Just a curiosity..... Do you know of any ships that were "destroyed" when the hit the bottom of the pond? Any broken frames, keels, decking. By destroyed, I don't necessarily mean permanently, but serious damage? What actually failed when they hit bottom?
Thats an interesting question. Never heard of it personally. Worst I have heard of was one of our guys ship sat in the bottom for a few weeks.
I've heard about a few boats where the "watertight" box turned out to not be, and the electronics got wet. Even that was fixable, though. The only "destroyed" boat equipment I've ever heard of or witnessed was due to short circuits / wiring problems, seized motors, or some other equipment failure, as opposed to damage from sinking. These boats are pretty robust.
Realistically, the terminal velocity of one of our boats in a sink (even with engines ahead full) is below that needed to snap a properly-built hull. I suppose a ship could be flying along underwater and catch a log or something and rip up some balsa or tear the SS off. But structural damage? Nah
Perhaps a ship could loose a log on a slope in a deep pond and get crushed under it on the bottom. I could see someone dropping a big wooden hull on dry land and it suffering some major damage but luckily have not seen it yet.
Never heard of structural damage, just component-level stuff. Broken-off prop blades and bent rudders from dragging ships through mud while hauling them up by the recovery float, and even that's rare. One guy didn't lock down his deck OR any of his hardware, so when his boat turned turtle all his guts spilled out... Another guy had his cruiser violently ripped in half by an accumulator explosion from an improperly maintained regulator... Maybe something has happened with thin, poorly-made fiberglass hulls, but most of the stories I hear are about how robust these ships are. Surviving long falls, jumping out of truck beds at freeway speeds, etc. and surviving.
Running into subsurface rocks while moving at top speed can cause some damage to props/rudder. Completely un-verified I think I heard about someone ripping a dummy prop/shaft out of thier boat that way which led to a sink. I have lost (plastic) gear teeth from hitting rocks after I switched to brushless motors. Also I've seen a rock get pickup up by the prop and cause a fuse to blow. My first VDT rolled off a table at NATS one year and one of the cross braces got knocked out, kept battling it with no ill effects. Structural damage from sinking is unlikely, you arent moving that fast and the bottom of most ponds tend to be soft anyway.
There was an unarmed cruiser (I believe) in the AUsBG with a frame made of MDF. It was unsealed. The material absorbed water fairly quickly and it swelled. Retired. One freighter in the SCBG was lost for a few months. Came up fairly rotten. Was rebuilt, and from what I heard, was lost again and not recovered. I guess it was meant to be a crawdad home.
There was an unarmed cruiser (I believe) in the AUsBG with a frame made of MDF. It was unsealed. The material absorbed water fairly quickly and it swelled. Retired. One freighter in the SCBG was lost for a few months. Came up fairly rotten. Was rebuilt, and from what I heard, was lost again and not recovered. I guess it was meant to be a crawdad home.
Other than damage to props and rudders during the recovery process the risk of damage is far greater during transport to/from the pond than from a sink.
Or just working on your boat around the shop. Kotori's Scharnhorst was blown over by the wind while reskining and landed on the prop shaft, bending it and breaking it loose. It really was the wind, I just happened to be passing nearby to work on my I-boat and had nothing to do with the damage.
