I admire the manner in which they once operated. Gloriously ill-advised.

Case in point, the Vasa:



Built in the early 1600s.

The thing was originally designed as a small/medium warship, one gun deck, etc.

But then later in the process they decided to actually make it into a fairly large warship. Halfway through building the keel, a combination of the king's demands and the unexpected death of the original designer, saw the half-thought-out lengthening of the boat, and then the addition of a second gundeck, as well as the outfit of a kind-of-ridiculous-for-the-time sixty four or so quite large guns.

But they didn't drastically change the design otherwise. Notably, they did not make the bottom/keel of the boat any deeper below the waterline.



It became quite clear quite soon, that this was going to result in a ship whose center of gravity was a bit on the high side. With a small ships' sized keel, the amount of ballast that could be carried was minimized. Which would be fine for a smaller ship. But then, with the second gun deck and all of those cannons added, the ship would require something more to counterbalance the mass that would be situated above the waterline.

But the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus would hear none of these paltry engineering concerns and demanded that the huge ship join his fleet immediately to showcase the naval clout of his country.

















The result was, well, this:



Or rather, well, this:



Its maiden voyage lasted about this long:



Which was oh, just about how long it took for it to find the first actual bit of breeze it encountered.

The wind caused well and properly mis-balanced vessel to heel over badly. Its (now many) gunports were unfortunately, open. Due to the insufficient depth/height of the keel, this meant that the gunports only needed to dip a few feet to be like, AT sea level. And so it came to pass that this happened and the ship quite rapidly filled with water and sank, killing a few dozen of her crew.

In the early 1960s the Swedes enacted a classic and swell plan to raise the wreck, pump out the water and drag it to drydock so they could fix it. Because it had only been a three hundred or so years, and you know, why not?

This, they actually did do:











They disassembled it, carefully dried it out, and have been reassembling it as a museum piece over the years:




Which is actually kind of awesome.


I actually hope they try to sail it again at some point. Because that would be hilarious and wonderful.

Note that the distance on the map is not miles but meters. It sort of didn't make it out of Stockholm harbor.

Of course, Mr. Gustav II Adolf Vasa also had the thing named after his folks, so everyone would know just whose it was.

Now, he was a rather whole-assed king in a time of half-assed kings. (Charles I, I'm looking at you here... Cardinal Richelieu ran France, etc.) And a military man in the habit of doing things like leading cavalry charges himself (without armor, as a musket ball lodged in his person made wearing a breastplate uncomfortable), something that had long gone out of fashion. And was the rare king who actually pulled off the stunt of traveling in disguise as a common soldier. (To lead more cavalry raids himself.) But should probably be remembered more for kicking Hapsburg ass in the Thirty Years' War than his unfortunate choice of ship name.

A quick search revealed the majority of the Vasa's armament to have been twenty-four pounder cannon. As a frame of reference, your average American Civil War cannon is a six-pounder. Now, four dozen twenty-four pounder cannon are going to add significant tonnage to a ship. On land, these would have been heavy artillery towed by oxen, not horses, and really unsuitable for use outside a siege. (Gustav, incidentally, dispensed with the very heavy guns as a regular part of his army. The feared Swedish artillery consisted mostly of smaller, more maneuverable field pieces. He, along with Maurice of Nassau, were the leading tacticians of their age.) So obviously a perfectly sensible thing to load mass quantities of onto a ship that already has a very shallow draft for its displacement.

Also, all the beautiful ornate carvings a practical design feature for something that may get shot at a whole bunch.

And if they ever did try to sail it again, they recovered most of the original sails. What shape they're in... well...

On the plus side, its location probably made it relatively easy to recover, being that it didn't make it out to sea.

Indeed, this would have been just about the last period of history that the Swedes could ever be considered anything close to extremely heavily armed and/or very dangerous.

Within a couple hundred years of Gustavus' passing, the country as a whole, would essentially drastically alter doctrinal course, and segue into the designing of seatbelts and crumple zones, instead of these gloriously sketchy gunships that were at least as dangerous to their crews as they were to enemy forces.

Truly, a Golden Era, followed by a Dark Age.