Hi Micheal
I think that one thing that was different in 1912 than today was the tolerances they were capable of machining to.
When I was a kid, they had 'run in' period for automobiles, where you'd only drive the thing forty mph for the first hundred miles, then work your way up, changing the oil at a thousand miles to get rid of the metal that had worn off the bearings, piston rings, etc. While her engines could do 83 rpm when they were worn in, a new engine would take a while to do that. She was still a brand new ship with less than what, two thousand miles or so on the engines? You had to get the pistons seated, wear in the main bearings in the engine and the strut bearings, too.
I am not sure what type of bearings they had for strut bearings on the Titanic, but believe it or not, modern ships still use wood for their outboard bearings. Lignum Vitea (sp?) is used in the strut bearings today, as it's a very hard wood that doesn't need oiling.
Slamming that engine full astern would be a definite no-no and any bridge officer who pulled a stunt like that would be on the beach as soon as the boat tied up. That kind of thing could do major damage to the engines and you don't just grab an engine dolly and hoist the thing out from under the hood. Pulling a spun main bearing in the engine would be a major undertaking for a shipyard. You'd start by pulling the head and then the piston and then the crank shaft just like you do with a car. I'm sure that every officer had that drilled into their heads by the Chief Engineer. Even if they gave a full astern order, the guys in the engine room wouldn't have obeyed it. Take a look at what is over the engine room on that ship and figure out how much hassle it would be pulling a mill, then figure out how hard it would be fixing the bow? Much easier to fix a bent up fender than replace the engines. It's not like you have a spare engine just sitting around.
The only one of the Olympus class liners that survived was the lead ship of the class. After Cunard took over White Star, she was kind of an odd duck to them. For one thing, she had been built with the idea that she and one of her sisters would be pulling in and out of port every week and they'd all have the same level of speed, accommodations,food service, and comfort. Olympus was sharing the route with a couple of other ships that weren't her size, didn't have all the goodies she did, so if someone wanted to cross the Atlantic in true style, they either had to juggle their own schedules around to meet hers. If you are laying out serious bucks for a private verandah first class cabin, you can get really irked to find you either had to cut your own trip short, or hang around another week waiting for the boat to make it to your side of the pond. Ismay's idea of first class super service being available just didn't work, as there was only one of those liners left after WWI. So Oly just didn't fit in, as the other boats speed (or hers, I forget which) had to be adjusted so they'd make up a rational schedule.
Shortly after WWI, they converted her boilers to oil. Coaling the boat was a real dirty job and everything had to be cleaned to get rid of the coal dust before the passengers boarded. It also cut way down on the size of the crew, as an oil fired boiler is a hell of a lot easier to run. For one thing, you have one boiler tender taking care of several boilers. Clean the burners so that the oil vaporized well, that doesn't take that long. With coal, you had stokers and trimmers who moved the coal around so the stokers could feed the fire grates. One stoker, one boiler, plus a trimmer for every two or three boilers, verses one boiler tender per.. what? Boiler room? No cleaning up the boat after fueling her, smaller crew, and screw the coal miners and their damn strikes!
Olympus went to the breakers because the law had changed. Those class liners, while sporting remarkable luxury, actually were more designed to haul a lot of poor huddled masses over to America. They could knock down steerage class staterooms to carry more cargo going eastward to Europe, as there wasn't as many people looking for cheap trips headed that way. When the immigration laws changed, that changed the profit margins on all of those big liners. Then came the Crash of 29 and some trips, there would be more crew than passengers, even with less black gang due to oil firing boilers. Cunard surveyed their fleet, trying to figure out which boats they didn't need and Olympus .. well, odd duck, boat only 21 years old, but they had excess capacity up the wazoo, plus her engine pedestals needed work, which brings us around to the point I was trying to make about pulling an engine on a boat like that. Reciprocating engines aren't as efficient as turbine engines. You are accelerating and decelerating very heavy masses of metal on every revolution with a piston engine, but with a turbine, you shove steam in and the thing spins around in one direction only at very high speed. So your reduction gears weigh a hundred and fifty tons or so? They are all spinning in one direction too, right? Can't remember the name of the two ships that Cunard had built somewhere in the 1910's, but one was piston powered and the other one was a turbine and that decided what kind of mills Lusitania was going to have. (Turbine!) The same thing as happened with piston engines verses turbine engines in airplanes. You have piston, connecting rod, valves, valve springs, etc on a piston mill all moving up and down, wheras on a jet, you have one shaft with vanes stuck on it shoving the air into the combustion chamber and out the back end. You can pull every single piece of electrical gear off of a running jet and it will still be working away processing oil into thrust, so they are way the hell cheaper than some huge Pratt and Whitney two thousand eight hundred cubic inch engine that looks like a corn cob and is a b!~~~ to get the air around all of those cylinders. So Olympus was pretty much like a Constellation trying to compete with a 707. Cunard's fleet was faster, cheaper to run, more reliable engines, and off Olympus went to the scrap yard. Even with Britannic and Titanic had survived, they'd have been off to the scrap dealers too, as they just didn't have what it took to compete any more. The Normandie, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Breman, Berengaria,Europa, Rex, the Ile de France, all of those ships were much more modern and faster and more glamourous than the old fashioned Olympus. Art Deco or Edwardian age trellis plants and wicker furniture in the Palm Court? Cunard and White Star merged, a year later Oly was laid up, two years later, she was broken up. While the QE 2 lasted 39 years, there wasn't as much major advances in ocean liner designs during the 1970's to 2010 period of time as there was between 1895-1935.
What I find a bit strange after having written about how superior turbine engines are for ships, is that diesel engines are now all the rage. QE 2 was converted from oil fired boilers.
QE 2 is less than a hundred feet longer than Titanic, but in 1895, I don't think that there weren't any 400 foot boats around.
Pretty long way around to answering 'why didn't they rev it up to 80 rpm in reverse', eh?
Tom
