This ship has twenty-four compartments below the water line. Fire-bulkheads protect passenger decks.
The 65,000-Ton, 23-Knot Imperator—Largest Ship Afloat
CHAPTER IX
WARSHIP PROTECTION AS APPLIED TO SOME OCEAN LINERS
It was shown in the previous chapter that the most completely protected vessel, so far as its flotation is concerned, is the warship, and plans were given of a battleship whose hull below the water-line was subdivided into no less than five hundred separate watertight compartments. Facts were cited from the naval operations in and around the harbour of Port Arthur, which prove that the battleship is capable of sustaining an enormous amount of injury below the water-line without going to the bottom.
Now, if it were possible to apply subdivision to the large ocean liners on the liberal scale on which it is worked out in ships of war, it would not be going too far to say that they would be absolutely unsinkable by any of the usual accidents of collision. The 60,000-ton Titanic, were she subdivided as minutely as the warship shown on page [143], would contain at least 1,500 separate compartments below her lower deck, and under these conditions even the long rent which was torn in her plating would have done no more than set her down slightly by the head. Her pumps would have taken care of the leakage of water through the bulkheads, and the ship would have come into New York harbour under her own steam.
But a warship and a passenger ship are two very different propositions. The one, being designed to resist the attack of an implacable enemy, who is using every weapon that the ingenuity of man can devise to effect its destruction, is built with little if any regard to the cost. The other, built as a commercial proposition for the purpose of earning reasonable dividends for its owners, and exposed only to such risks of damage as are incidental to ocean transportation, is constructed as economically as reasonable considerations of strength and safety may permit.
Another important limitation which renders it impossible to give a passenger ship the elaborate subdivision of a warship, is the necessity of providing large cargo spaces and wide hatchways for the convenient handling and stowage of the freight, upon which a large proportion of the passenger-carrying vessels chiefly depend for their revenue.