For me, there's a difference between a boat (like a small sailing boat used by, let's say, 4 to 10 people) and a ship meassured in thousands of tons.

Good interview anyway. What I liked was the interviewees remarks on failure safe and failure tolerant, it's the later one you want. And no sound engineer will tell you absolute statements like this.

Whats also interessting after the Titanic sinking where the changes to the operating procedures they made. The sad thing is that seemingly a lot of engineers (and designers of whatever technical device) still have a hard time to think of the overall system instead of thinking in devices. The Space Shuttle programm is only one of the more prominent examples.

This. It's a classic risk-reward tradeoff. We can make most things much safer than they are, but we generally accept a lower level of safety for practical reasons.

Formula 1 racing was once one of the most dangerous activities on earth. Before the 1980s, a driver had a greater than 1 in 20 chance of dying in any given year. Since the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994, there has not been a single death in the sport.

We could achieve a similar change in the number of automobile-related deaths on public roads, but we consider the costs to be prohibitive. The public just aren't prepared to buy cars with roll-cages and bucket seats and multipoint harnesses. Not unreasonably, most people won't wear a helmet and a HANS device on their commute.

No-compromise engineering is often surprisingly straightforward. The hard bit tends to be working out the best compromise between your various design goals.

I clicked to post exactly this. I live on the Chesapeake Bay, and it seems like half the boats in the local Craigslist are of the unsinkable variety.

I think what the article is really getting at is whether or not it's possible to build an indestructible ship, and of course, the answer to that is no.

It's possible to make a ship that is much stronger than the people it carries -- most ships are, but that doesn't make the people any less fragile or more susceptible to death, injury or drowning.

Submarines are perhaps a superior design for this, on paper, but generally speaking, a submarine isn't where you want to be if the submarine is in any danger whatsoever.

So yeah, unsinkable boat? Check. Unsinkable passengers? No check.

A friend of mine has built the largest homemade submarine in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC3_Nautilus) and they're clearly dangerous vessels, exactly because of what you're saying: If something goes wrong you're under 100 feet of water with no way of getting out. Even though UC3 Nautilus has a lot of built-in safety there have been a few situations that I would consider much more dangerous than sailing a dinghy across the bay of Biscay in a force gale 12 storm.

Unsinkable passengers? Sure. Just make everybody wear drysuits and floaties. It may not be Titanic chic, but you can't have everything.

If you get caught under deck while the unsinkable ship is flooding with water and possibly going belly-up, that might not help you much.

Our little 2 crew 303 had a shitload of foam inside the front of the hull. We used to tip it over all the time when racing. Once we sailed back to the club with the hull almost completely submerged (but not sinking).

It was unsinkable. But it wasn't a ship.

You're confusing ships with boats. They are not the same and are not interchangeable.

Correct.

Boats run under water.

Just because something is mandatory by law doesn't mean that it is possible.