We have Ismay, an arrogant businessman, urging Capt Smith to increase speed despite numerous ice warnings which he was aware of, we have the lookouts who misplaced the binoculars so they went up without them, we have Capt Smith who had a good reputation but whose total lack of experience in dealing with any crisis at sea played a role in the haphazard evacuations of the passengers, (in fact, he went inot a kind of daze/shock) Ismay's decision to have fewer lifeboats in order that the 1st class passengers would have private promenades and more luxuries, the lack of training of the ship's officers in charge to load all the lifeboats to the maximum and over, since they were all tested beforehand in Ireland with 30 extra adult men and were built to handle overloads instead of being sent away 1/3 full in some cases, the failure of the design of the so called wateright compartments that were not watertight at all but had no caps/tops or lids on them, but allowed water to slop over from one compartment to the next thus causing them to fail, the rivets which became brittle in the cold and failed, the calm of the sea which resulted in no waves breaking against the berg which was described as a blue berg or black berg having turned over in the water and was clear and therefore invisible until you were right on top of it, the 37 seconds the bridge had to try to save the ship; instead of turning away, which they did not have time to do, if they had just rammed it head on w/o reducing speed which only "burbled" the water and lessened the strength of the ship, they could have stayed afloat for several hours, the "mystery" ship clearly visible to all on the decks but who turned away and never came to help, the lack of assistance from Capt Stanley Lord who ignored the distress rockets and went back to sleep instead of rendering aid although they were within a few miles and much closer than the Carpathia, and given all these circumstances and more, which of these factors was the greatest contributor to the number of lost lives?