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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @11:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the two-out-of-three-ain't-bad dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

400-year-old warships in Swedish channel may be sisters of doomed Vasa

Two 17th-century shipwrecks on the bottom of a busy Swedish shipping channel may be the sister ships of the ill-fated Vasa. Archaeologists with Sweden's Vrak—Museum of Wrecks discovered the vessels in a 35-meter-deep channel near Stockholm during a recent survey. Neither wreck is as well-preserved as Vasa (to be fair, there are probably ships actually sailing today that aren't as well-preserved as Vasa), but they're in remarkably good shape for several centuries on the bottom.

Studying the wrecks could reveal more details about how early naval engineers revised their designs to avoid another disaster like Vasa.

The wrecks may be the remains of two of the four large warships Sweden's King Gustav II Adolf built in the 1620s and 1630s. The earliest of the four ships, Vasa, had a first trip out of port in 1628 that ended in disaster; the top-heavy vessel caught a gust of wind and leaned over far enough to let water rush in through open gun ports. King Gustav's prized warship sank just a few dozen meters offshore in front of hundreds of spectators, killing half the crew onboard.

On the other hand, the three later ships—Äpplet, Kronan, and Scepter—had longer careers. Äpplet sailed with the Swedish fleet to invade Germany in 1630, and Kronan and Scepter sailed against a combined Danish-Norwegian fleet in the 1644 battle of Kolberger Heide.

[...] At the moment, Hansson and his colleagues don't know which two of the three ships they're dealing with—assuming that the wrecks really are Vasa's sisters. The divers collected wood samples from both wrecks and will radiocarbon date them to confirm when the ships were built. All three of Vasa's sisters hail from the early 1630s, so if the dates match up, that will be a strong hint.

Meanwhile, the archaeologists plan to continue diving on the wrecks, measuring timbers and documenting details of how the ships are put together. Wooden sailing ships were the high-tech military vehicles of their day, and Vasa and her sisters were among the earliest to carry large numbers of heavy cannon. "We didn't have time to do a proper survey but will come back," Hansson told Ars. "It's quite hard to get a grip of such a big wreck in such a short time."


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 29 2019, @02:16AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 29 2019, @02:16AM (#925861) Journal

    You've only managed a small village with enough infrastructure to survive, or a couple of cities if the infrastructure's already set up, and there's suitable remote resources (a big if).

    Presently, humanity has managed a seven billion global civilization. It just happens to be on Earth not Mars.

    Better add a bunch more orders of magnitude to get the whole earth rescued from whatever fate you've doomed it too. I guess a wave of mass cullings would help keep the resource budget down.

    There would be plenty of economies of scale, particularly in the R&D budget. Seven billion people isn't much harder than a thousand people, research-wise.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 29 2019, @11:58AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 29 2019, @11:58AM (#925983) Homepage
    Partly agreed, which is why I'm talking about the real world aspect, the thing that makes it practical, as much as the lab aspect.

    But you're still assuming, for want of a metaphor, that the moore's law of material science will keep holding. Of course, there's only one way of finding out, and that's by doing the science and pushing the limits, I'm far from anti-science. I just think that none of the tech that we are even aware of as possible is good enough to create a sustainable space-faring population. We haven't even solved the food/sustenance issue yet. No, those experiments were an abject failure, and didn't last long enough even to get us beyond jupiter.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 29 2019, @07:01PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 29 2019, @07:01PM (#926099) Journal
      The primary constraints to any space activity is economic not scientific. A key one is Earth to orbit. We don't need greatly better materials science to get things into space, we need the higher economies of scale from launch frequency and payload size/mass, along perhaps with launch infrastructure multipliers like boosted launch (say providing some initial delta-v with rail gun or space gun). Similarly, the viability of any activity on Mars gets much better when one uses local resources in place of Earth-launched resources. For example, we already know that Mars has all the basic elements for human habitation (particularly the ready presence of the basic elements of life such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements plus construction materials for buildings). So no reason to bring such resources from Earth, which greatly reduces the need for costly space transport.

      I agree that there presently is a huge gulf between what humans can presently do and what is needed for permanent Martian colonies. Sending token space probes to Mars won't cut it. Sending people in orbit around Earth won't either. But my view is that the game has changed. Musk, mentioned in the beginning of this thread, has done remarkable things on a small fraction of the budget that any of the major space programs would have used. If he can deliver well enough on his "Super Heavy", then I believe that will be enough on the Earth-side to spur eventual colonization of Mars due to the massive drop in cost of supplying space activities from Earth. And if he can develop rockets at such a remarkably low cost, then maybe he can develop a Martian space colony too. The man has some skills.

      Many of these technology gaps can be developed concurrently. For example, the US in 1961 at the time a lunar mission was first announced had many technology gaps such as no big rocket, no capsule with the necessary capability or endurance, no lunar lander, no idea about where to land, etc. It's educational to see how they developed these simultaneously to get to the landing in 1969. I'm not advocating the same rush, dumping huge funds on a big gamble, but a private effort that develops and tests these technologies simultaneously could knock out most of the technological issues in a couple of decades.