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Comment by initramfs | Hacker News Reader

Seems like yachts are kind of like the private airline industry- when a super rich person can afford to request a bespoke design, safety requirements sometimes get eased. Plus less testing of the boat could be it. Pilots and captains for unique designs/mods might not have as much experience as commercial airlines: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/is-flying-private-mor... One example is the standardization of buttons in an airplane make it easier to know where to locate the important latches in an emergency.

Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago- it's when a novel feature gets prioritized that the fundamental stability of the design gets overlooked.

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> Also, it's possible some of these basic balancing and center-of-gravity considerations were already known over 500 years ago

To nitpick, properly being able to do these kinds of stability calculations are a considerably newer invention. E.g. the famous Vasa ship capsized in 1628 because at that time ships were still designed based on rules-of-thumb and the experience/intuition of the builders, with no stability calculations done.

Pretty sure the builders knew the Vasa wasn't stable. The King of Sweden wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Just 358 years later, the people in charge of a different kind of ship, named Challenger, also wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.

Yeah the Wikipedia is instructive.

>In the last part of the inquest held after the sinking, a group of master shipwrights and senior naval officers were asked for their opinions about why the ship sank. Their discussion and conclusions show very clearly that they knew what had happened, and their verdict was summed up very clearly by one of the captains, who said that the ship did not have enough "belly" to carry the heavy upperworks.[81] When other ships that predated stability calculations were found to lack stability, remedial action could be taken to increase the beam.

Also the original builder and his successor both died before completion. (Not suspiciously, but makes responsibility in construction harder)

But those rules of thumb worked, mostly.

Of course they did, after all humanity has been plying the seas for thousands of years.

Just pointing out that naval architecture, as a branch of engineering involving stability calculations etc., is much younger than 500 years.

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