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Originally Posted by SirMoric
Hmm, a ship full of oil is not easy to sink, especially not when you take into consideration that oil is ligther than water and the hole ship is divided into compartments to store oil.
Unless you get an explosion ripping a tanker into pieces they tend to suck up a lot of damage.
A torpedo going off right beside a ship will cause damage, but not as much as it will if exploding below a ship (design flaw of ships)....... (to us submariners that is).
rgds
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Certainly a single torp into the side of a tanker with oil wouldnt garauntee a kill. But 2-3 wouldnt certainly seem to cause problems. Structural integerity for one, each hit is going to weaken the hull and its ability to hold up to the all powerful, weakest point seeking nature of liquid.
The first hit is going to case a significant amount of oil to spill out. If not tankers wouldnt care if the had gapping holes by running aground, and exxon Vladez wouldnt have been an issue. The lose of oil opens the door two things or a combination of both. Some heavier water displacing the oil and/or the creation of space or basically an air pocket. Now if the explosion is able to build enough pressure in the hold to blow the seals on doors/valves etc on the deck you get a nice little thing. The heavy water filling in and the light oil being push out the top of the tanker through the now open ports/doors/valves etc on the deck. She'll bleed oil out the top as water fills the holds.
If the seals hold, you may get an airpocket. This air pocket provides an area for gaseous expansion and atomization of the oil if hit by another torp, the atomization of the oil and the heat of the torp explosion and some due to compression by the explosion can facilitate a secondary fuel explosion.
So basically each hit should be increasing the odds of catostrophic structural failure and the odds of a secondary explosion. Each torp hit is likly weaking or breeching the various bulkheads in the holds...something tells me they werent intended to handle to internal pressures caused by an exploding torp, the shock wave the oil would transmit would likly be horrific, bending, twisting and causing bulges in the surrounding bulkheads.
A tanker's structure can take a collision or tearing along the hull pretty well, but setting off an explosion inside a closed compartment of its hold is a different story and completly different source of metal stress and fatigue.
Now as good as I hope all this sounds...its all personal speculation. And it doesnt prove a tanker "should" sink in 2, 3 or 4 torps.
Also, it seems to be accepted that tankers with more volitile contents did go up much easier...if not more dramatically