Vasa's sister ship Äpplet found
su.seWhen I told a coworker I was visiting Stockholm for the first time a few years back, we had the following conversation:
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.
Aside from Vasa, the museums I'd recommend in Stockholm are:
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.
The Abba museum is also a lot of fun. Yes, that Abba from the 70s.
A lot of Stockholm night clubs are partially ABBA museums
Conveniently just a short walk from VASA as far as I know.
The Vasa museum is awesome! And while we're talking about Nordic countries, the Fram museum in Oslo is amazing. Being able to walk on and through the actual boat that Roald Amundsen took to the Antarctic is kind of incredible.
He was, and you are. Highlight of one my last visits to Stockholm so far.
I always recommend the Vasa museum to people visiting Stockholm as a tourist.
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.
I generally don't get into museums, but I found the Vasa Museum and the Viking Ship museum in Oslo to be incredibly interesting.
the moment I stepped in I could only say 2 words: "holy shit"
If you have some free hours in Stockholm, treat yourself a visit to the Vasa museum. Seeing these ships with your own eyes and internalizing the amount of work and thought that was put into them is a real thought provoking experience. The eventual magnificent failure of the ship only adds to the story. This is one of the more impressive museums I had the pleasure to visit.
> The ship's designer was Hein Jakobsson, the same master shipbuilder who completed Vasa. He realized that Vasa had the wrong proportions even before she was launched, which could lead to instability.
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.
This is one of the things that reading D.K. Brown's pentology on design of RN ships (_Before the Ironclad_, _Warrior to Dreadnought_, _Grand Fleet_, _Nelson to Vanguard_, and _Rebuilding the Royal Navy_) drives home: in the pre-WWI era almost everything is done with fudge factors and building off of what was done before, but a little different, and even into the 1950's there are lots of room for error.
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.
If you follow the excellent YouTube channel Drachinifel you will learn that many ships of that era (including WW2) had design flaws, like heavy rolling, flooding into compartments, breaking of the hull etc. This was the time before computer models and computer simulation.
I... did not need five more books to read, but now I do.
Hein Jakobsson completed Vasa, but wasn't the original designer. That was Henrik Hybertsson. Jakobsson widened Vasa somewhat to try to improve it, and Äpplet was even wider.
Äpplet was in use for almost 30 years, and was deliberately sunk.
> Jakobsson widened Vasa somewhat to try to improve it,
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...
"Just quickly add this one more feature, you'll have time to refactor after the release"
Ha! :-D Exactly so.
And there was unreasonable expectation and pressure from management
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_syndrome
Edited
Don't link to mobile wikipedia. It is incredibly rude to people who want the normal site, while being of zero benefit to people who want the mobile site.
I aspire to a life where my scale of rude behavior tops out with a stranger using the mobile version of an interesting link on an online message board.
That used to annoy me a lot, but then I installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-mobile-w... and forgot about it.
it annoys me a lot, but I don't blame it on the people posting, but on the people who put a one way trap door in the code on the site
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.
Seriously, why can't the same page just be responsive? Why do we need two different domains even, instead of the server serving a desktop or mobile page? Why does the mobile page not redirect back to desktop?
So many odd choices.
The Wikipedia page is just responsive. The Wikipedia Mobile page has a dedicated URL, and it assumes that, if you went to the trouble of requesting it specifically, that's because you specifically wanted it.
But it doesn't, if you go to the desktop site it redirects you to the mobile site. The desktop site isn't responsive, you get the desktop view on the phone, sidebar and all.
It has been said that mobile wikipedia is more user friendly on any platform, basically a more modern user interface than the standard desktop interface. Thus having benefit to everyone.
And the proportions of Vasa were wrong only because the king got to participate in and drive the design process.
In fact being a master shipbuilder in 1612 was very similar to being a master software architect in 2022.
That would explain why someone wrote IT shanties.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/22/1074964815/opinion-sea-shanti...
Not a patch on the White Collar Holler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsDkmVo2fg4
> Being a "master shipbuilder" in those days was apparently a tough gig.
I heard Boeing's hiring. Maybe they can set him up with a nice software defined pitch corrector too.
> He realized that Vasa had the wrong proportions even before she was launched
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.
A precursor of "fail fast, fail often" perhaps?
I hope they treat it right!
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.
That's not quite what the museum page says:
"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."
Maybe the science on this has changed? The display I saw when I visited in 2016 says they attribute significantly accelerated deterioration to the choice to spray the vessel with PEG.
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.
When I was a kid in the 80's I visited the old museum where they were actively spraying the ship, and I think they took that decision in the 70's, so I wouldn't be surprised if they know a lot more now about wood conservation.
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.
If you find this interesting, you might like learning about the Goethenborg, which you can even volunteer and sail on.
And also right now they need volunteers willing to work on rig and hull maintenance for food and sleeping quarters during its winter stop over in Barcelona.
I must resist asking if it used Java. I would love to see the Vasa but have not made it to Stockholm yet. I did see the Mary Rose in Portsmouth which was incredibly fascinating to see (large portions of the ship remain so you can see the layout). Mary Rose is from the century prior to Vasa and Äpplet.
I've been across much of the world, and never seen or heard of anything like Vasa. If I'm wrong, I'm sure comments below will have counterexamples :)
I tell people that if they only do one thing in Stockholm, it should be that.
Certainly not the same thing, but the 2 literally jaw-dropping moments I've experienced looking at "ships" in museums are the Vasa and the Space Shuttle Discovery (at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center outside of Washington).
Visited both. Mary Rose is well presented with all the extracted findings in their own galleries. But visiting Vasa is much better experience, it's intact, you're so close etc.
Have you been to the Mary Rose recently? I read about the changes since I was there around 2000. I remember the spraying and thinking it would take forever for that process to be finished. Interesting to be on that other side of forever and see visitors can see the boat without the spraying chamber in place.
Been there this summer. It's in the section where you go through double doors, to control temp and humidity.
It probably used Jäva.
Jåva sounds cooler :P
I assume it used Objective-C
I wonder if a statue of Paavo Nurmi will be on the deck.
While we're talking about old ships, let me toss in a plug (ha ha) for the Edwin Fox. Not quite so old, but still very interesting history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Fox
I'm lowkey waiting to hear about Applet's other sister-ship, JDK
...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 English, "Ä" is an "A" with a diaresis modifier: ¨, and is treated as an A for all purposes.
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 ¨.
Funilly enough if you looked at the rolls that were presented in the press conference of which battles the ship was a part of it is spelled "Eplet" there. We didn't have a consistent way of spelling things in Sweden until the 1800s.
My fave German/English confusion is still the word 'Mist' -- I'll never get over hearing how Rolls Royce couldn't understand how their luxury car, the Silver Mist, sold so poorly in Germany
The naming of the first ship is obvious: Vasa was the royal house of Sweden.
But why did the king decide to call the second ship "The Apple"? Did he like his Macintosh so much?
Vasa wasn't named after the royal house, it was named after the vase[0] on the heraldic symbol for the house of Vasa[1]. A vase is probably best described as a fasces. Äpplet was probably named after a globus cruciger[2], or "national apple" (riksäpple), part of the regalia of Sweden.
[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vase_(heraldisk_symbol)
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa%C3%A4tten#/media/Fil:COA-...
It seems that Gustav I also took the name Vasa from the heraldic symbol, though the Wikipedia article doesn't say so directly.
Gustav was known as "Gustav Eriksson" in his day, "Eriksson" being a patronym. Family names wasn't really a thing at the time, as coat of arms were. The form "Gustav Eriksson Vasa" first appears in the 17th century and simply "Gustav Vasa" isn't used before the 18th.
The classic "holy hand grenade".
Other names of Royal ships in the same style were The Crown, The Key, The Sceptre and The Sword. Like The Apple, they are all regalia.
Wikipedia says:
"The Apple" is the Swedish term for the globus cruciger, the regal orb and cross.
"Globus Cruciger" is a badass name for an indie game
Tangentially, there is an interesting connection between Scandanavia and the Mac: the command key symbol, AKA Saint John's Arms (among others). When I've visited Sweden, it's all over the countryside, on signs marking places of interest.
Another similar tangent: Rambo got his name from the Rambo apple, which in turn got its name from Peter Gunnarsson Ramberg who took the name from Ramberget in Gothenburg.
Which in turn got its name from old swedish “rám” or “ravn”, meaning “raven”.
It's tradition in the Swedish navy to give the largest and mightiest ships name from the Swedish royal regalia. But sure doesn't sound intimidating.
> Today, wrecks must remain on the sea bottom, and there is a new museum that is not based primarily on objects,”
"Must remain on the sea bottom"? Why? (Seriously.)
There are two important reasons to not disturb historical wrecks:
* 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.
in September of 2001 I found myself stuck in Stockholm for a few days. I did a lot of walking around in a bit of a daze. I was walking around thinking "Well, at least not much happens here" and I turned the corner to find myself at the place where Olof Palme was shot.
Later, I went to the Vasa museum. It struck me how recently that was a state of the art war machine.
Are there any surviving line drawings of these boats?
There's Vasa Museum[1] in Stockholm with the whole ship.
If you have the opportunity, visiting this museum is highly recommended - they let you walk inside the ship and see both the historical context, as well as the modern restoration process.
It's located in a beautiful park and the nearby Nordiska museum is also quite impressive.
I've been visiting the Vasa every few years for 3 decades and there has never been a time when museum goers were allowed onto or into the ship. I haven't been to Stockholm since the start of the Covid pandemic but I very much doubt that has changed.
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 funny because I also had this memory of walking around inside the ship when I visited the museum as a child. A few years ago when I visited again I realised it must had been the interior mockups I remember.
Ah, might have been a mockup I remember - the ceilings were quite low and the floor very angled.
It's a sign of how good the mockup and whole museum was that I remember it being better than it actually was.
Eh, no, you are not allowed onto the ship. Still, it is probably the best museum in Sweden.
They won't let you walk inside the ship. At least not a year ago.
It sometimes felt like it was a giant candle-wax drip model 1:1 scale, there is so much preserving coating on the wood.