The sinking of the Titanic has now been brought to you in real time. The RMS Titanic was a British passenger ship that sank in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912 after it had struck a fateful iceberg during its maiden voyage. It had been travelling from Southampton to New York City with calls at Cherbourg, France and Cobh, Ireland (then known as Queenstown). There were an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, of which more than 1,500 died, making it modern history’s worst peacetime maritime disaster.
The Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time it was commissioned and entered into service but that didn’t mean everything had been taken into consideration. Titanic did have advanced safety features such as watertight compartments and remotely activated watertight doors, but regrettably it only carried enough lifeboats for 1,178 people – which was about half the number of passengers on board, and one third of its total capacity. This seemingly criminal oversight was due to outdated maritime safety regulations at the time.
At 11:40pm ship time the Titanic struck an iceberg which opened up 5 of its 16 watertight compartments to the freezing sea. The ship could have only survived four of its compartments being filled. At 2:20am the ship split into two, leaving as many as a thousand people still on board.
As if the thought of this was not enough, a video of the Titanic sinking has been made to shed light on the events that unfolded on that fateful day. The most notable aspect of the video is the amount of time it took for the gigantic liner to sink underwater, which was a lot longer than one may think.
The animation video is the effort of Four Funnels Entertainment, a gaming company. The entire video is pretty long, two hours and 40 minutes long to be more precise, which depicts the sinking of the Titanic in a real-time .
The video was made as a marketing stunt for the company’s upcoming video game called Titanic: Honor and Glory. The game has very noble cause to educate the players about the horrific sinking of Titanic by bringing them closer to the events took place during the disaster.
The developers had one thing in mind while designing the game, that is to give the viewers a vivid experience of the sinking by fitting in as many historical facts as possible. The said video starts right from the moment the liner collides with the iceberg.
Throughout the horrifically slow sinking, various captions appear on the video explaining the major events of the disaster. Some of the major events shown in the video are the launching and loading of the lifeboats, Titanic’s attempts to communicate with other ships, and the desperate attempts by the skipper of the liner Captain Smith along with his crew and passengers.
If you think watching James Cameron’s Titanic gave you chills, try this animation, and you will never forget the experience.
The overall feel of the video is as if the viewer is riding on a massive drone that is observing the sinking of the liner. In the first few minutes Captain Smith can be heard shouting and giving emergency instructions to avoid the collision, but despite the measures the liner side-crashes into the iceberg and carries on seemingly intact. However, soon after this, the Titanic starts to sink.
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The narration reads that at one point that there are “still over 1500 people on board the Titanic”, meanwhile the horrifying screaming of the people on the liner can be heard. When Titanic eventually disappears under water, the caption reads that people who survived reported that they could still hear the sound of Titanic breaking even after it went underwater, and that help did not arrive for another hour and forty minutes.