re: Aubrey answer this

Aubrey Matthews (paubrey@CASTLES.COM)
Mon, 3 Feb 1997 02:52:11 -0800

>TILL
>As we have pointed out repeatedly, the SG was structured so that only a part
>of its 320-foot length sat in the water. If more than twenty feet of its
>length in the tail and nose section were out of the water (as pictures I
>have seen indicate), then this would be like Matthew's 500-foot Chinese
>junks, whose decks rode out of the water on pontoons. Furthermore, I don't
>think that anyone has said that an all-wooden boat over 300-feet would sink
>like lead when it was launched. Certainly it would float, and if it just
>sat in a harbor with no cargo, it would probably float indefinitely, but
>naval engineers and architects agree that all-wooden boats over that length
>were unsatisfactory when they were put into service, because the hulls
>leaked from the stresses of snaking and hogging and could not even be
>reinforced with diagonal irons strips (as in the case of the Rochambeau).
>Once again, this is information that Aubrey will simply ignore, but I do
>hope that he will answer a question.

Till, I have already mentioned how Noah could have beefed up his ark with
simple stiffeners and the arrangement of inner planks in the manner I
mentioned before. Now, when you coat the inside and outside of that type of
construction, you are not going to get any leaks no matter how much the
twisting. It is uncoventional in design but the ark wasn't a conventional
boat either. The fact that the ark was built on soft land, would have
created flaws on the ark as the weight of its construction increased. Common
sense would have been called upon to fix the problems. I don't believe that
Noah used only one layer of planks because the planks would have started to
flex as the stress loads started to shift due to the uneven load on the soft
ground. Noah would have saw this and created a fix for it. Also, he could
have added many bulkheads that fnctioned as dividers in the ark as well as
stiffening the floors, since they too carry the loads of the structure. I
say that the ark wasn't constructed in the same manner as a conventional
boat and was very seaworthy. Remember, the Rochambeau was a sailing ship
with mast. Do you know how much stress a mast puts on the structure of a
ship of that size? Look at a conventional sailboat on a windy day and see
how it tips over from the stress of its mast. The ark didn't have to undergo
that kind of stress. One other point. How many keels did Noah us? How many
bulkheads were used? How many stiffeners were used? How much pitch did Noah
coat the ark inside and out? Hogging would not have
been a problem for an uncoventional boat. Cost and time were not a factor.
To sum it up Till, you can built a leak proof ship the size of the ark by
using uncoventional techniques. Japan proved that with cardboard.
Aubrey

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