Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
to be fair new ships always have teething problems.
Warship Appreciation Thread
- Thread starter Husky_Khan
- Start date
to be fair new ships always have teething problems.
The QE didn't, so kinda embarrassing that the second of the class did.
bintananth
behind a desk
Every new piecing of kit has teething difficulties.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
the QE had excessive leaks on its shafts for several months so it did have some
Huh, that's news to me.
Dat's sexy.
bintananth
behind a desk
USS Texas is the only pre-WWI dreadnaught still floating. She doesn't even have steam turbines - which most of her contemporaries did have.
bintananth
behind a desk
The Mary Rose the Vasa. Both were unstable rennaisance-era era battleships packed with guns that capsized and sank. Pulling what was left them off the seafloor and putting it into museums were two of the most expensive maritime salvage projects of the 20th century.
The Mary Rose sank on 19 July 1545 in the Solent. A gust of wind made her heel over just a litte too much and water started coming in through open gunports.
The Vasa on 10 August 1628 in Stockholm Harbor less than a mile into her maiden voyage. A gust of wind on a very calm day sank her.
They weren't the first two and they won't be the last two ships to go down because of the weather.
The Mary Rose sank on 19 July 1545 in the Solent. A gust of wind made her heel over just a litte too much and water started coming in through open gunports.
The Vasa on 10 August 1628 in Stockholm Harbor less than a mile into her maiden voyage. A gust of wind on a very calm day sank her.
They weren't the first two and they won't be the last two ships to go down because of the weather.
gral
Well-known member
Vasa went down more because of being a failed project than because of the weather, but yes.
BTW, I've been to, and reccomend, visiting the Vasa Museum if you have the opportunity.
bintananth
behind a desk
Vasa was built when shipwrights were just guessing and hoping they got it right with the really big ones.
For another example of the weather messing up warships:
The damage report is, impressive ...
gral
Well-known member
IIRC, Vasa's builder proposed increasing beam of the ship during construction(as they already had an idea the ship would be unstable), but the King rejected the proposal. Furthermore, a test done after completion of the ship(soldiers on the top deck moving from one beam of the ship to the other while Vasa was moored), and she almost capsized. As magnificent as she looked, people knew she was a dog before she sailed, but perhaps they didn't know how short her career would have been.
bintananth
behind a desk
I didn't know about that.
Sorta sounds like HMS Captain. The Admiralty was effectively screaming "this is utter idiocy". The Admiralty was overrulled and she got built ...
The court-martial after her sinking was unusual in that engineers were called in to do the calcs and explain what those in the know already knew so that it would be on the record.
There's more to it than that.
The Vasa was originally laid down as part of an order of four ships placed by the Crown in January 1625, which were supposed to be two smaller vessels of 108 feet keel length and two of 135 feet keel length. The Crown demanded expedited construction of the two smaller ships after ten of its warships were lost in a nasty storm in September of that year, and then subsequently demanded that both of the smaller ships be enlarged to 120 feet so that they could be better armed. However, there was not sufficient lumber available for this, so a compromise was settled on that the 108-foot Vasa would be revised into a 111-foot ship, and one 135-foot ship would be laid down in parallel with it. All versions of these designs had a single enclosed gun deck, which was the standard for warships of that day.
However, the King subsequently learned that the Danish were now building a larger and more impressive warship with two gun decks, one of the first such vessels. In response, he ordered that the 111-foot ship which had already been laid down must now not only be scaled up to the 135 foot size, but also further enlarged to also have two gun decks. This was because he deemed it politically necessary to match or exceed the new Danish ship as quickly as possible; it was not acceptable to wait even for the second ship, the one with an actual 135-foot keel, to be constructed. The King subsequently also rejected the builder's recommendation that the new upper gun deck be fitted with lighter cannons to minimize weight issues, instead demanding that both gun decks be fitted with a uniform battery of the heaviest possible naval cannons, which at the time was 24-pounders. Moreover, the King demanded that no expense be spared to construct the ship as grand in appearance as possible, so topweight was increased even further with an high superstructure decorated with literally hundreds of ornate carvings.
Thus did a vessel designed as a shallow draft, 108-foot ship with thirty-two 24-pounders on a single gun deck end up being repeatedly revised into an improvised 135-foot ship with sixty-four 24-pounders on two gun decks. The Vasa was actually fitted with "only" forty-eight guns because the Swedish armories were unable to forge so many large guns all at once, but even with this unplanned respite the ship clearly demonstrated catastrophically poor stability once the guns were installed. This was vividly demonstrated by the "soldiers walking from side to side" test which was ordered -- but by that time the King wasn't there, he was off on military campaign in Poland and sending a constant stream of letters demanding that his magnificent new flagship be commissioned as SOON AS POSSIBLE.
To top off matters, in this era there was no mathematical calculation of stability whatsoever, and indeed not even any detailed building plans; instead, an experienced master ship designer would essentially direct the construction of the ship entirely by eyeball and instinct. But no ship designer *or* ship builder in all Sweden had ever worked on a vessel of this stupendous magnitude before, and the groups assembling the hull, the rigging, the armament, the ballasting, and the decorative carvings, totaling around four hundred workers, were all working completely independently of each other with no coordination whatsoever. And then to complete the disaster, the master designer died of old age mid-construction, leaving the completion of the design in the completely overwhelmed hands of his mere assistant.
Edit: Oh, and it *can* get more catastrophic than that: no one bothered to TELL the assistant ship designer *or* the shipbuilder about the stability test. Only the admiral and the captain knew about it, and the admiral simply assumed that the clear instability was the result of the crew putting too much ballast on board and making the ship ride too low in the water. While it was certainly true that the ship had inadequate freeboard, it also had grossly inadequate ballast for its sheer topweight; it had about 120 tons of ballast, and needed more than twice that to be even marginally stable in the water -- but there was neither sufficient buoyancy nor physical volume to carry any more ballast.
By modern estimate, the ship as launched was unrecoverably unstable from a ten-degree list and a breeze of just four knots would be sufficient to tip it over. The crosswind that actually hit it was on the order of eight knots, so there was absolutely no chance at all of avoiding catastrophe.
------
And then in the end, no one had the balls to actually tell the King that his magnificent new flagship would not work, leading to the inevitable humiliating disaster.
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paulobrito
Well-known member
Politics with self-awareness of their own limitations in practical knowledge ...
In what world do you live? Not this one for sure.
In what world do you live? Not this one for sure.
Blasterbot
Well-known member
I'm sure there have been a few politicians like that. not many though.
paulobrito
Well-known member
Oh, statistically, sure they exist. But, I have never seen one in the places of power.
Blasterbot
Well-known member
no no. I think they may actually be statistically irrelevant. probably above 1% but not sure if they breach 10%.