, the steam can only flow forward and the shaft can only turn in one direction.
However, the center screw was directly in front of the rudder, and shutting it down meant less water was washing over the rudder, which crippled the ship's handling.

Well, that’s the text on that webpage. Until I read the part where it comes to that the rudder needs water to flow around to work properly, I would have said that time was by far not enough to stop the engines and make the ship go rearwards. The machines had a performance of almost 40,000 kW, and an engine with that performance built in that corner of time was quite big and the moving parts were really heavy. And if you also mind that the Titanic was travelling at full speed (25 mph, nautical mph to remind you) and tests made with the RMS Olympic (being almost identical to the Titanic) it turns out that even though there has been a machine commando there would have been no chance at all that the officers serving thought this one could have avoided the crash.
Well, it hasn’t been the intention of the author to disprove just that. His thoughts concentrated on the fact that the rudder didn’t get enough floating water to work as the situation needed it to. But my intention of this article is not to doubt even this theory by stating that the ship still travelled with 25 mph giving an impressive amount of water floating around every single outer part of the ship. It is the machinery. Let’s just say the author is right with his opinion. Then we can say the major malfunctioning part was the middle turbine. It was driven by steam, also called “hot gases” and was said to be smaller and stuff. Piston driven systems might be heavier, but with a piston system this catastrophe won’t have occurred.

Piston driven systems are better than systems being driven by hot gases.

And what did the US Army adapt in service in the middle 1960s, even though every other NATO nation did otherwise?

THE M16 USING A DIRECT IMPINGEMENT RELOADING SYSTEM

As everyone being a little confident with firearms knows, the AR-15 platform, well known by its fully automatic examples M16 and M4, uses a so-called direct impingement reloading system instead of a piston driven system. To everyone not being so confident: A rifle reloading itself uses ammunition being too strong to blow back the bolt by its simple recoil. It would tear apart the gun. The solution: At the front end of the barrel there is a little bore allowing gas to enter a thin tube to push some force directing to the back. It is the gun developer’s choice whether the gas goes the whole way through this tube and working directly on the bolt or whether it pushes on a thin piston that works on the bolt. Such a piston system is heavier because, well, it contains an additional metal manufactured part, but it doesn’t allow hot gases to enter the gun’s mechanism. Besides, this gas contains grime which lies down into that tube and into the bolt and the whole mechanism which gets the gun dirty after some time. That limits the self reloading and shooting abilities of the rifle after some (hundred or maybe thousand) shots without cleaning in between.

Every other well known military assault rifle uses a piston and therefore this is the system of choice of every army in the world not using the AR-15 platform. The Russian AK rifles: Piston. The Belgian FN FAL, also called the Kalashnikov of the west: Piston. Every rifle used by the German army (FN FAL, HK G3, HK G36 and several self loading marksman rifles): Piston. The Swiss rifles made by SIG Arms, used by the Swiss army and the papal Swiss Guard: Piston. The Austrian Steyr AUG (that fancy rifle used by German terrorists called Karl): Piston. Well, even the rifle used by the US Army before the M16 was ordered used a piston system.

The Army sucked.

Did you expect otherwise?