Seems like yachts are kind of like the private airline industry- when a super rich person can afford to request a bespoke design, safety requirements sometimes get eased. Plus less testing of the boat could be it. Pilots and captains for unique designs/mods might not have as much experience as commercial airlines: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/is-flying-private-mor... One example is the standardization of buttons in an airplane make it easier to know where to locate the important latches in an emergency.
Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago- it's when a novel feature gets prioritized that the fundamental stability of the design gets overlooked.
> Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago
To nitpick, properly being able to do these kinds of stability calculations are a considerably newer invention. E.g. the famous Vasa ship capsized in 1628 because at that time ships were still designed based on rules-of-thumb and the experience/intuition of the builders, with no stability calculations done.
Pretty sure the builders knew the Vasa wasn't stable.
The King of Sweden wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.
Just 358 years later,
the people in charge of a different kind of ship,
named Challenger,
also wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.
Didn't bother to read the domain and didn't remember the boats name, so I didn't quite understand the title at first. Funnily, it immediately occurred to me, that it must be "that boat", but I half-expected to see some Alex Jones meets Eliezer Yudkowsky attempt to calculate how likely this stuff is to happen using Bayesian inference.
one of the quickest ways to ruin the way an established boat plan 'swims' is by adding a tall rig after de-masting.
it's extremely enticing to 'add more sail' to a boat in order to squeeze more speed out of it, or achieve easier lufting.
turns out that marine architecture is a lot harder than one thinks at first glance, and just about everyone that tries to tweak specs afterwards does so in such a way that makes the boat categorically worse.
(don't ask me how I came to realize this after many dollars spent)
the joke is, "the 2nd best day of your life is the day you buy your boat" which makes the listener think "2nd? oh, must be after your wedding/birth of child"
and then you say "the 1st best day is when you sell it"
This is true in many things. Most car mods make the car objectively worse unless you really need the niche thing the mod does - and even if you think you do, be really sure.
I'm a full-time RVer and see this all the time with diesel trucks. The trucks get "deleted" and modded for more power and to disable the DEF system. Almost everyone I've known throughout the years begins having transmission trouble within months, especially after heavy load. A few swear by it. I've got a very expensive Cummins and I'm hellbent to leave it stock (and under warranty).
The U.S. diesel tuning crowd seemingly never discuss air/fuel ratios. This is a huge mistake. Also it's important to understand how much torque your transmission is rated for and to not stray beyond it. It's possible to reliably extract more performance than the manufacturer supplied but you have to understand what you're getting into. Turning it up to 11 and "rolling coal" is gonna get expensive, and it's super dumb.
the issue isnt that they disabled their DEF system or deleted their DPF or EGR, it's that they probably installed new ECUs or flashed new fuel maps or something and boosted the power beyond the torque abilities of the transmission attached. In a lot of diesel RVs the transmissions are normally good to 2,000lb-ft, but the engines can be pushed beyond that pretty easily.
AFAIU modern diesels have lower combustion temperatures in order to limit NOx formation. I imagine this comes at a cost in thermodynamic efficiency.
Similarly particle filters, catalytic converters and whatnot reduce efficiency via exhaust backpressure.
So all in all, reducing non-CO2 emissions do come at a cost in CO2 emissions (or fuel consumed, if you like). Is it as much as 15%? No idea.. And is it all worth it? I'd argue yes, old-school diesel exhaust is nasty stuff.
Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
As for your later point...I very much concur. I started masking (n95) during the pandemic, and haven't stopped. I have a... large number of health issues including several respiratory ones. Exhaust in general really is nasty stuff. I live in pretty quiet smallish (100k) town, and it can be bad enough around here with all the pollen, but I wasnt recently on a whirlwind trip through the north east that saw me visit the dense urban cores of DC, Philly, Manhattan, and Boston. The difference in odor on the occasions I'd take my mask off on the sidewalk were kinda shocking as someone not used to it.
> Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
Not sure what you're arguing here. Isn't it quite obvious that resistance in the exhaust system means that the engine has to do more work to push the exhaust gases out; work that otherwise could be used to turn the crankshaft. Now of course a lot of that extra energy is wasted in any case, particularly if there's nothing like a turbocharger to make use of it.
In my final high school years, my parents gifted me a 1980 Corolla, and it became my experimental electronics lab for a while.
I installed a pull-out stereo, a separate amplifier, various permanent and movable speakers, etc. I mostly had the pros installed them, but I was always tweaking things at the wire-harness level. I enjoyed my music EXTRA LOUD, with minimal distortion.
And I had one of those basic aftermarket alarm systems. And there I was, constantly tripping the alarm for various reasons, and we lived in a safe neighborhood, so it was mostly an additional annoyance when I set it off, or armed it, or disarmed it: I was being super ostentatious.
So my proudest DIY mod was to install a shiny toggle switch in the dashboard. The toggle switch had the sole function of disabling the alarm by cutting its power. So I basically handed it to the crooks who came along in a few weeks to steal all my cassettes. But honestly, I doubt that anyone on that block was sorry to see me separated from my music at that point.
Pretty ironic that the single mast, that was added for sailing speed, was the likely cause yet they never used the sails. They just enjoyed it looking imposing and different.
“Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was ‘unsinkable.’”
I assign a rather low prior probability to any ship being “unsinkable”, so I’ll need better evidence than that before my posterior probability becomes more than minuscule
Were mistakes made? The retractable keel was up. I'm no grizzled mariner, but that feels like a thing you'd want to do in a storm. Feels like at that point your yacht has all the stability of a guy standing up in a canoe.
I sail a 1962 Block Island 40[1] with a retractable bronze centerboard. Granted, it's no mega yacht, but it has an aluminum mast that is at the thinnest 3/16" because at the time people didn't understand the material and were afraid of it. The main boom is a solid wood tree trunk that takes 3 of us to rig every year. Its solid fiberglass hull is 2" thick at the keel, tapering to about 1" at the toe rail, with solid fiberglass decks tapering from about 1" at the rail to about 3/8" where they meet the cabin top. In other words, this is a heavy, overbuilt, brick shithouse of a boat. But it's designed well and has enough ballast to be safe with the board retracted.
The fact that the keel was up is no excuse at all.
Adjacently, one glaring omission from the Times' coverage was reports of those gigantic cabin windows shattering. I wish they'd addressed that. I didn't know about the unseaworthy vents, but just looking at the pictures it seemed obvious that if you put that boat on its ear in any kind of weather you'd break those windows and sink.
I've had my boat with the rail 2' under water in 6'+ choppy Buzzards Bay conditions gusting over 30kt and it was a hoot. When I imagine a floating hotel like the craft in the article in a similar situation, that's probably a fatality. I wouldn't be able to sleep onboard a boat like that.
EDIT: There are also numerous examples in the historical record of whaling ships, clipper ships, war ships, merchant ships, and the like getting knocked down in storms and besides maybe crew being washed overboard and busted rigging getting through it relatively unscathed. It's absolutely inexcusable and shameful in the year 2024 for this to happen.
It's pretty shocking that a boat with no sail area could get knocked over bad enough to sink that quickly. Something had to be seriously wrong with the design. I'm not particularly salty, but I've sailed in 25-30kts with the rail buried and not even had a second thought about the boat sinking. I've been knocked down with full sails up in 25kts, and had a broach while racing -- sailboats can be expected to spend at least brief amounts of time on their side, even if you're not out doing anything particularly dumb. I just can't fathom how a boat wouldn't be able to survive 2 minutes on its side and still be signed off by a builder.
Presumably the thinking was that with all the sails down, there was no need to have the keel lowered. Which it probably wasn't, until the boat suddenly gets hit hard by an unexpected gust from the side and the windage of the rig is sufficient to capsize it.
As a slight aside, if anyone is interested in the topic the 'standard' introductory text is apparently 'Principles of Yacht Design' by Larsson and Eliasson. In particular, including a chapter on stability calculations. You can find an older edition freely available on archive.org.
The rumour I heard on “The Yacht Report” youtube channel is that when the retractable keel was down it was noisy. (Probably because there was enough play in the mechanism so it was banging around as the waves passed.) And the thought was, again according to this unverified rumour, that they only needed to extend the retractable keel when they had the sails up.
Now obviously nobody sane would make the knowing trade to risk their life for a bit of quiet. But it is easy to imagine the crew getting into the habit of retracting the keel so they can keep the rich guests comfortable. And especially if they were doing that on the regular and nothing bad happened ever people would normalise it and see it as the correct operating procedure. One might view this as a form of normalisation of deviance. “The gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behaviour is repeated without catastrophic results, it becomes the social norm for the organisation.”
(Technically speaking of course it is only normalisation of deviance if this was unacceptable practice. If it is true that the ship’s operating manual did not require them to have the keel down in that configuration then it is not deviance and then the term does not apply.)
Will be interesting to read the exact findings about this in the investigation report once it is out.
I thought the keel only needed to be down when they were something like 70 knots out at sea with the sails out, otherwise it was in the 'keel lite' position.
Like yourself, I await the investigation report, however, I suspect that will be a bit underwhelming and only confirm speculation. It is not good to speak ill of the dead, so it will take a lot longer before someone tells the unvarnished truth. I suspect that will be a story of folly, with the big mast being the 'invisible clothes'.
We have lots of these stories at the moment, from Oceangate all the way to the Boeing 'projects' that have been off the mark. You could 'explain it like I am five' to write a really good story book for bedtime reading for kids, going from the depths of the ocean to space, with follies that follow the same story, all the way. What a great time to be alive.
NY Times found that an unusually tall mast, and the design changes it required, made the superyacht Bayesian, owned by a tech billionaire Michael Lynch, vulnerable. Lynch co-founded Autonomy and was celebrating his court case against HP when his yacht sank.
I guess this is about moments of inertia of boats, but all it left me wondering is why a guy still counts among the ultra-rich after doing nothing his whole life other than a gigantic, notorious fraud.
Seems like yachts are kind of like the private airline industry- when a super rich person can afford to request a bespoke design, safety requirements sometimes get eased. Plus less testing of the boat could be it. Pilots and captains for unique designs/mods might not have as much experience as commercial airlines: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/is-flying-private-mor... One example is the standardization of buttons in an airplane make it easier to know where to locate the important latches in an emergency.
Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago- it's when a novel feature gets prioritized that the fundamental stability of the design gets overlooked.
> Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago
To nitpick, properly being able to do these kinds of stability calculations are a considerably newer invention. E.g. the famous Vasa ship capsized in 1628 because at that time ships were still designed based on rules-of-thumb and the experience/intuition of the builders, with no stability calculations done.
Pretty sure the builders knew the Vasa wasn't stable. The King of Sweden wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Just 358 years later, the people in charge of a different kind of ship, named Challenger, also wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.
Didn't bother to read the domain and didn't remember the boats name, so I didn't quite understand the title at first. Funnily, it immediately occurred to me, that it must be "that boat", but I half-expected to see some Alex Jones meets Eliezer Yudkowsky attempt to calculate how likely this stuff is to happen using Bayesian inference.
Or A.W.F. Edwards claiming that had it been the Frequentist, the boat wouldn't have sunk.
I was expecting something like "stochastic terrorism", but targeting rich people exclusively in a play on "a rising tide that lifts only yachts".
In order to determine the likelihood that the yacht has sunk, we must first examine our priors.
one of the quickest ways to ruin the way an established boat plan 'swims' is by adding a tall rig after de-masting.
it's extremely enticing to 'add more sail' to a boat in order to squeeze more speed out of it, or achieve easier lufting.
turns out that marine architecture is a lot harder than one thinks at first glance, and just about everyone that tries to tweak specs afterwards does so in such a way that makes the boat categorically worse.
(don't ask me how I came to realize this after many dollars spent)
Sounds like the old maxim around boat ownership still holds: "the two best days in boat ownership are the day you buy it and the day you sell it" :^)
the joke is, "the 2nd best day of your life is the day you buy your boat" which makes the listener think "2nd? oh, must be after your wedding/birth of child"
and then you say "the 1st best day is when you sell it"
rug pull
We used say boat stood for. Break out another thousand
This is true in many things. Most car mods make the car objectively worse unless you really need the niche thing the mod does - and even if you think you do, be really sure.
I'm a full-time RVer and see this all the time with diesel trucks. The trucks get "deleted" and modded for more power and to disable the DEF system. Almost everyone I've known throughout the years begins having transmission trouble within months, especially after heavy load. A few swear by it. I've got a very expensive Cummins and I'm hellbent to leave it stock (and under warranty).
DEF system: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid>
(Emissions control, reduces NOx in diesel exhaust.)
The U.S. diesel tuning crowd seemingly never discuss air/fuel ratios. This is a huge mistake. Also it's important to understand how much torque your transmission is rated for and to not stray beyond it. It's possible to reliably extract more performance than the manufacturer supplied but you have to understand what you're getting into. Turning it up to 11 and "rolling coal" is gonna get expensive, and it's super dumb.
the issue isnt that they disabled their DEF system or deleted their DPF or EGR, it's that they probably installed new ECUs or flashed new fuel maps or something and boosted the power beyond the torque abilities of the transmission attached. In a lot of diesel RVs the transmissions are normally good to 2,000lb-ft, but the engines can be pushed beyond that pretty easily.
I swear the older pre-def cummins engines got like 15% more mpg than the def ones. but RVs have been getting heavier too.
AFAIU modern diesels have lower combustion temperatures in order to limit NOx formation. I imagine this comes at a cost in thermodynamic efficiency.
Similarly particle filters, catalytic converters and whatnot reduce efficiency via exhaust backpressure.
So all in all, reducing non-CO2 emissions do come at a cost in CO2 emissions (or fuel consumed, if you like). Is it as much as 15%? No idea.. And is it all worth it? I'd argue yes, old-school diesel exhaust is nasty stuff.
Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
As for your later point...I very much concur. I started masking (n95) during the pandemic, and haven't stopped. I have a... large number of health issues including several respiratory ones. Exhaust in general really is nasty stuff. I live in pretty quiet smallish (100k) town, and it can be bad enough around here with all the pollen, but I wasnt recently on a whirlwind trip through the north east that saw me visit the dense urban cores of DC, Philly, Manhattan, and Boston. The difference in odor on the occasions I'd take my mask off on the sidewalk were kinda shocking as someone not used to it.
> Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
Not sure what you're arguing here. Isn't it quite obvious that resistance in the exhaust system means that the engine has to do more work to push the exhaust gases out; work that otherwise could be used to turn the crankshaft. Now of course a lot of that extra energy is wasted in any case, particularly if there's nothing like a turbocharger to make use of it.
In my final high school years, my parents gifted me a 1980 Corolla, and it became my experimental electronics lab for a while.
I installed a pull-out stereo, a separate amplifier, various permanent and movable speakers, etc. I mostly had the pros installed them, but I was always tweaking things at the wire-harness level. I enjoyed my music EXTRA LOUD, with minimal distortion.
And I had one of those basic aftermarket alarm systems. And there I was, constantly tripping the alarm for various reasons, and we lived in a safe neighborhood, so it was mostly an additional annoyance when I set it off, or armed it, or disarmed it: I was being super ostentatious.
So my proudest DIY mod was to install a shiny toggle switch in the dashboard. The toggle switch had the sole function of disabling the alarm by cutting its power. So I basically handed it to the crooks who came along in a few weeks to steal all my cassettes. But honestly, I doubt that anyone on that block was sorry to see me separated from my music at that point.
The one good thing about the sinking of the Bayesian: we can at least update our posteriors.
And I know I'll fail at trying to understand it.
Pretty ironic that the single mast, that was added for sailing speed, was the likely cause yet they never used the sails. They just enjoyed it looking imposing and different.
“Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was ‘unsinkable.’”
I assign a rather low prior probability to any ship being “unsinkable”, so I’ll need better evidence than that before my posterior probability becomes more than minuscule
Everything is unsinkable if you exclude the sinking conditions as "improper operation".
“Operated correctly” is the true scotsman of unsinkable ships.
Just don't crash it into an iceberg and you're all set.
Were mistakes made? The retractable keel was up. I'm no grizzled mariner, but that feels like a thing you'd want to do in a storm. Feels like at that point your yacht has all the stability of a guy standing up in a canoe.
I sail a 1962 Block Island 40[1] with a retractable bronze centerboard. Granted, it's no mega yacht, but it has an aluminum mast that is at the thinnest 3/16" because at the time people didn't understand the material and were afraid of it. The main boom is a solid wood tree trunk that takes 3 of us to rig every year. Its solid fiberglass hull is 2" thick at the keel, tapering to about 1" at the toe rail, with solid fiberglass decks tapering from about 1" at the rail to about 3/8" where they meet the cabin top. In other words, this is a heavy, overbuilt, brick shithouse of a boat. But it's designed well and has enough ballast to be safe with the board retracted.
The fact that the keel was up is no excuse at all.
Adjacently, one glaring omission from the Times' coverage was reports of those gigantic cabin windows shattering. I wish they'd addressed that. I didn't know about the unseaworthy vents, but just looking at the pictures it seemed obvious that if you put that boat on its ear in any kind of weather you'd break those windows and sink.
I've had my boat with the rail 2' under water in 6'+ choppy Buzzards Bay conditions gusting over 30kt and it was a hoot. When I imagine a floating hotel like the craft in the article in a similar situation, that's probably a fatality. I wouldn't be able to sleep onboard a boat like that.
EDIT: There are also numerous examples in the historical record of whaling ships, clipper ships, war ships, merchant ships, and the like getting knocked down in storms and besides maybe crew being washed overboard and busted rigging getting through it relatively unscathed. It's absolutely inexcusable and shameful in the year 2024 for this to happen.
[1] https://www.practical-sailor.com/sailboat-reviews/block-isla...
It's pretty shocking that a boat with no sail area could get knocked over bad enough to sink that quickly. Something had to be seriously wrong with the design. I'm not particularly salty, but I've sailed in 25-30kts with the rail buried and not even had a second thought about the boat sinking. I've been knocked down with full sails up in 25kts, and had a broach while racing -- sailboats can be expected to spend at least brief amounts of time on their side, even if you're not out doing anything particularly dumb. I just can't fathom how a boat wouldn't be able to survive 2 minutes on its side and still be signed off by a builder.
The keel's purpose is to balance the boat so it remains upright. A sailboat without a keel can be capsized incredibly easily.
I think I phrased my comment poorly, causing confusion. I meant that putting down the retractable keel is something you'd want to do in a storm.
Presumably the thinking was that with all the sails down, there was no need to have the keel lowered. Which it probably wasn't, until the boat suddenly gets hit hard by an unexpected gust from the side and the windage of the rig is sufficient to capsize it.
The cascading set of design failures brings to mind the 17th century Swedish warship Vasa:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)>
https://archive.is/RSOcI
https://archive.is/2024.10.31-234729/https://www.nytimes.com...
As a slight aside, if anyone is interested in the topic the 'standard' introductory text is apparently 'Principles of Yacht Design' by Larsson and Eliasson. In particular, including a chapter on stability calculations. You can find an older edition freely available on archive.org.
I subscribe to the NYT, via login with Apple.
Try to login, and it never responds to the login.
So I remember that I registered an account with an old email. Login, it send a verification code.
And then doesn’t respond to that verification number.
So I drop VPN… and it accepts the number… and immediately spams that email address..
Only to throw up another paywall.
And it still doesn’t accept the subscription I pay for.
> The retractable keel, which helped to keep the boat stable, was not fully extended when it sank.
Regardless of inherent design issues which are perhaps debatable, this seems like a bit of a "Have you tried plugging it in?" kind of a situation.
The rumour I heard on “The Yacht Report” youtube channel is that when the retractable keel was down it was noisy. (Probably because there was enough play in the mechanism so it was banging around as the waves passed.) And the thought was, again according to this unverified rumour, that they only needed to extend the retractable keel when they had the sails up.
Now obviously nobody sane would make the knowing trade to risk their life for a bit of quiet. But it is easy to imagine the crew getting into the habit of retracting the keel so they can keep the rich guests comfortable. And especially if they were doing that on the regular and nothing bad happened ever people would normalise it and see it as the correct operating procedure. One might view this as a form of normalisation of deviance. “The gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behaviour is repeated without catastrophic results, it becomes the social norm for the organisation.”
(Technically speaking of course it is only normalisation of deviance if this was unacceptable practice. If it is true that the ship’s operating manual did not require them to have the keel down in that configuration then it is not deviance and then the term does not apply.)
Will be interesting to read the exact findings about this in the investigation report once it is out.
I thought the keel only needed to be down when they were something like 70 knots out at sea with the sails out, otherwise it was in the 'keel lite' position.
Like yourself, I await the investigation report, however, I suspect that will be a bit underwhelming and only confirm speculation. It is not good to speak ill of the dead, so it will take a lot longer before someone tells the unvarnished truth. I suspect that will be a story of folly, with the big mast being the 'invisible clothes'.
We have lots of these stories at the moment, from Oceangate all the way to the Boeing 'projects' that have been off the mark. You could 'explain it like I am five' to write a really good story book for bedtime reading for kids, going from the depths of the ocean to space, with follies that follow the same story, all the way. What a great time to be alive.
NY Times found that an unusually tall mast, and the design changes it required, made the superyacht Bayesian, owned by a tech billionaire Michael Lynch, vulnerable. Lynch co-founded Autonomy and was celebrating his court case against HP when his yacht sank.
Whoops, clicked the link thinking it was something like the Byzantine Generals problem but with yachts on a Battleship board.
Condolences to the loved ones of the victims.
I guess this is about moments of inertia of boats, but all it left me wondering is why a guy still counts among the ultra-rich after doing nothing his whole life other than a gigantic, notorious fraud.
They don't ask how, they ask how much
I fully support billionaires dying from stupid shit and think they should continue doing it.
[delayed]