Him: “You gonna go see the boat museum?”
Me: “The what?”
Him: “The boat museum. It’s a museum with a boat in it.”
Me: “…just one boat?”
Him: “Trust me. Go see the boat.”
He was right. One of the coolest museums I’ve ever visited in my life.
The Royal Amory (https://livrustkammaren.se/en/home/)
A lot of old items from royalty and nobility. If you ever wanted to see how armor was deemed bullet-proof they have some dented chestplates that shows it off.
Swedish Army Museum (https://armemuseum.se/en/start/)
Army history from the 1500s and through the Cold War. Old collections of weapons, explanations of how huge armies were maintaned and fed and iirc they also have a huge old soviet missile.
My wife and I visited it once when we spent a weekend trip sightseeing in Stockholm. It was one of the best museums I've been to.
And indeed, she tipped, foundered and sank on her maiden voyage.
> The Apple was therefore built wider than the Vasa, but despite this, the ship was not successful...
Being a "master shipbuilder" in those days was apparently a tough gig.
One story that has stuck with me is of a destroyer class in WW2 that performed particularly horribly because of an error on calculating the metacentric height. The proper procedure for calculating it was to have two different dudes each spend a week calculating it independently and hoping that their numbers matched. Apparently, in the rush of what had to be done, the RCNC cut some corners and only had one draftsman do it in this case, and he made an error and now the ships rolled horrifically. But even Bouguer and Euler- the people inventing metacentric height calculations- are working a century after the Vasa, so a master shipbuilder in that era just has his working experience and no real math to help him.
Äpplet was in use for almost 30 years, and was deliberately sunk.
As I recall, the king ordered him to add more gun decks, and he did as he was told. Disobeying a king went badly in the 17th century...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_syndrome
Edited
I heard Boeing's hiring. Maybe they can set him up with a nice software defined pitch corrector too.
Not only did he realise it, he proved it. Days before launching the ship, he had 30 men run across the deck to demonstrate its stability. The ship listed badly and they stopped the demonstration before the King arrived.
My biggest takeaway from visiting Vasa was that it only has decades left, after being essentially immortal underwater, due to some preservation-related choices that seemed right at the time. A final irony for the vessel I guess.
"Vasa lay in the grimy waters in Stockholm for 333 years. After all these years in the water the ship was attacked by bacteria and rust.Vasa was slowly decomposing, and is still doing so today, due to a number of different factors. The museum is conducting world-leading research on how to counteract these decomposition processes. And considering the age, we must say that Vasa is in an impressive shape. Our goal is to preserve Vasa for a thousand years."
Some discussion on this at https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/....
But I'd certainly believe them if they've changed their estimates.
I tell people that if they only do one thing in Stockholm, it should be that.
...implausible? Really?
Ha! You can't tell me you've never thought about what you'd name things if you were warped into the past and worked as a Swedish shipwright.
Like, it's just too tempting to troll 21st-century conspiracists with anachronistic ship names, of course it would be a thing you'd do.
Call this the 'anthwarpic principle' (no I don't care) and by 2022 epistemological standards, it's as likely to be real as anything else
OK, fine, downvote me, you cowards
In German, "Ä" is the umlaut of "A", and it's not quite a letter of the German alphabet, but also not quite a regular A.
In Swedish, "Ä" is a unique letter of the alphabet which makes the "applet" jokes completely nonsensical. If the ship had been named "Epplet", would you have made an applet joke? You're only making the connection because you literally can't see the ¨.
But why did the king decide to call the second ship "The Apple"? Did he like his Macintosh so much?
[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vase_(heraldisk_symbol)
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa%C3%A4tten#/media/Fil:COA-...
"Must remain on the sea bottom"? Why? (Seriously.)
* In many cases the Baltic can do a better job of preservation than we can on the surface. It's survived 300 years down there, it's more likely to survive the next 300 if left in the same environment rather than introducing new effects. Put another way, anything that DOESN'T get preserved well in that environment is already gone anyway.
* It keeps the artifacts in their "context" - the place they were originally. You never know what new information may come to light later, and something seemingly insignifigant about the wreck site may prove to be important later. If you remove the wreck from the site, it's much much harder to link back all the artifacts to the place they came from.
Later, I went to the Vasa museum. It struck me how recently that was a state of the art war machine.
It's located in a beautiful park and the nearby Nordiska museum is also quite impressive.
"The Apple" is the Swedish term for the globus cruciger, the regal orb and cross.
Anyway, I think they're saying now that the biggest problem is that the old iron is reacting badly somehow, and they're thinking about - very carefully - replacing all the nails.
But the whole thing is very much a work in progress when it comes to conservation, no-one has done anything like this at this scale ever.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/22/1074964815/opinion-sea-shanti...
They do have some rooms on the side with mock-ups of some of the ship's quarters - maybe that is what you are remembering?
It's a sign of how good the mockup and whole museum was that I remember it being better than it actually was.
that's on top of my annoyance with the huge number of people who didn't understand what was good about original html markup and set about adding pixel counts and thinking they needed to know the screen size etc. It's the same people who don't understand unix.
So many odd choices.
