A Titanic Conspiracy?

I'm not 100% on this information but as far as I know HMS Hawk had an old-school battering ram which pierced a large hole in the side of the Olympic. The Olympic had to be dry-docked and fixed and it was rumoured to be a shoddy repair, the hole in place supposidly resembled a similar hole caused by the iceberg- a possibility that on first impact the hole gave away and may have sliced the ship in two like a can of sardines.

The insurance became void after the impact with HMS Hawk because the ship had effectively broken it's back and would never sail again safely.

Sadly there is some very compelling evidence to debunk this myth. Only recently Channel 5 /Sky in the UK screened a very comprehesive doc about the conspiracy and included ex Harland Designers and Marine specialists. The crux comes down to the ammount of material recovered from the wreck bearing the code numbers belonging to the Titanic. Like most big engineering projects and ships especially (when the are built side by side) the parts manufactured are coded to a particular vessel. Given the machining skills taken to build the Titanic most parts were custom made and coded as such. What has been rocovered tends to still carry the Titanics code number - including one of the screws. These could not easily have been switched having been desinged for a specific propshaft configuration and balance

Without being tooo rude about it my dad (who designed and built ships for a living and worked at Harlands) simply convulses with laughter at this theory. The legend tends to be based in part on the word of mouth of some guy called "Paddy" as seamen who surfaced years after the Titanic went down - and whos testimony is very dubious at best.

For those who want to seek the answer there is plenty of primary source material to go at without looking at published works and a visit to Belfast offers some great opportunities to see some of the recovered artifacts first hand as well.

To add the largest portion of the Titanic recovered has pretty much proved conclusively to belong to the ship owing to its configuration of portholes - an extra small port having been cut to accomodate an additional "head" in one of the state rooms - and engineering ammendment totally unique to Titanic and one not shared by any of its sister ships.

reply to post by Silk

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I dont know where you get your information from but the "so called Olympic"was stripped in Jarrow,Tyneside around 1936 and dismantled in Scotland soon after

I think that the Titanic should be raised above the ocean. Peoples are interested in the Titanic and seeing her above the water will allow peoples imagination sink deeper, and they will imagine what it was like to be aboard the Titanic when she was on her maiden voyage up to the day she sunk with tragic loss.

Titanic was largely covered by White Star's in-house insurance fund, so are we to believe they robbed themselves? White Star never benefited financially from the sinking.

That, combined with Titanic's yard number visible on the wreckage and the enormous impracticalities involved in making the switch (keeping a secret among thousands of shipyard workers?) spell out serious "ouch" for the conspiracy theory.




[edit on 7-1-2009 by nscopheacriaaclters]

reply to post by Anonymous ATS

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i see your point because i am a huge titanic fan also and would love to see the titanic, but for many people its considered a brial ground for them, and you have to respect that.

reply to post by MorningtonCrescent

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I just have a few questions about your conspiracy theory. I am doing a research project on the titanic, and in my research i have found a few things that i think are very interesting. First of all, i thought it was interesting that the two ships were built side by side, 3 months apart. Also since they were built so closely together, they painted the hull of the Titanic black, and the Olympic, white. They did so, in order to make it easier for the builders to tell them apart. So this is a pretty big visual difference that people would notice if they switched them."

If you have any advice for me in doing my project, email me at

amelia_frazier8@eku.edu

I am on the line of conspiracy theory or a legit sinking.... but "thebestpageintheuniverse" .....sheesh, the ice blocks in the bathtub bashing against them with a model? As far as his "to scale" claim.... geez, even if it was to scale the mass of each object doesn't hold. I'm sure he built everything in each compartment of his model ship to scale down the mass? Much less what scale the iceberg that was struck. I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that nobody knows the mass of the iceberg that was stuck. If the iceberg were of a larger mass, even given the rate of speed of the ship.... the iceberg moves a bit, and it WILL cause damage. You can't claim the title of "bestpageintheuniverse" over silly models in a bathtub with some floating ice you made in your freezer.... unless you have a couple bucks to claim a domain name

Better get back to your laptop, kiddo!

What do people make of the fact that all surviving crew were immediately rounded up on their return home by two directors of the White Star Line and a senior government representative?