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Brexit is in a way even worse, because at least with the sailing ships you have a sorta agreed process: Examine plans, get the length.
The problem was that the plans didn't agree, and not sure why they couldn't say "ok, but depending on the ship the lenght was x or y, perhaps we need to examine the validity of the plans..." but at least there was a "shared reality".
Whenever facts come up on Brexit it goes to
1: Not facts cos that person...
2: Nobody can predict the future
etc...I can totally envision the two boat hobby fans arguing! :):)
JWestland-
and not sure why they couldn't say "ok, but depending on the ship the lenght was x or y, perhaps we need to examine the validity of the plans..."
Well as you can imagine, the data on plans from the 18th century is a bit... unreliable. For example, they seem to have often built the actual ships slightly different from what the plans would indicate, or they changed something later on but didn't document it, etc.
Oh, and the measurements will have been in some semi-antique 'ell' measurement, which differed by 10% easily between countries, without it always being super clear which one was being used...
(Btw: this is the kind of level of detail to which those models were built, it takes a certain kind of person to persevere with that... the kind that will not accept 25m as a possible length when they're convinced it's 21.5m. ;)
In any case, you raise a good point: the positions are extra irreconcilable as they're not even starting off from the same plane of reality, because it's based on projected future and opinions rather than stuff that is actually there.
SwissChap
It's just really a fundamental problem, this. There is no 'compromise' that would actually work.
It reminds me of a thread about a decade ago on a forum about historic sailing ships, where there was some disagreement over how long some 18th century vessel actually was - one guy said something like 21.5m, based on some set of old plans, the other guy was of the opinion that it must have been 25m or so, based on some other plans. These are people that build wooden models of those sailing vessels, from scratch, so they are both extremely anal about such things, and they have the patience to argue this out over literally years.
In any case, at some point the mods tried to calm the waves a bit and suggested a compromise... and much like May with the current 'deal', this was shot down eagerly from both sides, with the prevailing argument being "compromise how, just average the numbers? That way, it's just guaranteed to be wrong..."