Tyler, the problem here is that survivor accounts are notoriously contradictory and even when they agree, you still have the matter of trying to make sense of what you see, if anything, in the dark.don't believe in this theory. There's no valid in it. Forgive me for sounding mean, but I hate that loser, Roger Long. He know nothing about the Titanic, her passengers, crew, & Captain. His "theory" goes against every survivor accounts.
As a sailor myself, I know all too well just how deceptive it can be out there on the ocean, in the dark, even under ideal conditions, and with no moon out that night, conditions were not ideal.
There are survivor accounts which assert that the ship broke up and at least as many which assert that the ship went down intact. Since we have the wreck itself to go by, we know beyond question or debate that those who said the ship went down intact were just plain wrong.
What Roger Long did was nothing less then what any good scientist does and that was to work on the problem, run tests and mathamatical models to try and best explain what was [i]actually observed.
Regarding the angle of the break, that much is, I'll conceed, a matter of some controversy. The nature of science is that there is always some room for refining a theory or discarding it entirely if new evidence justifies doing so, and I think Mr. Long would be the very first to tell you that. What he never said was that the ship was weak. He suspected it may have been, but the testing data didn't support it and he conceeded as much.
The hull girder was well designed and plenty strong enough to take whatever the North Atlantic could dish out. What it wasn't strong enough to do was survive the consequences of human fallibility which stressed the hull to the breaking point.
I see. Forgive me, but I just going to say it. There two great things that Titanic sank: One is that she is with & not scrapped. Two, is that because of her & the people she took with, we now have lifeboats for everybody. If it wasn't for that, even Queen Mary wouldn't have eoungh boats for everyone. In fact, if Titanic didn't sink, it is doubtful that Queen Mary or any ship would have lifeboat at all. that said, I would like to say wow! To be in a lifeboat & see Titanic break the way she did would just be mezmaraising. Tyler J Frederick