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doctor who - Why didn't the Titanic crash destroy all life on Earth?


In Voyage of the Damned episode of Doctor Who (2005), the Nuclear Storm Drive of the Titanic was capable of destroying all life on the planet.


From the transcript:



The Doctor: Oh, yes. If we hit the planet, the Nuclear Storm explodes and wipes out life on Earth. Midshipman, I need you to fire up the engine containment field and feed it back into the core.



Conversation with Capricorn:



Capricorn: I have men waiting to retrieve me from the ruins and enough off-world accounts to retire me to the beaches of Penhaxico Two, where the ladies, so I'm told, are very fond of metal.
The Doctor: So that's the plan. A retirement plan. Two thousand people on this ship, six billion underneath us, all of them slaughtered, and why? Because Max Capricorn is a loser.





In a later episode Turn Left, Donna was pushed into an alternate timeline by a fortune teller in which she never met The Doctor. Due to this, The Doctor died. Without him, the Titanic crashed into Buckingham Palace, which destroyed London. Why did it destroy London only?


Is this a known plot hole? Or I am missing something?



Answer



The Titanic was in the process of pulling up in the alternate universe. Since the Doctor states that with the drive turned off, the anti-gravity drives won't work...



"As soon as it stops, the Titanic falls"



...we can assume that someone on the ship (possibly Astrid, Midshipman Frame or even the 5th Doctor (Due to the events of the Time-Crash mini-episode) {h/t to @Amy for that suggestion} could have made some efforts to control the ship and restart the Storm Drive or reactivate the engine's containment field.



The Doctor also makes reference to a "Secondary Storm Drive" being activated by the heat of re-entry. We can presume that this also happened in the alternate universe and while it may have been insufficient to allow the ship to miss the ground it would have probably provided some level of containment to the engines.


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