As ever, you’re just amazed by the just the stuff that falls and lands around.

And we’re looking at something that I personally find very exciting.

Yeah, we get a really nice view of there.

Look at that.

Wow.

Haunting stuff.

Like, how impressive is this? Hey, like they were able to capture this degree of detail.

It’s unendingly cool.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs.

And uh today once again I’m a very happy excited ship nerd because our friends at Mell Limited have released some very cool things.

In 2023 they went down to the Titanic wreck and they documented it in exquisite detail.

So they started doing um runs with their ROV which is essentially an underwater robot submersible that is the size of a uh small SUV.

They go backwards and forwards just like a printer doing these photographic lines filming the entire wreck.

The idea was that from that photography, you can stitch together a 3D model.

It’s a process called photoggramometry.

We’ve talked about it a lot on the um on the channel before.

They released the bow section uh into their virtual experience called VROV pilot where you can actually fly one of these ROVs around and explore the bow section for yourself.

And we’ve looked at that in the past.

Then they released the Stern which is extremely exciting because the Stern really hasn’t been heavily documented in the past.

It’s the most decrepit of the two big sections of the ship that still exist.

It’s the part of the ship that’s the most damaged.

It’s the part of the ship that doesn’t have as many recognizable features, uh, for one of a better way of putting it.

It’s in really bad shape.

And it’s just not as pretty as seeing the bow section.

And, um, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just such an iconic shot of the the front end of the ship.

The stern, it’s not as well not as well filmed.

What’s really really not as well filmed is the debris field.

Uh there are whole sections of Titanic that were reduced basically to rubble.

You know, we’re talking twisted and bent pipes and all these things just strewn all over the place.

So, Titanic broke up four kilometers, the better part of four kilometers, um high from the ocean floor, right? All the way at the ocean surface, two miles, maybe two and a bit miles.

Titanic broke apart and it just shotguned out all of this stuff.

And where the ship broke apart was right really bang smack in the middle of the big main first and secondass galley complex.

All the ship’s kitchens and pantries.

And so a lot of what we’ll see today is stuff from this area of the ship and within the general vicinity of the of the engine rooms in particular.

Um in fact, you know, in the past we’ve said Titanic broke in too.

It’s not really true.

Titanic, uh, you know, there are two big main sections of it that still exist, but there’s a there’s a good chunk of the middle of the ship that’s missing.

We’re going to see some of it today.

It’s still there.

You just kind of have to know what you’re looking for.

Unfortunately, a lot of it is currently quite difficult to identify, but we do have to say, as always, a huge thank you to Mellin and a big up Mellin for doing this work and documenting the ship in this way.

Because in the past, you’d have to take a submersible, take it down to the bottom of the ocean, film everything, and try and do some research from what you filmed.

Whereas now, we can just load up the footage in 3D and zoom around the debris field and try and pick out what we see.

Maybe we can learn some things about the way the ship sank, some things about how it was built that we didn’t know in the past.

So, I’m going to walk through uh some of these and we’ll take a look at what we’re seeing and see if we can’t pick out some some cool and identifiable things.

So, here we get a general overview of the area of the debris field that Mellin have scanned.

And actually from this I’ve made a bit of a like top down map pointing north south to help you guys out with what it is that we’re that we’re looking at.

But basically this is the stern section.

Um it’s pointing northeast.

Uh the the stern is in, as you can tell, really bad shape.

We’ve talked about that in the past, but scattered around are some really significant pieces of debris.

Some of it is fairly distinguishable.

Um and they kind of act as landmarks, right? This is a really helpful way to determine uh where you are in the debris field around the stern and to figure out what it is that you’re looking at.

But this is the overall view and this is what we’re going to um we’re going to be looking at as we fly through the ship.

But we’re just going to start.

A lot of what you’re going to see around the stern section are bits that were blasted off the outside of the ship as it was descending to the ocean floor because of the hydrodnamic forces that were put on it.

The stern section was corkcrewing as it made its way down all that all that way.

And so as it was, you know, flying around like that, the whole chunks of it were being ripped off, what you you kind of struggle to to grasp from these scans is, you know, the scale of this, right? So the engines that you can see just down there at the um the bottom right of the stern section, they’re about four stories tall, you know? So if we put a person in there for scale, you’ll get an understanding of how big this site is.

uh and then how big these pieces of debris are.

And then you can imagine the sheer amount of force it took to rip these pieces of shell plating that stand like four or five stories tall or more uh from the the side of the ship.

So yeah, this this whole area has undergone really extensive damage, but it’s always puzzled me.

There are a few things about the stone section and the debris field that we’ll talk about that have always kind of surprised me.

So, starting off, we’re just doing an overhead uh pass flying along the um the general vicinity of the the stern section.

So, this is just off uh the the uh southern tip of the stern where it’s resting in the sea floor.

And the the first thing we come across is something that looks really really similar to what is famously known as the big piece.

So it’s a big chunk of the side of Titanic.

Now this is Now this is a section of the shell plating like the Titanic skin that’s about three stories tall in a bit.

This is from uh C deck down to D deck and E deck below it.

You can tell that’s C deck that’s on your right hand side because of the big familiar ovalshaped uh utly pivoting sidelights is what they were called.

They were basically port holes in first class.

That’s where the cabins would have been that you could pivot inwards and point um fresh air.

So from the side of the ship that it could like you know bring some ventilation into your um into your cabin.

below that on the um the second level down of port holes.

You can see very iconic these twin port holes one on top of another.

They were all over D-D for the dining saloon.

You know, this was where the the first class dining saloon was, the galley where they would prepare meals and things like that.

And then below that, the um port holes for for stateaterooms down on ec, you know, passenger spaces.

Um based on the layout, I was actually just before we um filmed this, I was looking at some blueprints.

And to the best of my ability, I’ve I’ve kind of narrowed this section of plating down to the port side of the ship, exactly where she broke up.

So just below in between the third or the fourth funnel.

And um this is a big chunk of it’s about frame 48 through 50 after on the port side.

I’ll put a picture up of what that looks like.

But this is a really cool bit of um the ship because this would have had uh the first row of port holes there on the on the right would have been white with the gold stripe and everything below that would have been black for the uh for the hole.

So this is a very iconic part of the part of the ship’s hull.

It’s very similar to the big piece which was raised very famously in the 1990s currently on display in Las Vegas and that was on the other side of the ship.

But this looks a lot bigger.

So, this would have to weigh quite a few tons.

And uh I don’t know, you technically could bring something like this up from the from the ocean floor.

Um but to the best of my knowledge, no one’s tried to to grab this bit.

But yeah, just a classic big old bit of Titanics uh Titanic Shaw plating.

And then all around it, you know, these kind of nondescript bits of twisted steel, uh, railings, pipes, a lot of pipes, a lot of bits of framing and web, you know, um, beams, things like that.

The ship’s skeleton that was all torn apart.

There’s a lot of stuff down there that even experts would struggle to tell you what it is that they’re looking at.

But but this is a really good early fly over uh to give you an idea of kind of some of the stuff that we’re going to be going to be looking at.

And as we approach the debris field proper as we’re now like going past the you know the southern tip of the stern section, you start to see big chunks of ship that were ripped out.

We just passed one that we’re going to be talking about in more depth in a minute.

Um you’ll also notice again just talk about general characteristics of what we’re looking at.

We’re now, you know, going past one of the, you know, the main sections of stern wreckage.

The kind of pooling of of rust, you know, as the ship is decaying, is it is rusting.

Um, it’s it’s pulling out.

It’s really accumulating in like craters that have been, you know, pummeled into the ocean floor.

The silt from where these um these chunks of ship landed.

You can actually see around that boiler, for example.

We’re passing that right now.

You can see a crater.

And that crater is being filled with rust.

Really, it’s being filled with um you know, steel uh decay as it’s being slowly eaten away.

Now, just to orient ourselves and just give you an idea of where we’re at, I’m going to bring up the map real quick.

Um we did just fly over one of the the big boilers.

Now, the boilers feature really heavily in this area of the ship because one of the main boiler rooms, boiler room number one, was biseected by the destruction when she broke apart.

And so all the boilers were individually spilled out and they weigh a lot.

So they didn’t flutter away as they descended towards the ocean floor.

They landed like meteors, like comets, you know, like that smashing straight into the seafloor.

So they they basically mark where Titanic broke apart on the surface.

So in this part of the debris field, there’s actually, I think, five of the boilers from boiler room number one.

That was the boiler room that the engineers were working uh to keep the steam up on the ship throughout the night.

It was the boiler room that was the furthest away from the damage to the iceberg.

So, it was presumably going to be the last one to flood.

So, that was manned basically until the end, keeping steam up, uh to provide, you know, power throughout the ship to keep the lights burning, that kind of thing.

The boilers play a a big role, I think, in not only identifying where you’re at on the seafloor, but also they played a big role in actually identifying the ship.

When Robert Ballard and his team and the the Frenchme were looking for the wreck of Titanic, they had a vague idea of where it might be.

They sent their robots and their submersibles to the ocean floor to look.

And they found a big boiler that looked just like this with uh three furnaces on it.

and they knew straight away, no question, that they’d found a big steam ship uh that had been missing in the area.

It could only have been Titanic.

So, that was one of those moments where they knew straight away.

It’s such an iconic thing.

But, if I bring up that map, you can see these boilers in their relation to the stern and understand what it is we’re looking at.

Just interestingly, to the top right of what we’re looking at right now, that to me looks like one of the big main steam lines.

So, some of the more uh technical details that we’re going to talk about through through some of the bits of machinery that we see down there do a lot to explain how Titanic worked and how the steam engine um functioned and how the steam flowed throughout the ship.

And that main steam line, if it is a main steam line, it looks about the right dimensions to me, was feeding the steam from the boilers all the way off to the engine rooms and then um directing the steam through the engines through the turbine to be condensed back down into water and sent back in a closed loop system.

We’ll talk about that more in a in a minute.

But a lot of the other stuff that we’re seeing down here is really badly mangled.

If you are confused and you have no idea what it is that you’re looking at, don’t feel bad because yeah, a lot of this is nondescript debris that’s kind of hard to uh to identify.

You know, it’s it’s been twisted and bent, broken up, and a lot of it is like piping and machinery and stuff that would have probably been hidden behind um bulkheads and paneling and that kind of thing.

So, um and now we’re approaching a section of Titanic’s underside.

This is part of the double bottom.

This is a really good um scale granting opportunity because Titanic’s keel its double bottom was about six feet tall.

Now I’m 6’4, which means I would only stand just a little bit taller than that big piece of of debris that we’re seeing right there.

So, you know, the scale of this is pretty impressive.

The double bottom of the ship was Titanic’s back.

you know, it was extremely uh heavy duty, really really well riveted together.

It had to be flexible as well.

Uh it couldn’t just be rigid because, you know, the ship going over a big wave would would break apart.

So, it was it was heavy heavy duty, designed to flex with waves and things like that.

It meant that on the night the ship broke apart, you know, it was it was the last part of the ship to fail.

It held on right until the end.

And there are whole sections of the double bottom that just came off.

uh in in you know pretty decent sizes.

And I think James Cameron and his team when they were doing the Ghosts of the Abyss expedition in 2001 had identified two pieces that fit perfectly together and probably marked the the point at which Titanic broke apart.

And you can tell this is the the underside of the ship because of the plating pattern.

You know, these are these are the the shell plates that run the length of the ship.

They’re called strakes.

uh they’re riveted together and you can see the thickness of that um that kill there.

It’s about it’s about six feet.

The the blank space that we’re looking at there that’s been kind of like cut across like a loaf of bread, that 6ft tall gap would have been used for like water tanks and things like that.

Ballast, fresh water, salt water, you name it, it all would have been um used down there.

But it was also a critical safety feature for the ship because it protected from damage from the um from the underside.

So you do see a few sections of really big uh double bottom, the keel, the plating and things like that.

But again, a piece that big can really help us as a landmark in determining where we are and what we’re looking at.

This off here in the distance here is uh the very top of one of Titanic’s funnels.

You can just make out at the very top of the screen here one of the waste pipes.

So that’s the the top of one of the funnel waste pipes.

And you can actually just see the base for the tribell whistles, the um the bronze whistles that would have would have sat at the top of the ship’s funnel.

The funnels when they um came off the ship, they they probably didn’t stay round for very long.

You know, they’ve got that like classic elliptical shape.

Um when when funnels come off, they lose their uh you know their strength, their rigidity.

They rely on tension and things like that.

So they just kind of like fell flat, came down to the seafloor and pancake down.

It’s amazing.

You can still very clearly from this angle make out the top aspect of um of one of Titanic’s funnels there.

And you can actually still see just coiled below uh what looks like maybe one of the the stays, one of the big cables that connected the uh the funnel to the deck there, which is quite cool.

Some of the whistles were actually brought up and tested in the 2000s, the early 2000s.

And um more recently, a replica has been made of Titanic’s whistles, which is has been mounted to a steam tractor and sounds really, really cool.

I’d love to see that in person to be honest.

Um, yeah, again, just one of these things when you’re looking at stuff like this, you’re looking for recognizable shapes and forms and things like that.

And, you know, if you see one thing that’s recognizable, it can generally give you a clue as to, you know, the rest of the scene as to what you’re looking at there.

So that really really seems like the top of one of Titanic’s funnels that’s just kind of like landed uh in the debris field there near the stern section by coincidence, you know, cuz this has fallen from the surface all the way down to land where it rests today.

If you’re enjoying this video, please be sure to like and subscribe, not to me necessarily, but to Mellin.

Mellin, who provided this fantastic visual material to us, have their own YouTube channel, and they are growing it.

We’re currently working on a series with them with our friends Drakinfell and Joe Lavender, the historian on the battleship Bismar.

They actually went to the wreck of the Bismar and just like they did with Titanic, they’ve photographed it.

They’re creating a digital twin of history’s most famous warship.

So, be sure to go over there and like and subscribe to their YouTube channel.

You’re going to see more of me.

Uh we’re going to be doing some Titanic stuff together over there, so you might enjoy that as well.

I’ll put a link in the description and the pin comment.

They’ve also got a Patreon where they are putting up some exclusive stuff, behind the scenes tours, things like that, interviews with the crew.

That’s really fun.

They also have VR Pilot.

VRV Pilot is available to download right now on Steam.

You can take your ROV and fly around the wreck of the Titanic.

These scans will soon be in VRV pilot.

At the moment, you can go to the bow section.

You can go to the stern section.

Very soon you, my friend, will be going to the debris field, and you’ll be able to go and have a look at it in your own time in 3D space as if you’re flying one of the ROVs down there on the bottom of the ocean.

So, please be sure to check out Mellin’s Patreon, their YouTube, or go and download VRV pilot today and become your very own digital ROV pilot.

Again, congratulations to Mellin on the Emmy nomination.

We’re all really looking forward to seeing how that one goes.

uh you guys’ visuals and the work that you’ve done here are really nothing short of spectacular.

So, we know you’ve got this in the bag.

Okay, now we get a nice um top down view as we come up and uh and over some more shell plating.

This is quite a cool section of uh debris here because it looks like there are some pumps actually.

They they really they look like um they could be feed pumps or um some of the heating pumps that were used to basically recirculate uh the ship’s steam water.

Um you know, the the water that was um as pure as possible and used in that closed loop system that I described earlier, but it’s kind of hard to tell.

They just look like uh what might have been used.

Just below there, you see a piece of the shell plating.

There’s another kind of like small part of the side of the ship.

Um, this one has a port hole and on top of the port hole, you can still see one of the dead lights uh that are intact and swung up and locked into place.

So, the dead lights were it was like a steel plug.

Basically, they were a cover that in a storm the stewards would shut and you could bring it down, lock it over the glass and protect the port hole.

uh if the weather got too bad, if a wave broke the glass, you wouldn’t have water damage inside the ship.

So, basically, all port holes were fitted with a dead light of equal size.

You could lock down over the top of it.

Um Titanics and the White Starline ships had a little star um cast into the um the aspect of the deadlight that faced the passenger.

So, you can actually still see that dead light is swung up and still attached to the port hole that it would have been fitted to, which is a nice little nice little detail that the scanners captured here.

Um, there’s not a lot else here aside from maybe a piece of deck house there.

There’s not a lot here that is immediately recognizable.

Um, the good news is that because this is so well documented now and so well forensically captured by Mellin with their scan that we’ll be able to really get in close and analyze exactly what it is that we’re looking at.

Up here on the right, we have a really interesting bit of the ship.

This is uh an upper deck.

It’s a part of the ship that would have had exposed decking.

It’s a part of the ship that has uh a teak border to one of its its forward or after aspect.

And it’s a part of the ship that then has deck house attached to it with what look like fairly decently sized windows.

And it really looks like part of the Aday Prominard to me in the vicinity where Titanic broke up.

You can tell that this was a part of the ship that had decking like exposed planks because you can still see these rows of bolts that would have held the planks into the the um deck plating of the ship below.

The deck, the wooden decking was quite thick.

It was like really heavy duty.

Over time, um, it’s been eaten away.

Parts of the ship’s decking were teak, which hold up really, really well over time.

Other parts were were pitch pine, which doesn’t hold up as well.

Titanic’s ad prominard was almost all pitch pine.

What wasn’t pitch pine, what was teak, were the margins around the outside.

So, it’d have two different kinds of timber.

All the, you know, the long planks that make up the beam, the um the deck would all be pine.

The outside border would be something a little more heavy duty like a like a teak.

This seems to me to be uh part of the the possibly the a deck prominard because that kind of matches you know the the deck kind of pattern here.

They would have had pitch pine running the length.

The deck house here, which once would have been the wall, seems to have a cutout here for a door at its lower aspect.

And then just forward of that, two of these kind of classic big firstass windows.

And I’m pretty sure there’s an area in a deck that looks exactly like this.

And then to the right hand side of this, you can actually just make out what looks like a uh the bullwalk, which was the not a railing, but like a solid wall that was about just above waist height.

um that ran the length of of ADC there on the um the semi-encclosed part of it.

So yeah, if if I had to bet, I would say this was a a big chunk of the ADC prominard.

And if that is what I think it is at the at the back end of that there.

If that is a piece of um te running widthways across the ship and that would mean this is the part of the ad prominard where the expansion joint was um that was made so Titanic could flex and would have failed along the expansion joint and you know this piece would have been blasted off because of it.

But that’s a really cool um really cool thing there to to pick that out and be able to decipher that.

It’ be great to eventually zoom in when this is released on VRV pilot and have a closer look at this section.

There’s a ton of stuff that’s sitting on top of it.

There’s like pipes, what might even be like a heater, a cabin heater or something that’s just landed on top of it because you got to imagine all the heavy bits hit the ocean floor first and then what flutters down like steel hail for the next hour afterwards.

just all these little bits and pieces like pipes and things that aren’t heavy enough and they just slowly floated down and landed all over the place.

Cool.

So, passing along now, we are coming across um more mountains of debris that may look difficult to pick apart, but there are a couple of clues as to what we’re looking at.

So, um down here on the bottom left, you might see what looks like um giant piston that you might have ripped out of your car.

That’s because that is one of Titanic’s engine cylinders still attached to the crankshaft which is incredible.

So again, the crankshaft was about 6 feet tall.

So that’s a big bit of kit.

The amount of force that it took to bend the connecting rods there which were again like just solid steel like that thick, you know, is um or more is extremely impressive.

But this is Titanic’s port side low pressure cylinder.

Titanic had four engine cylinders for each engine.

um they were rated at different pressures basically so the steam could be used throughout and as it as it lost its pressure as it was being used in each engine cylinder um the cylinder that would next go into would be rated to be to function at at a lower pressure.

Uh the first pair of engine cylinders to balance out the engine were low pressure cylinders and a pair of those were ripped off the ship when it when it broke apart.

So although it looks like the engines are still intact and peeking out the the back of the ship where it where it ripped up, there are two missing.

Well, they’re not really missing.

One of them is right here.

So this is the the port side example.

The starboard side example is a little further north.

We’ll have a look at that in a minute.

But it’s come to rest next to this really really interesting big bit of um debris.

This is a big a big pancake section of B C deck uh cabins um you know passenger areas and things like that.

Again, a little difficult to make out what it is that you’re looking at.

There are also some random things that have fallen around and nearby.

So, just to the right of this big collection of, you know, decks that have all been stacked on top of each other, you can actually see a piece of what looks like DEX plating.

And again, you can make that out because it’s got the the two port holes stacked on top of each other.

Straight away, you know, that’s part of D-D.

Um but that big collection of of um twisted, you know, plating.

There’s something really interesting about this this piece of debris is that of all the things to land on top of it, you can actually make out the top, the very very top of one of Titanic’s masts has landed randomly on top.

Titanic’s masts were not just decorative.

They held the Maronei wireless antenna which was connected to a very powerful electrical set and to make sure that the entire mast which was made out of steel didn’t become electrified when it was in contact with the wires.

The top of the mast was made out of teak wood so it you know obviously wood isn’t um it can’t conduct electricity.

The steel for the masts for the most part has been eaten away you know especially the the top parts.

There’s still some parts connected to the the wreck of the ship.

Um, but there are whole sections that are missing now.

But that’s the very very tip.

That’s the teak tip of one of Titanic’s masts that’s come to rest on top of this rather uh confusing pile of debris.

We’re basically heading northwest at the moment.

So, we’re running parallel to the to the stone section.

There’s another one of those boilers.

There’s another one sitting in a big um big pile of uh rust.

Here’s another big chunk of Titanic’s side plating.

And um you can make out those utly pivoting port holes that I was talking about earlier.

Again, you know, just a section that big.

You know, it’s gone away 10 or 15 tons, right? I mean, just a huge amount of destruction.

And now we’re passing over one of the electric cranes.

This is one of the mysteries of the Titanic wreck to me is that around the stern section, all of the cranes came off, but they all landed really close together.

And the question I always had was, did they come off on the surface because the force of the ship, you know, actually being pulled under.

If they had, I would have imagined they’d be a little more scattered around.

They all really seem to have kind of been clumped together.

So, you know, James Cameron and his team had theorized about the water column that came down on top of the wreck after it hit the seafloor.

You know, you’ve got 20,000 tons of steel moving at 20 knots, which is how fast it would have been going when it was steaming on the surface.

It’s pulling this weight of water down behind it.

And so, you know, you wonder if the force of this ship hitting the ocean floor and the water coming down on top of it didn’t spllay out the decks, push things off it.

You know, there are lifeboat davits like all the cranes that lowered the lifeboats over the side of the ship.

They’re all scattered in groups all over the the stern section, but very very close to it.

And so, you know, you wonder if a lot of this stuff wasn’t actually just blasted off when it hit the ocean floor.

But there are like little little things down here that you can kind of identify.

It looks like slightly to the top right there, there’s um the remnants of one of the deck ladders, one of the little teak uh deck ladders that would have been on um the boat deck and led people up onto the uh the raised roof over the first class lounge or something like that.

That one’s um there.

That one’s there.

It looks like it’s in it’s in really good shape.

But as always, a lot of nondescript twisted metal.

Yeah, there’s the base one of the Davids right there.

That one’s really interesting because it swung out.

So, you know, they they use these davs to um load the boats and, you know, they had to crank them out to do it.

The davits actually sat in their um in their cradle.

The cradle is the little box shaped base to the dabbit.

And they they sat in those things like that, they were on the tooththed gears.

And then to um get the dabbit swung out over the side of the ship so they could lower the boat.

You had to physically put a handle in, insert it in, and crank it out.

Once it was cranked out like that, it would stay there because the the you know, the teeth of the gears locked in.

That dabbit is still swung out.

It’s um swung out in the position it was cranked out to on the night of the sinking.

and it was obviously blasted off the deck of the ship when she sank and it is now sitting on its side on the ocean floor.

But for the fact that the davit is actually still swung out as if it were about to, you know, launch a lifeboat.

One of these davs was pulled up uh by RMS Titanic, Inc.

It’s currently on display.

I got to tell you, these things are huge.

I mean, I forget the exact dimensions, but again, you know, I’m like 6’4 and I was looking up at it, you know, looking up at the thing.

Another one of those things that gives you a a sense of scale when you look at them like this.

It’s very easy to lose your um your perception of the size of all of this.

But the fact that it’s swung out and it’s still sitting there in the exact position that um lightaller or Murdoch or one of the officers and their men desperately swung it out to the night the ship was sinking.

And it’s still there.

That’s uh that’s amazing.

That’s the little little human touch down there for you.

It’s still there.

Yeah, this is one of the really interesting parts of the debris field.

Again, this is a great orientation giving piece.

This is one of those landmarks that we can um use to to navigate ourselves.

So, in in relation to our map, we’re now really far north um of the stern section.

This is what is called the aft tower.

Now, basically, when Titanic broke into pieces, I don’t say broke in half, I say in pieces because there were whole chunks of the ship that ripped off intact.

What you’re looking at right here, this is two or three stories, two or three decks of the ship right between the third and the fourth funnel that were ripped off in one whole chunk and just floated down to the bottom of the ocean and landed upside down.

So that big empty cutout rectangle right in the middle of the um the deck house there, that was the reciprocating engine room hatch.

So this is the big shaft that leads all the way down from the top of the boat deck down into the engine room below.

And that would have been used to give not only access to the engine room so that you could, you know, haul out bits of machinery for repair or replacement, but to provide ventilation.

So the hot air, it would have been really hot and humid down in the the steam engine room.

And a lot of that stuff can rise up and out of the ship.

Now, that empty shaft, like a big vacant elevator shaft, was once 10, 11, 12 stories tall, right down into the down into the engine room.

Well, now, um, this is, uh, a really unusual view because you’re basically getting the view you would have got if you were standing in the bottom of the ship looking up, uh, because this part of the ship’s landed upside down.

So, what we’re looking at here is I think the underside of B or C deck on the port side of the ship.

And I’ll get out some deck plans so you know what I’m talking about here.

But, um, yeah, this is all in the vicinity of the third and fourth funnel where the ship broke up.

There are a couple of really interesting things that we can see here, um, that have again landed in really unusual proximities to one another.

So, on the on the left, we have Titanic’s starboard side low pressure cylinder.

So, this is the matching cylinder to the one we saw earlier on the port side.

It’s further down south in the debris field.

Uh the cylinder head is really obvious here.

It’s it’s still attached to the crankshaft.

Again, really really big piece of kit.

But over there on the right, we have uh the direct contact heater.

Lost my voice there for a second.

But over there on the right, we have something called the direct contact heater, which we’ll talk about in a minute because that is integral to understanding how Titanic’s steam system actually functioned.

But yeah, this is one of those really iconic pieces of the wreck.

Um, it’s called the aft tower because it was attached to another huge chunk of the ship that broke apart and actually landed the right side up closer to the bow.

Again, it comprised parts of A deck, um, B deck and C deck and the bottom of the third funnel.

That one is imaginatively called the the forward tower.

Um again, it’s just pilots that like wreck nerds use to discuss and describe the ship.

But yeah, this is a whole chunk of um just behind the number three funnel that and and also in the vicinity of that piece that we saw earlier that marked the demarcation of a deck possibly and the and the um expansion joint in between number three and number four funnel.

Uh this is the below that.

This is down on B and C deck.

There are some folks who’ve had a closer look at footage that’s been taken over the years and they can actually find still um ceiling lights mounted to the beams and stuff that we’re looking at right now that would have once been the ceiling for people’s cabins and hallways on Cdeck.

They’re still there.

So again, when we get our hands on this, when it gets released on VRV pilot, we’ll be able to uh see some of that stuff in in greater detail.

It’s very exciting.

I love these uh overview shots because you get such a good understanding of the layout of the of the debris field.

So, we’re we’re just flying off the uh port side of the stern section.

I’m just going to have a closer look at one of these boilers that’s kind of landed here.

You get a fantastic view of the crater this thing left when it hit the ocean floor.

Look how deep that is.

That is a a big old crater.

You know, it’s interesting.

You would have thought after all these years of currents and movement that, you know, the scars left behind from the ship hitting the the ocean floor might have been erased.

But, uh, no, no, it’s still very much very much intact.

the boiler kind of sitting in a pool of its own um decay.

Off to the right.

I think that’s a bathtub.

I think that’s one of the ship’s bathtubs.

Um Titanic had not a huge amount of bathtubs.

In third class, I think there was something like four, some ridiculous number like that.

They were um iron bathtubs with a ceramic coating basically.

So, Captain Smith’s bathtub famously for all those years was in really good nick.

Uh, now it’s been covered up, but I’m I’m fairly certain that’s a bathtub sitting um just off to the right of the boiler there.

You know, Titanic’s boilers were mostly uh double-ended, so you could have um stokers at either end loading the furnaces with coal.

But for the five in boiler room number one, which is one of the boilers we’re looking at now, they were single-ended purely because that is where the boiler rooms ended.

There was nothing on the other side of boiler room number one but for the reciprocating engine room and therefore they only needed to be uh single-ended.

But you can very clearly make out the you know the three furnace mouths.

Um, as ever, you’re just amazed by the just the stuff that falls and lands around.

I mean, we’ve got, you know, the end of one of the ship’s benches, the deck benches just down on the bottom left.

I’m pretty sure that’s a bathtub.

Again, just so random how the way these things fell.

So, well, now we’re flying off um just off the stern section towards the north and we’re looking at that big chunk of um B deck and C deck and we’re looking at something that I personally find very exciting.

Uh this is, as I mentioned earlier, this is the direct contact heater.

It’s essentially um a water heater.

What’s really cool about this thing is that it’s still attached to the fixtures that what sort of held it to the um the inside of the ship.

What’s also cool about this is it’s a quite recognizable iconic part of Titanic’s machinery and explains the way that the ship’s steam engines and the steam system the steam system worked.

So, let me explain real quick.

The steam is generated by the boilers.

The boilers are burning um coal.

The coal is heating uh water in these tubes that run through the boilers.

And as the water is heated up, obviously it turns into steam.

It’s a couple hundred° hot.

Uh it runs up into the main steam lines and it goes back all the way back into the engines where it goes through the high pressure cylinders, the medium pressure, then the low pressure cylinders.

It’s then exhausted into the ship’s central turbine which was designed to operate in a vacuum and actually draw in the um the the steam that had been depleted of most of its uh most of its pressure.

The steam then drove the central propeller.

After that it had to return to the boilers as water to be heated into steam again.

That creates a closed loop system.

So there was a system of pumps and heaters that were basically designed to take the water, pump it back um and turn it into usable water again.

So the first step in that process was to go through the ship’s condensers.

So the condensers basically took um the steam out of the low pressure turbine uh ran it past um you know ran it through tubes that were exposed to cold sea water that was circulating throughout the the condenser units.

And then in doing so of course as steam cools down becomes water again.

So you’re getting this condensation.

You’re getting droplets of water that are forming again.

It’s becoming it’s becoming water.

It’s not steam anymore.

It’s water now.

So the main circulating pumps, so the circulating pumps are taking that water through the condensers.

We’ll come back to the circulating pump soon.

The water is then taken through a series of um pumps and heaters and filters to basically take out any impurities, any grease, any oil, salt, anything like that that is picked up in its journey through the the steam lines and through the engine.

The water is then heated.

So, it goes through a set of um the the we pumps and then some heating pumps that gets it warm because it’s being primed to go back into the boilers.

And if it’s already warmed up, if it’s already hot, it’s going to flash over into steam much quicker than if it was cool, as cool as it had been going through the condensers.

So, it goes to the forward end in a closed loop.

It’s gone to the back of the engine room into the turbine room.

and it’s sent back through the we pumps and through the heaters back to the forward end of the ship’s engine room and then it’s pumped up into the water into the contact heater.

Now, we actually and that’s what we’re looking at here.

This is the the direct contact heater.

We actually have a really good representation of what this looked like on the ship.

This is a representation of Titanic’s engine room made by Steve Turjan in 2017.

As you can see there, you can I’ll put a link for this.

I’ll I’ll um put that in the description so you can look around.

Remember how I said that the ship the debris field and everything’s covered in pipes and bits of nondescript metal.

Uh here’s why.

You can see there’s a lot of it down there, right? So, but we’re basically standing on the um the first level up from the uh the floor, the tank top of the ship.

At the moment, we’re looking backwards.

We’re looking towards the stern of the ship.

In a minute, we’re going to turn around forward.

If we look up, we can see the skylight, the engine room hatch that I was just telling you about.

That’s what we can see in the um the aft tower.

You know, this is basically this is almost exactly the view that you would have looking at the after tower now.

You know, we’re looking at it from the bottom up.

That’s what it looks like.

But if we were to stand in Titanic’s engine room at this level and look forward, we would see a wall.

Now, that’s not super exciting, but if we were to look slightly up, you would see this thing here.

Now that is the the base of the direct contact heater and sitting directly on top of it is the direct contact heater.

So you can actually see if we go back to what Mellin have um set us through to look at.

You can actually see that base still attached to the direct contact heater.

Right? You can see the here we’re looking at the underside of it.

Um but you can very very clearly see it here with the contact heater sitting on top of it.

So this is really the final step that the the the water previously the steam has to go through uh in order to be sent back to the boilers and become steam again.

It goes into the direct contact heater.

It is suddenly heated to a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit 200 something and then it is piped through back forward into the boilers.

It becomes steam again.

The direct contact heater is also getting rid of gases.

It’s getting rid of um oxygen, um any other impurities and things like that in the process.

It serves a couple of purposes, but its main function is really to uh get that water hot enough that it can easily become steam.

Once again, Titanic only had one of them, and this is the one.

What’s interesting is it was actually fitted, as we can see from this reproduction, um, right inside the engine room hatch.

And it seems by coincidence, it’s not attached to anything anymore.

maybe by some steam lines, but it seems like either it’s it’s been dragged down, still attached by lines and pipes alone to land in the vicinity of the AR tower, which probably seems more likely, or in the break up, it broke completely free and it just happens to have fallen down and landed um next to where it once sat really when it was installed on the ship.

But yeah, that’s a that’s a really important piece of the ship because it, you know, is testament to how how the whole thing worked and actually how the how that closed loop system is so clever.

You know, it’s every step of it is designed to take the steam, use every bit of it to create energy and to drive the ship forward and then, you know, to turn it back into water, but not cool it off enough that it’s not going to be as efficiently heated as possible.

you know, you have to create as much steam as you can, as quickly as you can.

Therefore, let’s put some heaters in place and some pumps that can heat it up on its way back.

You’ll also notice looking um at it from up here that it’s in a kind of a funny place.

You know, it’s high up.

It’s above our heads.

And the reason for that is basically you’re you’re pumping it um from the the the feed pumps which are down here on either side of the ship port and starboard.

So, it’s being pumped up through here, through the steam lines, up into the contact heater, but then gravity is taking this the the water, and it’s basically just going downhill back into the boilers.

So, you don’t have to worry about, you know, an extensive network of pumps getting it all throughout the rest of the ship.

It’s just gravity doing its thing, providing the providing the pressure.

So, that’s why it’s a little higher up.

I think that’s closer to D deck off the top of my head.

So that’s quite quite high up somewhere around E deck or D deck or something like that.

Very clever bit of kit.

It’s just amazing seeing this captured in this level of detail, isn’t it? It’s so forensic.

You could just sit here and watch it all day.

It’s absolutely remarkable.

We’re flying in now um towards uh I think it’s the port side low pressure cylinder.

Yeah, that’s attached to that chunk of C deck and um B deck.

You know, you think about the force that it takes to to rip steel apart like this.

It’s just absolutely unbelievable.

Just amazing seeing the the connecting rods bent in such a way like 45° that it’s been bent over like that.

It’s just unreal.

But also that they remain detached.

There’s a lot of nondescript stuff down there.

I mean, you can see the, you know, the catwalks that the engineers would have walked on, um, getting around the engines.

You can see, uh, windows.

Actually, there’s a window, I think, down on the bottom left, the kind that you might have seen up on the boat deck or on a deck.

Now, we’re going to get a closer look at all the decks that have pancake down um, near that low pressure cylinder.

So, we’re looking at the other side now, and here we can get a good view of the top of the mast there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look at that.

So that’s the the the wooden part of the very tip of one of Titanic’s masts.

If we were to look in a higher resolution, you’d actually be able to see one of the lightning rods that were designed to to um cop lightning strike instead of the Maronei wireless antenna taking it instead.

This is an interesting clip because we’ve talked quite a bit about um the ship’s deck cranes before and we’re about to zoom in on some of them, but I don’t want to talk about the deck cranes.

We’ve talked about them quite a bit.

We’re looking uh down the the the length of the stone section.

You can actually see the engines peeking out from the the exposed tear area of the the um stern section on the left there.

But we’re going to look at a big piece of the bottom of the ship.

very interesting piece at the bottom of the ship.

We’re just about to fly over it.

And this is it here on the lower right.

Now, there’s another piece of Titanic’s steam machinery that’s technically still in place where it was installed back in uh 191.

I think it was 1911.

They were still putting the engines and things in.

Uh this is from the turbine room.

I mentioned earlier about the condensers.

The condensers are pulling in sea water through um valves in the bottom of the ship.

The sea water is going into the condensers.

The condensers are running that seawater uh over the steam lines in little tubes.

The steam is finding that quite cold.

The steam is turning into into water again.

To do that operation, they needed pumps to run the seawater up and through the the condensers and out over the side.

You needed something called a circulating pump.

And there were four circulating pumps, two on each side, two for each condenser.

You can actually see two of the circulating pumps.

They are um lying on their side um just on the bottom right there.

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