The other explanation involved a shell passing right down the funnel and setting off the boilers.
foeth wrote:The trouble is that those on-deck fires had to traverse to the magazines.
Bill Jurens wrote:The documentary suggesting the forward magazine explosion, which is not too bad otherwise, keeps coming up again and again. As a member of the Marine Forensics Committee of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the author of "The Loss of HMS Hood -- A Re-examination" I was specifically tasked with the forensic investigation of the causes of Hood's loss on the 2001 documentary which you saw.
There was definitely no forward magazine explosion -- or at least no forward magazine explosion of consequence -- on Hood. The forward hull separated due to hydrostatic compression and structural overload. The documentary quite deliberately ignored and/or distorted my findings in this regard and substituted a forward magazine explosion theory which, to put it kindly, might be best described as 'goofy'. You will see me in the program, but most or all of my comments regarding the actual cause of the forward hull separation have been carefully edited out.
The detailed results of that investigation were published in a paper for the Marine Forensics Committee of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers in 2002.
foeth wrote:The other explanation involved a shell passing right down the funnel and setting off the boilers.
... there is no way a shell could have entered the funnel. (This is an old subject, so may trigger a hefy response). That is, unless the Germans adopted a shell that can consiously decide to change course in midair (say, 70 degrees)
RF wrote wrote:I don't understand why such a programme would have you involved if they ignore your expert opinion - what would they have to gain?
Whether the forward magazine exploded or not is surely academic to the fact that Hood sank."
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