""Vasa" Swedish Sailing Ship." Topic

So beautifull.

Much more here
link

Hope you enjoy!.

Amicalement
Armand

Thanks for sharing.

That is a beauty.

A shame it sunk right after untying from the dock.

I wish they'd made it in 1/100th scale.

A shame it sunk right after untying from the dock.

The young Crown Prinz probably took the keys from Papa Gustavus and took off with the ship, only to wreck it twenty minutes later. "Honest Dad, I wasn't even going the speed limit!" I bet he was grounded for several years for that one!

Nice model indeed.

A miniature work of art!

Thanks for sharing

It's a nice ship, well worth looking at if you're in Stockholm.

And a very nice model! (1:150 is a sad choice of scale, though.)

As for the crown prince* theory it doesn't really hold water, Condottiere.
The future queen Kristina was but two at the time. Gustavus Adolphus may have been the Lion of the North, but he didn't have many surviving kids.

* Kronprins, no z, by the way. We're not Germans.

Hendrix- he was the bastard child of old Gustavus who he legitimized, as a favor to his mother, the chamber maid Elke. crown Prince, Kronprins, whatever. It's all the same in the end.

How about a waterline version?? :)

Nice model, but just looking at it you can tell that it was top heavy, no wonder it capsized.

"Top heavy" is a misnomer. The model reflects fairly standard ship design in the early 17th C. On launch day a strong gust caught the ship unaware and when she heeled water flooded in through the open gun ports. Not saying there weren't design flaws, like a ballasting issue for example.

How about the fact that they hadn't lashed all of the guns down and when she tipped, the guns rolled across the decks causing her to list further. With the gun ports open the water poured in and she sank in minutes. Never leave dock without securing everything – lessons learned the hard way!

DeRuyter – No, she was Top Heavy. She is NOT a standard ship design in that Sweden had never built a ship with two gun decks before. They took a standard single deck designed ship and added the 2nd gun deck (against the ship builders advice), making it top heavy.

And when they lauched it with very little ballist, the first big gust pushed it right over. The biggist proof is that your own statement, a big gust hit her and she went right over. Properly designed ships don't do that, gun ports open or not.

Neither of those two statements are true. While the Vasa clearly was top heavy Sweden had been building ships with two gund decks since the 16th Century, indeed the Swedish ships of the 1560's were larger and more heavily armed than any other ships in Europe with ships such as the 173 gun Mars or the 90 gun Saint Erik.

The Vasa was based on a French ship, the galleon Galion du Guise which also had two gun decks and the order for the armament of the ship shows that it was always intended to have two gun decks.

Vasa had 120 tons of ballast on board when she was raised which does not sound like "very little" to me but obviously it was not enough to counter the flaw in her design.
Her sister ship "Äpplet" was of identical design except that she was made 5 feet wider which solved the stability problems.

Although my visit to the Vasa museum goes back ten years or so,I seem to recall she was equipped (by decision of the King?)with heavier guns than she was designed for on the upper deck. Now Physics 101 was a long time ago, but wouldn't that have raised her centre of gravity while making her sit lower in the water?

As for open gun ports (firing a salute), it's hard to imagine the water coming in through them not having an adverse effect on stability. My understanding was that in heavy weather, the lower battery would normally stay closed for just that reason – why have gunport lids at all otherwise?