24 pounder tested against a hull replica of the Wasa warship

Joat42 wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:The real problem wasn't mucking around with her design after it was officially "frozen" (that's more of a modern USN tradition ). It was simply that no one knew how to make proper stability calculations and when concerns were expressed, the "whistleblowers" were told to sit down and shut up. It's nice to know that some bureaucratic and government agency traditions have been around for so long, isn't it?

Bureaucrat, the worlds second oldest profession (with electrician being the oldest since someone had to run all those wires before the light was turned on).

runsforcelery wrote:The real problem wasn't mucking around with her design after it was officially "frozen" (that's more of a modern USN tradition ). It was simply that no one knew how to make proper stability calculations and when concerns were expressed, the "whistleblowers" were told to sit down and shut up. It's nice to know that some bureaucratic and government agency traditions have been around for so long, isn't it?

Thucydides wrote:Look at the Vasa's lines, and you see that the when the cannon are run out they do not form an effective broadside, since they are all slightly iverging from each other (as the range increases, the shot will land farther and farther apart). She could shoot ar fairly acute angles from the stem, but less so for the stern.

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Skywatcher44 wrote:I am no expert, but I am not sure how the divergent angles prevent an effective broadside, I was under the impression that gunners normally "fire as you bear", meaning the guns would tend to fire front to back or back to front anyway? Seems the forward angle on the first few cannon just let you start your broadside a bit early, hoping for that "golden bb"?

Dilandu wrote:

The problem, as i understood, was that it was hard to point all guns in one direction on "Wasa", because the gunports were placed so, that the guns couldn't be actually placed parallel to each other.

Tenshinai wrote:

Dilandu wrote:

The problem, as i understood, was that it was hard to point all guns in one direction on "Wasa", because the gunports were placed so, that the guns couldn't be actually placed parallel to each other.

Like i already stated in previous post, cannons can be aimed sideways, and the more guns on a smaller ship, the more difficult it is to have a straight gundeck at all.

As i also noted above, not even the vastly larger and century later Victory of Nelson has a perfectly straight gundeck.

SWM wrote:Dilandu's point was that the guns on the Wasa cannot be aimed sideways enough to point parallel to each other. On later ships they could and did, so that all could be aimed at the same target at the same time. On the Wasa, only a few guns could be aimed at the target at the same time.