Vasa's sister ship Äpplet found (opens in new tab)

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 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"

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.

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.

And there was unreasonable expectation and pressure from management

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_syndrome

Edited

And the proportions of Vasa were wrong only because the king got to participate in and drive the design process.

> 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?

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."

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'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.

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.

It probably used Jäva.

I assume it used Objective-C

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 ¨.

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-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_cruciger

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's Vasa Museum[1] in Stockholm with the whole ship.

[1] https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/