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2007-04-01 Science & Technology

Magnificent Pictorial of the Swedish Warship Vassa

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Posted by Anonymoose 2007-04-01 00:00|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 The text at the link doesn't tell the the true story. The Vasa is used as a case study in project management. The original design was good; the architects then gave in and added an extra deck at the Kings request. Scope creep.

Posted by Thagum the Prolific7285 2007-04-01 00:11|| 2007-04-01 00:11|| Front Page Top

#2 When the Vasa was built in 1628, it was the most powerful warship on earth.

Excepting the story presented by every subsequent sentence. The "most powerful warship on earth" might reasonably be expected to make it to sea. Most powerful aquatic paperweight is another category.

Posted by Excalibur 2007-04-01 07:48|| 2007-04-01 07:48|| Front Page Top

#3 It's hardly news but this is as good a place as any to post a fantastic story I ran across recently.
In 1893, the battleship HMS Victoria, sank after a collision with HMS Camperdown off Tripoli Lebanon. She took 357 men with her, including Vice Admiral Tryon, CinC Mediteranean, whose confused orders were held to be the cause of the disaster. Camperdown survived, though badly damaged.
Victoria's wreck was discovered and explored by divers in 2005.
The wreck is largely intact and is standing vertically in 450 feet of water, like a giant tombstone, with its bows deeply embedded in the sea floor. It is the only vertical wreck known in the world. There used to be one in the Phillipines but it collapsed a few years ago.
The pictures are downright spooky.

Ocean muck is not my specialty as a geologist, but this situation would seem to require a very special set of conditions; the bottom material would have to be soft enough for the ship to penetrate far enough to gain a good hold, but solid enough to support the great mass for 114 years. It would also have to be fairly thick, to keep the wreck from smashing itself against bedrock before it had lost most of its momentum. The linked article explains some other factors that may have contributed to this extraordinary phenomenon.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2007-04-01 09:31|| 2007-04-01 09:31|| Front Page Top

#4 the bottom material would have to be soft enough for the ship to penetrate far enough to gain a good hold, but solid enough to support the great mass for 114 years.

You may wish to incorporate the massive load shift that would have occured during the vessel's downward flight and final impact with the sea floor. Additionally, there may have been some atmospheric displacement resulting in a huge slug of downward flowing seawater displacing any trapped air in the ship's prow. While an accommodating degree of seabed permeability is of obvious importance, the other two successive displacements of interior weight and trapped atmosphere might have played an important role as well. Additionally, there is the chance that a breach of the forward hull could have preferentially weighted the ship's nose with inrushing seawater.

As to the Gustav Wasa (original spelling, although Gustav the First's real name was actually Gustav Eriksson), the article failed to mention how, once on dry land, the entire vessel had to be kept under a constant drench of fresh water in order to prevent catastrophic warping of the ship's timbers due to non-uniform drying.

The magnificent hull certainly exhibits more carving than a herd of skateboarders. From what I remember of the original National Geographic article, it was a calm day and the deck cannon were not secured during the Gustav Wasa's launch. Immediately thereafter the ship encountered a freak abeam gust that heeled it straight over. Shifting weight of the rolling cannon capsized the vessel almost instantly.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2007-04-01 22:18|| 2007-04-01 22:18|| Front Page Top

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