DBWI: What if the Olympic survived it's collision with the HMS Hawke?

I really wonder what would have happened had Olympic survived it's 1911 collision with the HMS Hawke. As we all know Titanic survived colliding with an iceberg on her maiden voyage on March 28th, 1913. Would it still survive the iceberg collision without it's refit?
 
Without the Olympic sinking after the collision, there would no need to refit the RMS Titanic nor to modify the design of the RMS Gigantic, that's for sure. However... would the Titanic strike an iceberg on her maiden voyage, if she had departed as original planed in 1912? Well, the 1913 collision was a sheer case of bad lack... would i be repeated again in 1912? And if so, without the refit... perhaps she would go down. Hell, even the Gigantic would had problems to survive being torpedoed off Ireland during the Great War without the refit.

PS: Welcome to the forum, by the way.
 
Well, the unfortunate sinking of the Olympic was in a way a saving grace for both the Titanic and Gigantic. Parts of the wreckage was recovered and sent to Harland and Wolff in Belfast for analysis, and its showed the steel used in its construction was more brittle than originally thought, even though Olympic had just started operations a few months earlier. The relatively cold temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean may have accelerated its steel turning brittle. As such, both the Titanic and Gigantic ended up being delayed for one year as both ships had to be heavily modified with new steel structural parts of much better quality.

That's why Titanic survived the glancing collision with the iceberg (though it was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to get "patch" repairs before it was sent back to Harland and Wolff for major repairs) and Gigantic held together even with a direct hit from a German torpedo. Gigantic, alas, was finally broken up in 1937 after its retirement, but Titanic today is a hotel/museum ship at the port of Southhampton, just like the original Queen Mary is a hotel/museum ship at Long Beach, California in the USA.

The loss of the Olympic also served an important lesson: don't scrimp on the quality of steel used in building a ship. Small wonder why when the Liberty ships were built in the 1940's during the Second Great War, the early production ships ran into the same problem of structural cracking with poor quality steel, but later production ships used better quality steel (every one of the 10 surviving operable Liberty ships came from later production runs).
 

Archibald

Banned
This didn't prevented the Lusitania disaster of 1914, where 1400 passengers lost their lives (a boiler exploded in the middle of the Atlantic and broke the ship in two, and it sunk within an hours and a half. ... this led to drastic change in safety (more lifeboats)
Both Titanic and Olypic dodged bullets with minimal loss of life, for sure. But the trend since 1900 was bigger and bigger and faster liners - a disaster was to happen sooner rather than later...

OOC: this also applies to current monster container-ships and cruise-ships. sooner or later there will be a major accident. Costa Concordia was nothing.
 
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Without the Olympic sinking, there would no need to refit the Titanic nor to modify the design of Gigantic. However - would the Titanic strike an iceberg on her maiden voyage, if she had departed as original planed in 1912? If so, perhaps without the refit she would go down. Hell, even the Gigantic would had problems to survive being torpedoed off Ireland during the Great War without it.
The other thing is, of course, is that had Olympic gone down in the Solent I think it is likely that the maiden voyage of Titanic would have been captained by Edward Smith; he had a tricky record despite his seniority and publicity, and I'm sure that had he had command of Titanic he would have found a way to mess that up too. It is true that her striking of the iceberg was largely down to weather and luck, but the fact it happened even without Smith is testament to the quality of the White Star Line's captains it seems.
Well, the unfortunate sinking of the Olympic was in a way a saving grace for both the Titanic and Gigantic. Parts of the wreckage was recovered and sent to Harland and Wolff in Belfast for analysis, and its showed the steel used in its construction was more brittle than originally thought - even though Olympic had just started operations a few months earlier. The relatively cold temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean may have accelerated its steel turning brittle. As such, both the Titanic and Gigantic ended up being delayed for one year as both ships had to be heavily modified with new steel structural parts of much better quality.
The financial cost of these efforts to White Star Line cannot be understated, however. The Olympic and Titanic incidents were disastrously expensive for the company. Given the initial cost of the class, the tragic loss of Olympic (then pretty much the largest liner in the world) and the further work that had to be done on her sister ships, for Titanic to run into trouble and narrowly survive was catastrophic for PR. I find it pretty tricky to envisage that the White Star Line survived as long as it did in our timeline, war or no war.
Titanic today is a hotel/museum ship at the port of Southampton, just like the original Queen Mary is a hotel/museum ship at Long Beach, California in the USA.
I still think it would have been nice to send it to Belfast, which was one of the options considered. It would have been a nice testament to the history of shipbuilding over there.
This didn't prevented the Lusitania Disaster of 1914 where 1400 passengers lost their lives.
I thought that the actual cause of the explosion was unconfirmed? I mean, with little evidence I find it hard to believe that a cruise ship just... explodes. But I don't want to dwell on conspiracy theories.
 
The other thing is, of course, is that had Olympic gone down in the Solent I think it is likely that the maiden voyage of Titanic would have been captained by Edward Smith; he had a tricky record despite his seniority and publicity, and I'm sure that had he had command of Titanic he would have found a way to mess that up too. It is true that her striking of the iceberg was largely down to weather and luck, but the fact it happened even without Smith is testament to the quality of the White Star Line's captains it seems.

Indeed. With Smith commanding the Titanic, he would have caused a mess, because of his "peculiar" way of acting. If without him the Titanic hit an iceberg, I shudder what would had happened with him at the wheel.
 
The loss of the RMS Lusitania was more than just the boiler explosion--recent dives by Premier Exhibitions group from the research vessel EV Nautilus confirmed what a lot of people suspected--the Lusitania was illegally carrying US-made munitions for the British war effort just after the First Great War started. It appears the boiler explosion also eventually ignited the ammunition, hence the reason why the ship split in two before it sank.

But would it have made it safely to port at Southhampton anyway on that fateful voyage? We know that the Imperial Germany Navy through their Naval attaché at the German Consulate in New York City knew about the contraband cargo on the Lusitania, and had dispatched U-boat SM U-21 to intercept the ocean liner before it docked at Southampton. But since the Lusitania sank in the middle of the North Atlantic, that mission was obviously scrubbed, and the SM U-21 went on to sink a number of small merchant ships in the English Channel instead during the fall of 1914.

By the way, there was serious consideration of putting the Titanic in Belfast as a museum ship, but after the Second Great War when the "Troubles" started, they had to shelve that idea. Putting the Titanic in Southampton as a hotel/museum ship made more sense, since that famous liner operated from Southampton on its many transatlantic voyages.
 
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