DId the shockwave from the explosion kill the Hunley crew?

Andersonh1

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-explosive-theory-what-doomed-crew-hunley-180974159/

If a shock wave traveling through the watery tissue of the chest wall is like an out-of-control semi-truck speeding down a mountain highway, then lung tissue is the gravel pit of a runaway truck ramp. The truck itself suddenly slows to less than 2 percent of its prior speed—but its great kinetic energy must still go somewhere. Cargo goes flying, gravel flies everywhere. Likewise, the delicate tissues that form the walls of the lungs rupture and shred, and blood sprays into the alveoli, the gas pockets needed for breathing. This breakdown is called spalling.

Brain tissue can also be affected by a shock wave, which can cause traumatic injury without ever damaging the skull. Critically, the brain remains intact after a primary blast injury, and the only potential sign of trauma is a faint inkblot of blood that may be spread across its surface.

Fatalities from a primary blast occur at lower pressures than the pressure levels required to translate a human body. To rephrase that in plain English: A person will die, choked with blood, from a shock wave that was far too weak to move him.

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We set off as many charges as we could before the sun began to set on the pond. Blast after blast, we captured and saved the waveforms. I was thrilled to see that the readings looked consistent. And like the actual Hunley, the scale-model Tiny refused to show any damage itself, even after repeated blasts, even as it transmitted the pressures inside.

By the end of the day, the data saved on the laptop was worth more to me than anything I owned. I immediately backed it up in triplicate.

The next step was to translate all the squiggly pressure traces into a meaningful description of what happened on that cold night in February 1864. My end goal was not simply to sit in a series of muddy ponds and set off charges. It was to determine whether the crew had been killed by their own bomb while cocooned inside the steel walls of their vessel.​
 

5fish

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LINK: https://www.history.com/news/confederate-submarine-hunley-sinking-mystery-civil-war

Now, researchers have found another piece to the puzzle: A hidden failsafe mechanism in the Hunley’s keel should have helped the crew escape the vessel, but it was never activated. This suggests the crew may not have seen whatever sunk the sub coming.

Archaeologist Michael Scafuri has been working on the submarine for 18 years. After removing layers of corrosion, silt and shells from the sub, his team of researchers found that the emergency levers were all locked in position. “It’s more evidence there wasn’t much of a panic on board,” Scafuri told the Associated Press. The levers would have released 1,000 pounds of so-called “keel blocks,” bringing the submarine up to the surface and allowing the crew to swim away to safety.

The discovery suggests two options: The crew may not have realized they were in danger, or not anticipated a need to surface quickly. The Hunley was small and cramped—not even large enough for its crew to stand up straight—yet its men showed no attempt even to get away from where they were stationed.

It’s why researchers at Duke University proposed last year that they must have been killed instantly, perhaps by the blast from the submarine’s own spar torpedo. “The pressure wave from the explosion was transmitted into the submarine,” graduate student Rachel Lance told Nature. “It was sufficiently large that the crew were killed.” In their 2017 study, researchers made a scale model of the submarine, then blew it up in a pond. By measuring the forces, they finally had the data to back up a long-held suspicion.

Despite these advancements, Scafuri says they were still a while away from being able to say definitively what had happened inside the submarine. “I would love to get to that point absolutely,” he said, but made no promises about whether it would be possible.
 
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