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2011年8月3日星期三

Was there a two-decker ship that was built then had a third added and sunk due to excess weight?

-I remember reading/hearing about a ship-of-the-line that was designed and built with two decks of guns, but then the country who commissioned it heard of ships with three decks so added another to the ship. They didn't account for excess weight and when they launched it it just sank, what was the ship?!The flagship of Gustavus Adolphus' Swedish Fleet: The 64 gun Vasa. She quickly sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 after a gust of wind forced her to heel and water rushed into an open gun port. Fortunately for history, she was well preserved in the pervasive mud of Stockholm Harbor and, after her recovery in 1961, remains on display mostly intact and open to the public in the Vasa Museum at Stockholm.



The issue was not over having an extra gun deck added, though the Vasa's demise has been attributed to that idea in popular culture for a long time (despite no evidence existing to indicate this). Rather the distribution of the weight already in the vessel was the fundamental flaw. Unlike later Men-of-War, the Vasa had insufficient ballast for her size and had heavy guns on all decks; rather than the later practice of having lighter guns on higher decks. 48 of her 64 guns were hefty 24 pounders, and the rest were either smaller anti-personnel swivel guns or small artillery pieces retained for boarding actions. The end result of this poor armament distribution was that she was prone to heel quite sharply during turns or cross-winds, and that the very low gun ports did not help much when the time came. As ship building improved, such glaring errors in design would become a thing of the past.



Though there are, however, incidents in which extra gun decks were added history. The monstrous Sant铆sima Trinidad, for example, started out with three gun decks and had a smaller, fourth deck added for a grand total of 140 guns! Vessels that existed before formal ships of the line came into being were often commandeered merchant ships, and it is entirely feasible that extra gun decks were added when possible as they typically only had small, singular gun decks to begin with.
The Mary Rose, 1511. Henry VIII witnessed her demise. (apologize. wrong answer). 1545. Michael is correct abou the Mary Rose

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