Wreck of Dmitri Donskoi with supposedly $130 billion in gold inside, discovered
77 replies, posted
"Salvage companies" have a legitimate place in the maritime industry. There are plenty of companies that hire them to recover their own stuff. The Costa Concordia being a prime example.
That is a very different kind of salvage operation than the one that runs stuff like in the OP or Acosta
There's currently no evidence that there is or ever was that quantity of golf on board that ship. Most reports are based off of hearsay which stipulated that the ship was carrying all the gold for the pay and various port fees/supplies for the entire fleet. Simple logic will tell you that the rumors of gold are likely fantasy, as all fleet commanders are aware that a ship may sink either through acts of nature/mechanical failure, or through combat this rendering the entire fleet unable to resupply or dock.
So much better that the gold goes to those in rich and powerful in governments, instead.
They need that eight penthouse to survive.
I can't even imagine how much gold that is
As I am not an archaeologists myself, I wonder why kind of historical information or details we might get from a shipwreck like this. Since some people here already mentioned its probably a well-documented ship for the most part, I would believe there aren't much to be learnt from the ship itself. A quick look at the wiki page even has the whole sequence of events before she sank recorded. It is really possible to archaeologists to extract even more information from something like this?
Not that I would like to support this salvage project that is very likely to be a scam.
Roughly $130,000,000,000 worth
there always is, from the actual structure/building techniques to daily life onboard to what those last moments were actually like. if they brought in actual archaeologists who looked for the gold and confirmed/denied its presence that would be great. because if there was gold then they would recover it in a scientific manner and study the rest of the vessel without destroying it - and if there isn't they could just let it be without destroying the vessel. treasure hunters would just end up destroying the wreck without any study.
If it holds this much gold, why did Russia just sign it off to the depths for so long? If I lost that much gold I'd be doing everything I could to get it back, and Russia never lacked manpower. How did they manage to lose track of so much gold?
No clue. That number is so high I don't trust my outcome. I'm not sure about that ship either and how much it can carry. You're looking at 3,300 metric tons of cargo on one ship.
This is another good point. The Dimitri had originally been a part of the Baltic Sea squadron. When Russia’s Pacific fleet was destroyed it was assigned to steam to the pacific with much of the rest of the Baltic sea fleet.
these ships had to overload themselves with coal to make the journey, and even then they still had to stop at coaling stations. Coal was being stored everywhere, in the bunkers, on deck, in bunkrooms, etc...
where the hell would that gold be exactly?
The ship carried some ridiculous amount of coal. Like 910 metric tons.
Also because you brought up the issue of "where", that's about 6,000 ft³ (170 m³) of space. According to dimensions on the Wikipedia page, it would have at least 12,895 m³ of interior space. Say half that because it's shaped like a ship, and you've got ~6,500 m³ remaining. Then the actual interior. I'd also say they dropped coal for gold cargo, so I mean, maybe it is in the realm of possibility?
i severely hope you're being this obtuse on purpose
Nobody gave a fuck about this ship apart from the gold when it sank, nobody gives a fuck about this ship apart from the gold now, and nobody is going to give a fuck about this ship apart from the gold in the future.
What information could we possibly gleam from a bog-standard cargo ship that has any actual value? It's not a prehistorical artifact. There's about 18 or so people who were still alive when it sank, even.
Not for this fleet lol. From The Dreadnoughts written by David Howarth, who touches upon the Russo-Japanese war.
So the Russians had to carry as much coal as possible, packing every ship until she was grossly overloaded. The flagship Suvorov had bunkers for 1,100 tons; she had to carry twice that load. Coal was everywhere, recalled Semenov, "Not only up to the neck but over the ears". There was coal in backs on deck, and coal dust in the heads, coal dust in the boats, coal dust in the food lockers".
The Russian fleet had very few ports they were able to coal from. The British were allied with Japan at this time, and closed their ports to the Russian vessels. They would not have just discarded precious space for coal to carry gold. Military vessels have very limited space for anything not essential to being a floating gun platform, even more-so in the period she's from.
One, she wasn't a cargo ship. She was an armored cruiser in the Russian Navy. There's a huge difference.
Secondly, even if she was a "bog-standard cargo ship" there's a lot she could tell us. Things about trade patterns, cargo-vessel styles, how she was crafted, what life was like on-board, etc... The very kind of information that is gleaned from any other cargo-vessel shipwreck. In her case specifically there is a lot she could reveal about the actual construction of the vessel, life in the Russian navy during the Russo-Japanese war, etc...
So? It's a piece of underwater cultural heritage. The age doesn't really matter much - there's archaeology being done on sites from the 1960s these days lol.
She was the only one of her class, she was a modification of another cruiser in the Russian navy. She was unique, the only one of her kind.
again, just leave her be. there's no actual evidence of gold. just let her rest on the bottom.
200 tons of gold would have taken up the same amount of space as 10 tons of coal. If they really needed to move that gold, they could easily have given up some space for it.
When that spce is so precious I really doubt they’d be giving up any of it. The fleet was overloading itself, I have my doubts that they gave up any space for extraneous cargoes. Warships don’t have much space to store things, like at all.
What exactly would have been the purpose as well? Unlike ships (save for the Russian submarines which were shipped overland to the Pacific), that gold could have been moved overland through Russia by a variety of means that would have been more secure.
The idea of there being gold onboard only raises more questions.
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