[Breaking] Over One Hundred Thirty Dead in Ship Disaster

Over One Hundred Thirty Dead in Ship Disaster

PALAVEN - A privately-operated turian spaceliner known as the “Tarius” suffered what appeared to be a drive core failure on approach to the Apien Crest's Farin II, resulting in the vessel's complete destruction . Communications between the ship and its destination reveal that it had entered deceleration between the system's fifth and sixth planets, and was preparing for final approach when a shortwave emergency signal was received by local authorities. Rescue patrol ships were sent out immediately, but recovered only two pods with a total of nine survivors from an expanding debris field.

The “Tarius” was carrying 600 tons of cargo and 110 civilian passengers, along with a crew of 40. The survivors have been identified as two crewmen and seven passengers, two of them children.

“The rescued persons are still in shock and are currently being treated on Farin II," said Hierarchy planetary official Kren Vageros. "All of them were in the same section and in close proximity to the rescue pods when the malfunction occurred. None of them could provide any detailed insight on the reasons for the disaster. Our prayers and thoughts are with the families of the victims.”

Asked for possible reasons for such a catastrophic failure, an engineering expert on site noted that from first analysis of the debris, "this looks like a progressing drive core failure. There can be thousands of technical reasons for that. The ship was operated by a private corporation who has a good safety record. Everything else is speculation at this point.”

Rumors about an attack or sabotage have been dismissed as groundless by Hierarchy officials. A formal investigation committee has been installed.

Damn, that's brutal.

My thoughts are with the victims.
Are we forgetting how dangerous space is?

That may be indirectly a consequence of the reaper war. Because of the tremendous ships losses incurred, a lot of companies kept vessels in space that they would have sent to docks before, just because there are so little ships left.

I wonder what the cargo was.

Oh, here as well. We had this all over the news feeds at work.

A terrible tragedy. Unfortunately nobody mentions the details about the cargo. Maybe it was diverse and unimportant or nuclear warheads? The latter would be fairly uncommon on a civilian part-passenger liner.
I hope there will be a thorough investigation though.

I find myself (strangely enough) taking the same position as the slaver. The Reaper War utterly savaged both standing military fleets and merchant marine the galaxy over, as a result many have been forced by sheer necessity to keep a number of craft operational longer than they would prefer and cut mechanical maintenance down to the bare minimum (the War was hard on credit chits too). An attack is unlikely because, really, Hierarchy and virtually everyone with enough spare brain cells to rub together knows that there are far more appetizing and less consequence bound targets available. Sabotage is also somewhat improbable given that there are a great many easier ways to remove the ship from service, kill an individual on board, and/or eliminate the cargo. And again, Hierarchy ship.


Congratulations, you've managed to post the most inane thing I've seen today.

And considering some of the other trending threads at the moment, that's rather impressive.

It's the Hierarchy. When are they not thorough?

That would depend on your meaning of "thorough."

If you mean "doing everything by the book," they give the volus a run for their serif-scratching money. If you include "using an ounce of imagination" at any point of the definition, such as "eliminating all other possibilities," well...let's just say you have plenty of better-qualified candidates.

How distressing!

This one is pleased that at least two of the youngsters have survived. It does not want to consider how many others were lost.

When this one first journeyed from Kahje to the Citadel, it did not think of the dangers; it was too excited! It believes it may undertake its next journey somewhat more stoically.

It will raise the issue of this tragedy at tonight's visit to the Inner Sanctum.

Such a tragedy. And very true what Bintar and others have said, I hate to think how many disasters like this are waiting to happen, even among reputable operators. There was an incident not long ago here (hardly comparable, but still) where a freighter's countergravs cut out early during docking, which turned out to be the result of somebody during the war simply lowering the whole OS's margins of error to get extra life out of the main drive and leaving it to the individual caution sensors to override. Luckily the dock's tractors were already locked in and caught it; just as well their margins had been more carefully supervised, if they'd been a second slower the whole ship would've just dropped like a stone into its bay.

Credit where it's due, the Hierarchy may go by the book, but their book does have a pretty big chapter on 'don't assume everyone else goes by the book too'.

Pity that so many get such a case of illiteracy when they reach that chapter.

Not sure what Hierarchy you've been hearing about, but it certainly isn't the Hierarchy I fought beside during the Reaper War.

Yeah, I'm going to agree with everyone that it was most likely just an accident. Safety hasn't been the primary concern when it comes to space travel lately. I know the squids on the Davis talked about how they were messing with systems to get more out of the old bird. A couple of the Engineering servicemen were a bit spooked about how the drive core could vent into the Engineering department if things got too hot.

Bro this is one of those cases where talking in, like, metaphor or whatever makes you look dumber 'stead of stupider, you know? I have no shitting idea what you're trying to say.

OT: Man, this is a sad story, you know, but it ain't exactly a new one. Drive core fault, ME field suddenly going offline, shit it's like an engie's worst nightmare. And that ain't a figure of speech, that's me literally quoting a frigate POG I served with, get me? And folk, even in the military, are so scared of it happening because it's something that can and does happen.

Space travel can be a real bitch at times.

Allow me to point out who I was talking to in that conversation.



If you still don’t have a grasp on what I’m saying, let me spell it straight out: turians are not innovative. They do not plan for the unexpected; nor do they investigate for the unexpected. There’s a reason we use the phrase “giving it the old Palaven try;” if something can be given a simple explanation, then nine times out of ten a turian will go for it.

You can already see it in the investigation, with their anonymous, faceless “engineer” going on about “thousands of technical reasons” the drive core could have collapsed. No commentary on what’s been eliminated, nothing about the cargo, simply business as usual despite the fact that over 130 people died in a single accident on a spaceliner.

S/he was an engineer (probably a professional incident investigator), asked about possible causes - what other answer would one expect? They gave a first-analysis hypothesis, but made it very clear that an enormous amount of investigation remains to be done before anything can be definitively ruled out; that's exactly what I'd have thought a professional ought to be saying in response to media queries at this point. If you're suggesting that they're going to ignore any answer other than mechanical failure, I don't see where that's coming from.

By the Spirits this is horrible! I just hope this doesn't turn into another Kara...

Don't you think you're jumping the gun on that a tad?

A hundred and forty one people dead is tragic yes but it's still a fraction of a disaster of that scale. Something like this...well as heartless as it sounds things like this happen with relative frequency really.

If this ship had been a mercenary company, or dare say controlled by some other authority, would anyone really care?

Oh no doubt there'd be the handful of self righteous folk here (and yes you know who you are) who'd say something like "How is this even news" or "they deserved it" but I imagine that the reaction of the vast majority would be more or less consistent.

The truly worrying thing is why the ship was lost after all, not whose ship was it.

It is tragic that some forget that just because others have chosen (or had chosen for them) a career path they don't agree with, that doesn't necessarily mean they're not people. And thank you for pointing out what should be the secondary concern for anyone involved in this, even as remotely as those who are merely hearing about and commenting on the news.

What concerns me most is that the ship's warning and failsafe systems that should have contributed to the number of people who survived did not. Did these systems also malfunction, or were they just ignored? Progressive drive core failure is most often not like an attack which is often somewhat unexpected and usually tends to cause explosions. Especially not, I should hope, on the sort of ships that have the financial backing to function as cruise liners in spite of the economy.

I don't think it was a luxury cruise liner, just a regular ship, transporting people and cargo from A to B. That tells me nothing about the state of the ship or the crew.

Also, there obviously was an short emergency signal, so some warning must have happened. As for why not more people got to the pods can have many reasons, like instant gravity failure for example. Untrained, a lot of people have a hard time reacting to it and it takes minutes to get somewhere. Catastrophic failure to hull breach/complete destruction could happen in mere minutes. Why engineering couldn't see it coming is hard to understand though. Maybe it was a case of 'only minor malfunction, we'll look at it after landing'.