154 



BUOYANCY AND STABILITY OF TROOP TRANSPORTS. 



service in peace time, comfort is of prime importance, the stability must necessarily 

 be small, and ballasting under certain conditions may become a necessity. 



The following table gives the weight of fixed ballast carried by some of the 

 troop transports during the war, and also the amount of water on board the ships 

 when they were in the light condition near the end of their voyage. 



Table IV. — Ballasting of Troop Transports. 



LONGITUDINAL BULKHEADS. 



Most merchant vessels are subdivided on the purely transverse system. When 

 damaged under water they usually preserve their upright position or take a slight 

 list, and if they founder they go down by bodily sinkage, bow or stern first. The 

 boats can be lowered without difficulty, provided the sea is not too rough, and in 

 well-subdivided ships ample time will be generally left for this operation (Titanic). 

 At the International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea, in London, 19 13,* "evi- 

 dence was produced which made it perfectly clear that there was no known case of 

 a vessel having been bilged in service and then capsizing. * * *" 



Longitudinal watertight bunker bulkheads commenced to be introduced in mer- 

 chant vessels with the Lusitania — primarily in order to secure coal protection against 

 gunfire — and were subsequently fitted in certain other English liners destined to be 

 used as auxiliary cruisers in time of war. In Germany such bulkheads were fitted 

 in several vessels as in the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, her sister-ship Kaiser Wilhelm II 

 and the Vaterland, later used during the war as troop transports by the United 

 States Government and re-named the Mount Vernon, Agamemnon, and Leviathan 

 respectively. In these vessels center-line bulkheads, moreover, were fitted in the 

 engine-rooms. 



In other passenger steamers as, for instance, the S. S. Philadelphia, used as a 

 troop transport under the name of Harf isburg, side bunkers are fitted which are vir- 

 tually independent of each other, since they can only equalize across the top of the 

 boiler-room on a level well above the deep-load water-line. 



♦Sir A. Denny, Institute Naval Architects, 1914, p. 204. 



