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)
and then you say "the 1st best day is when you sell it"
rug pull
Boats are just holes in the water that your throw money into.
That way it includes going to buy the paint and sandpaper, putting the boat in a drydock or otherwise on land, finding and dragging out the tools and getting power to them, drying the boat, cleaning it, eating, toilet breaks, taping off the edges etc, letting the paint dry, cleaning up everything afterwards, putting the boat back into the water and probably tons more that I missed.
x5 sounds about right for this one.
I'm curious about how it went for you?
(Emissions control, reduces NOx in diesel exhaust.)
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.
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.
Something about the large, hardly noticeable depression traps bad air at a regional level. I wouldn’t move back for a myriad of reasons, but everyone is always surprised when I list air quality as one.
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.
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.
Saying that when the boat is nearly 200 feet under the surface of the sea seems insane.
{Titanic, Bayesian}
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...
EDIT: I can actually count on one hand the number of times I've been in situations like that and while it's a hell of a lot of fun it's not something you bring your friends, family, children, etc along for..
https://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2024/08/27/former-bayesia...
It should also be noted that the fishermen in the area all received notice of incoming storm activity and many of them took precautionary measures HOURS in advance of when the storm actually hit. Whoever was the bridge watchstander on duty during that time should have been paying attention to the immediate near term weather forecast info. This was an entirely preventable incident.
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.
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.
>In the last part of the inquest held after the sinking, a group of master shipwrights and senior naval officers were asked for their opinions about why the ship sank. Their discussion and conclusions show very clearly that they knew what had happened, and their verdict was summed up very clearly by one of the captains, who said that the ship did not have enough "belly" to carry the heavy upperworks.[81] When other ships that predated stability calculations were found to lack stability, remedial action could be taken to increase the beam.
Also the original builder and his successor both died before completion. (Not suspiciously, but makes responsibility in construction harder)
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
But if you overload it or damage it and compromise air spaces or break off or crush lighter-than-water materials (e.g., styrofoam filled fixtures and voids), then it's no longer unsinkable. So you're right, nothing is unsinkable. Not even when "operated properly" and maintained properly, there's no guarantee you won't run into unforeseen conditions. An unsinkable boat is as ridiculous as an uncrashable airplane or automobile.
It's worth it for those classes of vessels. Their job is to handle very rough conditions. The price of such extreme stability is a rough ride.
Self-righting yachts exist.[2] But they look like rescue boats with nicer interiors.
Many recreational sailboats have enough flotation to survive 90 degrees of roll, with the sails flat on the water. This is called a "knockdown". In small craft, it's usually embarrassing but not a disaster. Larger sailing craft are usually built to avoid rolling that far.
There's a conflict between luxury and seaworthyness. The things you want for rough conditions, such as high freeboard and few openings, conflict with what people want in a luxury craft. Bayesian apparently couldn't go past 45 degrees without water pouring in. A stupidly tall and heavy mast allowed wind to push it that far over with no sails raised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.