Fact sheet:Liberty ships.

[rustysi]

it was still a very new method for ship fabrication. That there were unknowns in the performance, should not be surprising.

Yep, and there was also the urgent need... Oh, you want it yesterday?

[NigelKentarus]

IIRC, I saw a program a while back on Liberty ships on the History channel. The record to build one was just under 24 hrs. I think it was built in Richmond CA, but I'm not sure.

[NigelKentarus]

I dis-remembered the amount of time it took, still not sure about the shipyard.


From Wiki:
The first ships required about 230 days to build (Patrick Henry took 244 days), but the average eventually dropped to 42 days. The record was set by SS Robert E. Peary, which was launched 4 days and 15½ hours after the keel was laid, although this publicity stunt was not repeated: in fact much fitting-out and other work remained to be done after the Peary was launched. The ships were made assembly-line style, from prefabricated sections. In 1943, three Liberty ships were completed daily. They were usually named after famous Americans, starting with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.

[Symon]

The Pratt School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering has been a fixture at MIT since Charles Herbert Pratt’s chair grant of 1912. Lots of people went through the program. It was righty-tighty with the materials physics curriculum.

I know for a fact that one can buy an auditor place in a serious survey class for $50.00. Gotta but the books, though. But learn before you barf your stuff.

Even today, acknowledging cross fertilization, material physics is as it has always been. The internet welding nonesense is just that. Learn before you barf.

Why would anyone believe the vaporings of the internet, when it is so easy to find the truth of the matter? Oh, well, I guess the Internet is more important than truth.

Well, Ya’ll have a good time stormin’ da castle.

[BattleMoose]

Right.

Nothing in your previous post relates to the failure modes of the liberty ships. And the rest is just insults.

[obvert]

A lot of good information is making it to the internet these days. Just look at this forum!

Seriously though, I think a good number of us post connections we're in the process of forming or findings we would hope are expanded on and even corrected by someone who either finds or knows more. We're not expecting to be right, just to have a dialogue and hopefully learn more than what we do know. It doesn't lead to understanding or encourage more input to have conversations turn ugly or a poster to be called out for supposed ignorance.

The internet is where we do this. We're not all going to scan our books, and we're not all going to have access to academic password-protected online resources (like the excerpt I posted above), so we have to sometimes take what we can get. If someone has a problem and takes the time to insult, at least they could also offer an alternative source to support their assertions.

I teach students to learn how to research the old fashioned way and to use online tools. That' how education does it now. The source doesn't matter as long as it's supported, cross referenced a bit and passes a further common sense test. When you find the same thing in several sources, as posters here have done about Constance Tipper, you kind of start to believe there's something to it. If others want to stick to their guns and refute that info it would certainly be a lot more courteous to do so with sources and less bluster and rhetoric. It's entertaining maybe, but only if you're not the one getting slammed.

[navysim]

I checked on the internet and it states that the earth is "FLAT" not round. So it must be true.

verify, verify, verify and confirm. Internet is a great tool for quick research but not to be trusted completely. ex. researched some vessels and I get max ranges from 7,500 to 12,500 miles for one ship from different sources. lol.

[spence]

Welding was not new in WW2 but all welded construction was. Welding two pieces of metal together does indeed turn them into one piece of metal. If a crack gets started in that piece of metal for any reason then the crack can propagate through the entire piece. Aside from the cold of the North Atlantic and the quality of the steel there was an incredible amount of pounding going on around the edges and corners of the cargo holds which occurred simply because people were constantly loading and unloading cargo using cranes and cables. Such banging aggravated the stress concentration points which naturally occurred at the corners of the cargo holds. It should be noted that windows (portholes) and doors (hatches) on ships don't have square corners for the very reason that square corners are natural focus points for metal stress. By the same token one can stop a crack (temporarily) by drilling a hole through the metal at the end of the crack to relieve the stress at the point of propagation.

To correct the problem ships were retrofitted with a riveted strake extending along the side of most if not all of the length of the ship. These riveted strakes basically turned the one piece ship into a three piece ship. Cracks might propagate from the corners of the hatches but they were stopped when they reached the boundary of the adjacent pieces of metal.