Vasa - From Concept to Maiden Voyage (Part 1) 

were you actually able to travel during covid to sweden and do the interview there?

@@senecanero3874 I was able to travel last year during a period when the restrictions were not as significant as they were towards the end of the year.

How do you pronounce Drachinifel? And what is the relevance of the name?

Alternate history question. Somehow the Axis counties are provided with the plans to make the Balao class submarine in 1935 and all of the leadership pour most of their naval resources into their construction. How does this change the outcome or does it delay the inevitable?

How useful were the secondary turrets in the centreline as on the Yamato class and on some American classes such as Des Moines class? Why were they so rare?

Oof

*Angry monarch noises*

Wonderful is brief. Like the Swedish Summer. jcschutz.bandcamp.com/track/wonderful-is-brief-underbart-r-kort

Denmark approves of this message.

too soon

Like Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship SN10 that a couple of weeks ago landed successfully for the first time after a 10 km test flight. Or so it looked, only to detonate on the landing site after having been standing there for 8 minutes. Aerospace engineering is learning design procedures from the early 17th century!

@@bjorntorlarsson It landed at least

@@h0riz0n45 by that metric he's had a 100 percent success rate 😂

@@h0riz0n45 So did Vasa -- on the bottom of the harbour...

@@bennylofgren3208 Vasa also have a higher recovery rate then the mentioned SpaceX Starship SN10..

Well said Lars! Only a person secure in both their knowledge and in their skin in general could ride shotgun on their own platform.

​@@buckchesterfield8886 He's smart enough to know he doesn't know everything and when he has a person who's really knowledgable about something he listens and learns.

He looks as old as the Vasa itself

@CreedOfHeresy Actually he has a sprits'l tops'l. Jibs hadn't been invented in 1628. But I like the cut of it too.

Disconcerting to hear a Yank accent (or maybe Canadian? But I'd place his accent in the upper half of the US, probably not coastal, either...somewhere between like Pennsylvania and Missouri). There's in interesting story, here.

And a big bump on his head from hitting beams while crawling through wooden ships. Just like me. But I got mine in a basement and thankfully it's hidden in my hairline. Cool dude. An expert in naval history and the war wounds to show for it.

@@matthewcoleman1919 A New Englander here - sounds Canadian to me.

Actually we do :D

@@wigge123wigge123 Dang, I was hoping for some comment like "No, but we do have a functioning healthcare system.." lol

Usually in Swedish successful wars the army caries the day, but not before the fleet is horribly lost due to bad weather, bad luck or incompetence... sometimes all three

@@darrellsmith4204 This looks bad for the kingdom Johnsson. Scramble our best spin team.

@@TheSlyngel Hahaha! True that!!😁👍 Also.. I guess that's why the army still to this day heavily looks down on the navy (as well as the air force, though considerably more towards the navy) Flottist jävlar!😈

Most cannons were made out of bronze at the time. The main problem is they would get work hardened after too much firing and would become dangerous to fire.

@@austinm.9832 When Gustav I made Sweden Lutheran he grabbed a much silver and gold as he could to fund his army and he confiscated as much bronze as possible in order to forge cannons. A majority of these metals came from the churches

Also makes for excellent ballast.

Bells, Cannon... both great for making lots of noise XD

Mary Rose: I'll take a double helping of that action

Also last time I was this early, Vasa was the pride of the Swedish Nation

I read that in Anakin Skywalker's voice.

Yes it is

@@josephthomas8318 why

@@THEgodofAzurlanenodebate It's his line. Star Wars prequels have become a deep, deep well of memes lately.

We have documentaries and WW2 reruns to handle the metaphysical aspect these days.

Could paint the damned things flame red.

I say we bring back the Great White Fleet paint job as seen on the Olympia in Philadelphia. I really want to see an Arleigh Burke destroyer in that scheme.

**Justin Trudeau takes notes, immediately orders what’s left of the Canadian navy painted in a rainbow pattern.**

@@RCAvhstape or the RN Edwardian scheme. that would be a hell of a sight!

The height makes it a comfortable visit as a museum ship!

As a "race-built galleon" (what was called a "razee" in the 18th Century), Vasa would have been a very dangerous opponent. While she'd have lost (guessing) just under half her guns (making her new rate something around a 44...hmmm, where have I run across that before? 😏) losing a whole overly heavy deck could well have given her enough stability to retain much of her rig, making her potentially a very fast ship for her time. Give her full-weight 24-pounders as chasers for a bit of extra punch fore and aft, and you basically have a 17th Century version of HMS Indefatigable...or USS Constitution (another very heavily built, heavily armed single-deck warship). Such a pity she didn't survive long enough to have a chance of that happening.

@@christopherreed4723 The reduced topweight would have brought her lower gunports higher above the water, making the guns usable in more sea states. Many multideck ships couldn't open their lower ports in any kind of seaway.

@@christopherreed4723 Race-built and Razees where two different, but similar, ships. Race-built, or Raze-built, where purpose built to the design as opposed to a razee, one that had been built larger, but had a deck (or forecastle and quartdeck) removed after a time.

@@emm4rmstrong I know. I used them as examples. If Vasa had survived her maiden voyage and (one hopes) promptly returned to the shipyard to have her upper deck cut away, she would have been a razee...although the term wouldn't have been applied to her at the time, since it only entered the vocabulary some time later.

You just need to roll with it.

A truly terrible pun ILOVE IT!😆😅🤣😂

I rolled. over this comment.

Don't worry, it'll be a breeze.

I was immersed...

Draft too shallow

Architect:"Ain't she beauti...hmm that can't be good. Oh well, Back to the drawing board."

@@korbell1089 he didnt even get into the big fight that happened after the sinking of each person trying to pass off blame yet.

And then there was that little border that reached from the walls of Gothenburg north to the wilderness areas in Lappland where Swedish, Danish and Russian claims overlapped... Technically that's longer than any other land border between two European powers, both then and now.

Only half right. Everything south of Dalaälven is south of Sweden. At leaat to us born in the north. By the way: the middle of the country geographicly is somewhere around Östersund, maybe a bit south of that. From there, you have the same length to Treriksröset in the north to the most southern point in Skåne. And no. I do not live in the north. Could not stand to fumble around without a proper job in the early 90's. So I moved where there was work to be had.

It is just that the borders with Denmark-Norway were geographically impassable for a larger army at the time. And no invasion of any depth ever occurred throughout the quarter of a millennia that a dozen wars were fought (that's a new war every twenty years). Norway is shielded off by the mountains and the Danish holdings in south Scandinavia by the forests of Småland. So naval warfare was very important for Sweden against its arch enemy brother people. But it was always hard since the Danes were good at that stuff. So what turned out to be decisive was to enter Denmark from the south through Germany, which the Swedish King Charles X Gustav did in 1657, telling the protesting neutral German principalities he crossed through (from one of several futile Swedish wars in Poland) the classic: _"If you are not with me, you are against me!"_ Not exactly the Swedish neutrality stance in the 20th century. The Danish King was actually euphoric in a letter to his allied Austrian emperor, that the Swedish King was now trapped "like a pig in a poke" on the peninsula of Jutland as the emperor's vastly larger army approached and the superior Danish navy staved off the Swedish navy. However, it was during the little ice age (the long Maunder sunspot minimum) and the Baltic sounds froze over so hard that the Swedish King could march across to unprepared Copenhagen. All Danish territory on the southern Scandinavian peninsula were surrendered in a peace treaty. Naval power doesn't count when the enemy army can do like Jesus and walk on water.

@@bjorntorlarsson I find your comment strange. If the borders were impassable to armies, no one must have informed the monarchs of the Vasa era of that, as they would always take command of an army invading accross the borders to attempt to take strong points and take part in the traditional burning of the enemy's towns.

​@@greghall4836 Only the border fortress towns of Kalmar and Älvsborg on the Swedish side. Danish admiral/general Rantzau landed a small army in Sörmland just south of Stockholm in the 16th century, but quickly left. Do you have any other examples? The area between the then Danish part of southern Scandinavia and (the economically) central Scandinavia is still today quite the wilderness. Germans like to buy small old houses there because it is as exotic as Siberia, or Germania during antiquity to them. You can walk all day through the pine tree forest without meeting anyone. It's about 100 km from the then Danish border to Jönköping, which would've had a good warning time to prepare for a siege. And I don't know of any Danish campaign ever reaching Jönköping, but I can have missed something. There are no Drachinifel style podcasts about Swedish history, unfortunately. And the libraries have almost no books about it. It is a subject that has seen utterly little research in the last several decades.

An old account reported that they did an inclining experiment, and knew she was tender. Not something you tell the king.

I had the same model kit in the early 90ies, until I loaded it with marble ballast in the bathtub, shot it to sinking with my elder brothers Air pistol and then set fire to it on the concrete stairs of the front entrance to my parents house... I think I was between 7-9yo at the time XD

@@SonsOfLorgar your model may have suffered a worse fate than the real thing! Hard to do :)

@@SonsOfLorgar I gave a large plastic model bizmark the BB gun treatment, sank it in the tub, then raised it and patched the holes with modeling clay and did it a few more times. Great fun lol.

I had the same kit. Even bought it at the museums gift shop. I remember the instructions and artwork called for the decorations to be painted in mostly blue and gold. That was before they knew the actual (a lot more colorful) paint scheme I guess.

Titanic managed to get to Cherbourg and Queenstown. Bismarck had some fun in Baltics. Vasa went down 1.3km from shipyard.

...Titanic, Shinano and Bismarck: "...welcome to the club...!" ;-)

Great Eastern: "Oh the hell with this! I ain't going in that stuff!"

Hunley: Amateurs!

VOC Batavia has joined the chat

There was a lot of wars in Baltic before. There was Swedish-Polish war in 17th century, then long series of Russian-Swedish wars in 18th century.

@@mancubwwa Yeah, and Drach should have a look at the battle of Svensksund in the Gulf of Finland 1790. 60-90 ships sunk, 90% Russian. :-D The frigate Saint Nikolai has been a treasury for marine archaeologists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Svensksund

@@mancubwwa Yep yep. Even the dutch & British got involved in thier quite a few times. What other outsider fought there?

An author named R C Anderson published books called Naval Wars in the Baltic 1522 - 1850 and Naval Wars in the Levant 1159 - 1853. If you can find them, probably through inter-library loan, they probably cover what you would be interested in, although in obsessive detail. The library of the University of Victoria has copies which I read almost 50 years ago.

@@chrisvickers7928 Thanks for the suggestions mate! I will definitely look them up.

Right there in the harbor! Yikes!

Makes a great museum though!! So worth it in the end.

We are so happy, unfortunately they built other ships. But hey, our suburb to the Danish capital was once the home of the king of Sweden (during the great siege 1658-1659)

Its ok m8. We Brits capsized the Mary Rose. So we all learn through our mistakes.

Damn wind

Telling your king bad news is not always for the faint of heart... :)

🎶Du tysta du glädjerika sköna....🎶🇸🇪❤🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

If you ever return to these necks of the woods, I highly recommend a return visit to the museum. It has been completely remade since you were here last, and it is even more interesting now.

@@bennylofgren3208 I have family in and around Malmo and Gothenburg. I'd love to see Stockholm again as an adult. Sweden has changed so much since the 1980s. Of course, international travel right now is a little difficult. Hopefully this will change soon.

@@ronmaximilian6953 You would be most welcome! I hope restrictions lift soon and things start going back to normal again.

Quite interesting. Sounded like an American or Canadian. If so, kudos to him for making it as an expert of the Vasa Museum!

I agree, I'd like to spend a day talking to him about ship of the period. He was very interesting.

@@donleaman2018 , at least we get to live vicariously through Drach. Hehe.

@@SwiftTrooper5 I had the same thought. He's the least Swedish sounding Swede I've ever encountered. And I grew up in a city in the midwest US settled almost entirely by Swedes.

@@SwiftTrooper5 Dr. Frederick Hocker has a Ph.D from Texas A&M University which, coupled with his accent, makes it plausible the man is American.

Admiral to captain:"The king is watching so I want you to give him a show he won't forget!"

"Do a barrel roll!"

It wanted to be a Kayak doing a "Greenlandic Turn" and failed.

What prank?

@@JohnSmith-kg2rt Some Finnish students put a small statue on the ship before it was raised up...

@@teme82 what was the statue portraying

@@JohnSmith-kg2rt A finnish long distant runner and national treasure Paavo Nurmi

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EzagNAVvMSM.html

Prank of the century.

There is actually a small collection of unofficial memorabilia from the salvage, stored down in the pontoon. (Off-limits for regular visitors) I recall a diver's helmet signed by all the divers and some other stuff. It is almost like a time capsule of late 1950’s humor. I can't say I saw Paavo Nurmi down there but that story sounds familiar... It is a great prank! I hope someone kept the statue.

Thats.... Very possibly true.....

What maiden voyage?

@@Firebolt193 Maiden “outing” perhaps?

A more extreme failure than the mary rose

Swedes are lovely, Sweden... not so much, better get back under Danish administration 😉

@@PalleRasmussen Sweden spawned Sabaton. It's clearly a superior civilization.

@@PalleRasmussen Naaaah, I would rather see sweden burn to the ground thanks to the social demokrats than allow denmark to rule over sweden again.

Stockholm is a beautiful archipelago with some unappreciated history and culture. My visit was amazing, and I much preferred it to most central European locations that many sre drawn to.

Was going to mention the same thing. An absolutely ridiculous arcane and outdated regulation. Frustrates me to no end

Unfortunately it's in the customs tariff and changing it requires international agreement...... And that's not going to happen!

@@steveclarke6257 Now now , dont be like that. Surely you know as well as I that change will come , only downside I can think of is that probebly neither of ous will be around when that happens /s

Is Göteborg nothing to you? 😉 The thing is that the great powers did not want a single power to control Øresund, so they set us on each other.

@@PalleRasmussen You shouldn't dismiss the importance of native ambition om the part of our ruling houses though. One of the facts that lead to the Kalmar War was the ambiguity över exactly who owned the väst territory of Swedish and Finnish Lappland, as well as the vast majority of Northern Norway away from the narrow strip along the coast that was actually inhabited by Norwegian. The renaissance mindset and the Lutheran nation state which it created was incredible opposed to the quilt of overlapping sovereignities that was the norm for the preceding medieval world. And war was how the great renaissance princes solved these territoreal ambiguities.

Hmm you're right. Must be same model ;)

Be greatful for that, some older people speak a very cringe english that is flat out embarrassing to listen to when it is a politician for instance.