Talk:Sinking of MV Sewol

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Split Discussion[edit]

I propose that the sub-subsection Sinking of the MV Sewol#The Sewol be split into a different article. The current article should only be about the sinking of the ship, and the background information presented should conform to the sinking. Additional information about the ship (such as the infobox, which is taking up a lot of space) is distracting as tangential information. If the ship doesn't appear to have adequate notability for a stand-alone article, I'm also fine with deleting the information that's irrelevant to the sinking. If there are no replies within 5 days, I'll be WP:BOLD and split the article. KJ Discuss? 13:49, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes check.svg Done WP:SPLIT, with templates added to talk pages. KJ Discuss? 08:17, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Murder or homicide?[edit]

The BBC cite does indeed refer to the chief engineer being found guilty of "murder", as do many others (including Korea Herald [1]; however, many others use the broader term "homicide", eg ABC[2], Guardian[3]. Can regular editors clarify? Davidships (talk) 12:36, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Ideas for clarification[edit]

References to the bridge need to be made consistent. The bridge is referred to as ‘the steering room’, ‘the helm’, and ‘the bridge’. The duties of the Third Mate and the Helmsman also need to be clarified. The Third Mate is variously described as ‘guiding’, ‘steering’, ‘monitoring the radio and radar’ and ‘commanding’ while the Helmsman is variously described ‘directing’, ‘turning the ship’ and confusingly that he ‘turned the ship 3º to starboard……’. It is also unclear what the permanent captain’s advice regarding steering or helm restrictions were.

The bridge is where the ship is navigated from. The control for steering the ship is located on the bridge as are the navigation instruments and displays the ship’s short range radio communications and the main engine speed control or telegraph for relaying engine orders to the engine room.

At sea the bridge is manned by the officer of the watch (OOW), which would in this case be the Third Mate. There should also be a lookout and if the ship is being steered by hand, a helmsman. The Captain will normally be on the bridge during critical times of the sea passage, for entering and leaving port and for docking and undocking.

It is unclear from this entry if the ship is in automatic pilot or in hand steering. If the ship is automatic pilot the OOW would normally, although the lookout may, change the set course on the auto pilot. The automatic pilot will automatically change to a new course setting within the limits and maximum rudder angle set by the OOW and steer a course with the accuracy and using a maximum angle set by the OOW, If the ship was in hand steering then the OOW would tell the helmsman what course to steer or could give wheel orders telling the helmsman what angle of rudder to apply. The helmsman may also be instructed not to apply more than a given rudder angle.

The OOW would not normally steer the ship but would conduct the ship by monitoring the ships position and other shipping by use of the navigation equipment and radar and by listening to the short range radio.

The entry needs to clarify whether the ship is being steered by the helmsman or is in automatic pilot, also what type of orders were given on each occasion that course changes were made (i.e. orders for a specific course to be steered or wheel orders for a specific rudder angle to be applied) and what the advice of the permanent captain was with regard to steering; for example it may have been that above a certain speed a certain rudder angle should not be exceeded. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Simon JD (talkcontribs)

6,825 tons weight or tonnage[edit]

According to Wikipedia and other sources the Sewol had a capacity of 6825 gross tons, but in this article this amount is specified as the weight. I find it highly improbable that a 6800 ton-ship weighs exactly that amount. Gross tons are very often, even by the media mistaken as weight measurement, so it is possible that this is the case here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dafalias (talkcontribs) 16:02, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

@Dafalias: The weight is supported by sources such as the New York Times [4], the Guardian [5], and the Chosun Ilbo [6]. There doesn't seem to be any other sources that contradict this statement. There doesn't seem to be anything improbable about having a ship's weight accurate down to a ton (around 1,000 kilograms). KJ Discuss? 16:34, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Sorry to have come to this very late. There is indeed nothing improbable about the existence of "weight" figures, though they are rarely used for commercial vessels (mainly for calculating scrap value). Such measure, generally called light displacement, for Sewol was 6,113 tonnes (source: Sea-web database, published IHS Global (suscription required) [7]). Outside the specialised shipping press, it is regrettably almost universal that the media refer to the widely-available gross tonnage of a vessel as its "weight", and insist on erroneously adding "tons" or "tonnes" to it, as in the citations above. Davidships (talk) 23:48, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
No, KJ, you do not understand. "gross ton" is NOT a measurement of weight, it is a measurement of the volume of a ship. And the press is NOT a reliable source on that, this error is very, very, very wide spread, it even occurred in nautical magazines (to their embarrassment). Plus, newspapers write off each other, so the mistake just gets replicated. In German they even changed the noun from "Bruttoregistertonnen" to "Brutto-Raum-Zahl" to emphasize that it is not about the weight of a ship. Consider the Wikipedia entry of the Oasis of the Seas: The ship is 225.000 gross tons large, while the weight is estimated around 100.000 metric tons. These are two very different things. Now it is extremely unlikely that a ship has the same weight in metric tons as it has volume in gross tons. I highly doubt that such a vessel would be able to swim.Dafalias (talk) 15:07, 5 May 2015 (UTC)