Aren’t the sailors supposed to be the smashed ones?
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That’s a different boat. The supports there are the same blue-painted metal as the launch rails; the ones in the failure video are dark wood.
Yes, because clearly that was the problem.
I’m kind of unclear on what caused the woodsplosion, though. The support frame appears to stay in one piece as it enters the water, even the last/leftmost bit; I don’t see it buckling under the weight. Wood doesn’t normally explode when it hits water from a few dozen feet up, no matter how much weight is behind it.
Maybe the bottom is very shallow, and the frame was driven against it and smashed, then carried outward with the water? But no, if that was the case the regular steel frame would rip through the bottom of every launch.
…Do I take it that heeling wildly over 45 degrees is normal and expected?
Wood explodes when a timber gets bent and snaps. I saw it with a tree I was cutting fell on another tree and snapped the trunk. Luckily all the pieces flew away from me. But in the case of the ship, the slo-mo shows that those were precut wedges that were under immense pressure between the wood fame and the hull.
Isn’t that an effect similar to the pieces flying away when spaghetti are bent beyond breaking point?
I got that much, but it appears that the frame survives unbroken until it leaves the ramp entirely, and I 'm not clear on why hitting the water (at low speed) would add enough extra stress to shatter it.
I don’t think so, at the end you can see some people running over to where the cameraman would be. Here’s another video where you can see everyone in that area getting soaked:
If I’m reading the description right, it looks like this is where the wood came from (please excuse the use of MS Paint, I only have work-related programs on this computer and I don’t work with graphics):
I guess the shifting load shattered the wood and it was just funnelled backwards with the wave by the shape of the boat.
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